So Long, Mr. Coffee

I'd been paying some attention to the voyage of Curiosity, but in the last few days only enough to know that the landing was supposed to be today. I figured I would check its progress through the day, but I hadn't noticed that the scheduled landing time was very early in the morning here in North America. So I slept through the Seven Minutes of Terror. I opened up Google News this morning and there they were: numerous stories about the successful landing, an astonishing bit of spacefaring by an unbelievably complicated set of machines.

Here on Earth, more specifically in my kitchen, a much simpler machine gave up the ghost today, our Mr. Coffee. Relatively simple, I have to add, because I understand that Mr. Coffee represents a nifty bit of engineering itself, one that revolutionized home coffee-making in the early '70s, and introduced young TV-watchers to Joe DiMaggio.

I don't have any opinion about the quality of Mr. Coffee coffee, since I don't drink coffee. But Yuriko seemed to like it. Often, late in the afternoon, I would use it to prepare her some coffee to drink after she returns from work. Today, I loaded it up with coffee grounds and water, and flipped the switch. The little green light went on, but other than that, nothing. Tried it a few more times: still nothing. Cleaned it out and tried again. Nothing.

There'd been nothing unusual about the appliance's performance lately or any strange noises. No hint that the end was near after what -- six or seven years on the job? (I can't really remember.) Mr. Coffee just up and died.

Friendship 7

Worth remembering: John Glenn's flight around the Earth 50 years ago today. I'm not old enough to remember that day, but I learned about it not so many years later from space-flight books and a back issue of National Geographic, complete with that magazine's trademark vivid pictures and illustrations. I checked just now: it was the June 1962 issue, the fourth cover in this gallery. More about the creation of the article is here.

There's a lot of video material about the flight online, including this slick but informative short from NASA.

These are mediocre times for the likes of NASA and the U.S. space program, so I can see why the agency might want to remind the world of its salad days. Such is the uneven course of exploration, or human affairs for that matter. Still, I suspect that the agency, or some successor entity, or private initiatives, will see other space triumphs in future decades, and the stall of the early 21st century will be forgotten.

Also worth remembering: the July 21, 1961, flight of Liberty Bell 7 by the luckless Gus Grissom, who came before Glenn but after Alan Shepard, and whose Mercury flight tends to be ignored compared to those other two. At the end of Grissom's suborbital, his spacecraft sank in the ocean and he almost drowned. And, of course, he died with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in early 1967 in the Apollo 1 fire. That mission had originally been slated to fly 45 years ago tomorrow.

Boilerplate Apollo With a Sounding Rocket on the Side

I've posted about the Cernan Earth and Space Center before, but that was some years ago. The planetarium still has its modest collection of space artifacts, many of them associated with Gene Cernan, including the spacesuit he wore on the Apollo 10 mission, but also some spare hardware. Inside the building is a never-used lunar module ascent engine and a Gemini retro motor (Cernan flew on Gemini IX-A), among other things.

Outside the building is an Apollo test capsule, which is the white cone-shaped object in the photo.

"Having the same size, weight and weight distribution of an operational Apollo capsule, test capsule like this one were used by NASA and the U.S. Navy to practice ocean recoveries during the 1960s," notes a nearby sign. The space program argot for such a capsule is a "boilerplate," a term I learned reading about the Apollo program as a kid. It wasn't until later that I heard other uses for the word, including the paragraphs near the end of a press release that describe the company for whom the release was issued, and which are reused many times.

According to A Field Guide to American Spacecraft, this particular boilerplate Apollo is BP-213, one of a number scattered around the country. Most are at museums, as you'd expect. But one is (fittingly) at the Apollo Middle School in Hollywood, Fla., while another is (strangely) at a Dairy Queen in Franklin, Pa. At least it was as of 2007, says Roadside America.

Next to the test capsule is a Nike Tomahawk sounding rocket -- first stage Nike, second stage Tomahawk. The Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles says that "the first Nike-Tomahawk flew on 25 July 1963. The rocket could lift a payload of 45 kg (100 lb) to 370 km (230 miles) or 115 kg (255 lb) to 215 km (134 miles) altitude. The USAF launched 38 Nike-Tomahawks between April 1967 and November 1983, mainly on aeronomy and plasma physics missions. The last of almost 400 Nike-Tomahawk launches by any user was a NASA flight in November 1995."

As It Happens, the Moon is Full Tonight

And a fine silver moon it is, rising from behind my neighbor's honey locust, if I stand on my deck. It's a breezy, warmish evening, so I did that just now.

I should know better than to read comments posted at any web site (except here), but sometimes I do it anyway. Such as the comments at a short article accompanying photos of the Apollo landing sites taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Here's a good one -- entirely sic:

These “pictures” prove nothing. I could do that in photoshop.
The moon landings were faked. All the facts show this without doubt. Anyone with a bit of knowledge knows this. For one thing the moon isnt a planet and so doesnt have any gravity. The “landers” should be floating in space. And why are there “tracks” on the moon? After 40 years they should have vanished. Outside my home a car track doesnt last 1 month. LOL!
Also look at the picture of the “flag” on the moon. It’s WAVING! But there is no wind on the Moon!
Don’t be fooled by the great scientific conspiracy. They use these things to control us to take away our freedoms. Put your faith in God not “science”.

