MarsBlog.net

Cool. Let’s hope this is just the first of many – SpaceX’s Dragon craft makes historic hookup with space station:

Once the fix was made, Dragon returned to the 30-meter checkpoint and moved in for the final approach. When the craft reached a distance of 10 meters (33 feet), NASA astronaut Don Pettit used the station’s 17-meter-long (60-foot-long) robotic arm to grab hold of the Dragon’s grapple attachment at 9:56 a.m. ET.

“It looks like we’ve got us a Dragon by the tail,” Pettit told NASA’s Mission Control.

This certainly doesn’t seem to be the NASA Greg Klerkx wrote about a few years back. Let’s hope they can keep the commercial competition going long enough that we have multiple players in the market.

Posted on May 25th, 2012 under Space Commerce, Space Policy. Tags: commercial space, ISS, spacex. Comments Off

Well, this looks…awful.

I’d like just once to have TV do a post-apocalypse show right. Having everyone be beautiful, unblemished, healthy, well-groomed, and attired in bright, clean, factory-made clothes 15 years after the entire world blacked out calls for a bit more suspension of disbelief than I’m able to muster. Jericho could almost get away with it, given the establishing apocalypse happened about 20 minutes into the first episode – everyone started off healthy and well-fed, and there were still stockpiles of soap, shampoo, makeup, and new clothes left over.

And don’t get me started on how post-apocalypse bad guys are always stereotypical “military psychopaths” with an authoritarian bent and leather wardrobe that would make Ernst Roehm salivate.

Posted on May 19th, 2012 under Entertainment. Tags: EMP, JJ Abrams, NBC, post-apocalypse, Revolution. Comments: 2

So, I sold the IR-converted d100 a couple months ago, and used the proceeds to convert my (now-superseded) d80 for infrared. Still fine-tuning the manual and autofocus, but it worked well enough to take this weird shot at Moab a couple of weeks back:

It’s not hard to imagine an alien world that looked like this.

Posted on May 11th, 2012 under Entertainment, Photography. Tags: infrared, Moab, photography. Comments Off