Dirty Skies

Posts Tagged ‘NASA’

NASA has waved off the first landing opportunity of space shuttle Discovery because of weather.

The next landing opportunity at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is at 10:23 a.m. ET

via CNN

UPDATE:

The space shuttle Discovery will not land today. The last landing attempt for Kennedy will take place tomorrow at 7:34 a.m, then it’s on to plan B – Edwards Air Force Base in California.

UPDATE: She’s home!

I found this video over at NASA this morning. It’s called the 2009 Tour of the Cryosphere. Produced by the Goddard Space Flight Center, it combines the satellite imagery with computer animation to take the viewer on a brief tour of our planet’s frozen regions –- the cryosphere.

“The Tour of the Cryosphere 2009″ combines satellite imagery and state-of-the-art computer animation software to create a fact-filled and visually stunning tour that shows viewers the icy reaches of Antarctica, the glacier-pocked regions along the Andes Mountains, the winter snows of the American West, the drifting expanse of polar sea ice, and the shrinking Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland.

– NASA

The video is in .ASX format which leaves Mac users in the dark so I’ve re-encoded and mirrored it here. It’s a nice piece.

I grabbed the camcorder last night and went out to watch the launch of NASA’s Kepler Telescope from my front yard located about 150 miles west-southwest of the Cape Canaveral. To my eyes the engine glow was quite red (atmospheric effect?). It was very clear and dark so there is nothing in the way of skyglow to put the image in perspective. I zoomed out and fiddled with the gamma a bit to try and give some.

At any rate, here it is. This was definitely one of those launches that looked ALOT better to the maked eye from my location and didn’t transfer well to video.

NASA’s Kepler Launch (from my front yard) 
(launches on YouTube in a new window)

 If you missed the NASA TV coverage, I’ve mirrored it here.