I can see that guy's last point. He'd best put his faith in God, since he knows no science. Besides, God is famous for protecting fools, besides drunks and children.

Apollo Man on the Moon Coloring Book

It's the time of the year again to turn our eyes to the Moon for a moment and ponder humanity's furthest expedition to date, even as the achievements of 30 years of Earth-orbiting Shuttles are considered.

Around 40 years ago, my mother bought me Apollo Man on the Moon Coloring Book, and last year I was astonished to find it at her house, its pages yellowing and its edges frayed, but otherwise in fairly good shape. I brought it back with me to Illinois.

The copyright date, unsurprisingly, is 1969. It's a product of the Saalfield Publishing Co. of Akron, Ohio, and cost my mother 29¢ (about $1.60 now, adjusted for inflation). A subhead says, "Based on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Program."

According to Kent State University, which now owns the company's library and archives, Saalfield "published children's books and other products from 1899 to 1977 and was, at one time, one of the largest publishers of children's materials in the world." Wiki continues: "During its flourishing, the company published the works of authors including Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, P. T. Barnum, Daniel Defoe, Colonel George Durston, Laura Lee Hope, Herman Melville, Dr. Seuss, Anna Sewell, Shirley Temple, Johanna Spyri, Mark Twain, Johann Rudolf Wyss, and Robert Sidney Bowen."

And also published the works of anonymous staff artists who drew coloring pages about the Apollo program. When Saalfield went out of business in 1977, Kent State acquired what was left. The university now has 171 record storage boxes + oversize, 175 cubic feet, of material produced by the company.

"This inventory is limited to a group of cloth books, picture puzzles, paper dolls, and a variety of activity books," the inventory web page says. "The cloth items include children's books, banners, and promotional materials. Among the activity books are coloring books, follow-the-dot books, pasting and sticker books, wet-a-brush, rub-a-pencil, and stencil books, and sewing cards. Of special interest are a number of Shirley Temple items including authorized editions of paper dolls (including one 32" tall), coloring books, sewing cards, and other activity books."

Quite an operation in its day, but now not even a ghost of a memory except to a number of collectors and archivists. I checked the listing, and Kent State does not seem to have a copy of Apollo Man on the Moon Coloring Book. I doubt that they or any collectors would want mine, since I used it for coloring. Which was, you know, its purpose. I don't quite understand the fetish of mint-condition collectibles.

You might call the book's style Coloring Book Realism. Each of the 96 pages (three 32-page forms? probably) is briefly captioned, only one sentence per page, but still manages to contain a fair amount of information about the Saturn V, the CM and LM, the astronauts, their equipment and a step-by-step description of the journey to the Moon. Curiously, the term "Apollo 11" is never used, though "Columbia" and "Eagle" are mentioned once, and the date of the first moonwalk is specified, so there's no doubt which mission is depicted.

Also, none of the astronauts are named, and none of them quite look like Armstrong, Aldrin or Collins -- they're more generic clean-cut astronauts. Must have been a way to avoid any licensing entanglements. President Nixon, however, does make an appearance in name and visage, talking to the astronauts on the phone.

I colored some, but not all, of the pages. And added some comic relief.

Elsewhere, the astronauts have pointy goatees, green teeth and a few other added details.

The Nichols Bridgeway

Heavy rains through most of the morning, which might be fitting for Towel Day. Today is also the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's famed call to send a man to the Moon by 1970. An audio of the speech is here, one that's is longer than the usual sound bite. Interestingly, the president asked for money not just for going to the Moon, but two other space ventures as well: a nuclear-power rocket called Rover, ultimately shelved in the early '70s, and weather satellites, which have proven themselves tremendously useful over the last five decades.

Seems like a lot of special things happened 50 years ago. Clearly, 1961 was quite a year.

After Robert's graduation from the School of the Art Institute last Saturday, we figured the thing to do was go to the Art Institute and look around. Even better, his status as a newly minted alumnus provided all of us with free passes, except for Lilly and Ann, who still don't need to pay to get in.

From the Great Lawn of the Pritzker Pavilion, one way to reach the Art Institute is via the steel Nichols Bridgeway, which begins at ground level, slopes up over Monroe St., and connects to the third floor of museum's Modern Wing, where there's a restaurant. You have to go down again to reach the collection of modern art in the Modern Wing.

Though the bridge has been open for about two years now, this was my first crossing. This is what it looks like from the ground.

And this is from roughly the mid-point of the bridge, looking back at the Pritzker Pavilion, with its distinctive Frank Gehry curlicues. It's a wide structure, the better (I guess) to make pedestrians more comfortable with the three-story rise.

Renzo Piano, architect of the Modern Wing, designed the bridge too. Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamen wrote: "Piano's bridge is a straight shot, consisting of curving steel sections that are welded together to resemble the hull of a racing yacht -- or, as wags would have it, the world's longest gutter. Sealing the nautical metaphor, Piano, who like many architects is an avid sailor, gave the bridge delicate, prow-shaped ends... from above Monroe, you can gaze out at the blue waters of Lake Michigan or through the skyscraper canyons of the Loop. At the end, you survey the sunken commuter railroad tracks that bisect the Art Institute. They are a vertiginous 50 feet below."

I also want to mention the bridge's engineers. Architects often enough get a mention, but not so much engineers. For this work, two firms won an award of merit for the work in 2009 from the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois: Ove Arup and Partners Ltd., who did the bridge superstructure, and Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, who did the substructure.

There Be Dragons Online

I slew a dragon and built a fire today. The former figuratively. The latter literally. The dragon was some malware that infested our laptop, the sort that informs you rudely that your machine has such-and-such worm and demands you fix the problem via the only thing it lets you do -- go to a web site where the fix is "sold." All you have to do is hand over that string of numbers on one of your plastic cards.

Bastards. Somewhere in the world are bastards who create this kind of thing. But through a variety of maneuvers I won't bore anyone with, I obtained a download that offed the malware dragon. Not quite hand-to-hand combat with a fire-breathing lizard, but satisfying all the same when it actually worked.

As for the fire, I built the season's first in the back yard. But there were limitations. I didn't have that much charcoal left over from last year, so mostly I burned large sticks. Nice for burning, but a little uneven for cooking meat. Still, it was satisfying to get the thing going.

Then it rained. I covered the grill, so the meat continued to cook. The rain was brief but heavy, more of a cloudburst really. The black metal hissed as the raindrops hit it and smoke billowed out of the side.

I can't let the day pass without mentioning the flight of Freedom 7, which was 50 years ago today. I see that Google ignored it, which rankles a little. Last month's anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight was duly noted with a doodle, but poor Alan Shepard, the first American in space -- and, we should note, the second human being -- got none. He also happened to be the only one of the Original Seven astronauts to make it to the Moon, where he famously swatted some golf balls, though Wally Schirra was aboard Apollo 7 and of course Gus Grissom died in an Apollo capsule.

This is a dramatization of Shepard's flight from the fine series From the Earth to the Moon, a section of episode 1 that happens to be about half as long as the actual flight. Also, some footage of Shepard hitting those golf balls, which was in early 1971. And just to show that there's information about everything online, this is a page that takes up the question of whether he left behind two or three balls on the lunar surface.

Two April 12ths, Maybe Three

Today's a remarkable double-shot anniversary: The firing at Ft. Sumter, and then 100 years later, the launch of Yuri Gagarin into space. Both events are worth thinking about at some length.

For the occasion of the Fort Sumter's sesquicentennial, I picked up 1861 by Adam Goodheart, published this year in time for the Civil War sesquicentennial. I've only read about 20 pages so far, but it's good reading. True to the spirit of historical inquiry in modern times, Goodheart starts off with some interesting revision. Or perhaps in this case, re-revision.

When South Carolina seceded, the U.S. Army presence in Charleston Harbor was mostly at Fort Moultrie, under the command of Maj. Robert Anderson. Unlike Sumter, Moultrie was essentially indefensible.

"It would be one thing if President Buchanan had simply announced that he was withdrawing the troops from Charleston Harbor and turning the forts over to South Carolina, a decision that Anderson would have certainly obeyed, perhaps even welcomed," Goodheart writes. "But he would be damned if he was to surrender -- even worse, perform a shabby pantomime of a surrender -- before a rabble of whiskey-soaked militiamen and canting politicians."

Under the cover of darkness on December 26, 1860, Anderson moved his command to Fort Sumter. "Like so much else about the beginning of the Civil War, Major Anderson's move from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter is largely forgotten today. At the time, however, the little garrison's mile-long journey was seen not just as a masterstroke of military cunning but as the opening scene of a great and terrible national drama... 'Major Robert Anderson, thundered the Charleston Courier, 'has achieved the unenviable distinction of opening civil war between American citizens by a gross breach of faith.' Northerners, meanwhile, held enormous public banquets in Anderson's honor; cannons fired salutes in New York, Chicago, Boston, and dozens of other cities and towns.

"And considered in retrospect, Anderson's move seems freighted with even more symbolism. He lowered his flag on an old fortress, hallowed by the past, yet half ruined -- and then raised it upon a new one, still unfinished, yet stronger, bedded in New England granite...

"Twenty years after the war, when officials at the War Department began preparing the Official History of the War of the Rebellion, a massive compilation of documents that would eventually grow to more than two hundred thousand pages, the first of all the uncountable documents that they included was Anderson's brisk telegram announcing his arrival at Sumter. Nineteenth-century historians knew that without this event, the war might not have happened...

"When the saga of the Civil War is recounted now, it usually begins four months later, when the Confederate batteries at Charleston finally opened fire... It elevates a moment when war was already a fait accompli, with Americans on both sides simply awaiting the opening guns."

As for Col. Gagarin's venture into space, I remember how little detail about the flight -- or any Soviet flight -- used to be available. That's no longer the case, fortunately. And with the Cold War long over, there's no excuse for neglecting the flight of Vostok 1 as an achievement for all humanity, just as Apollo 11 was.

From the April 12 entry at Astronautix.com, I learned a few things about the flight I didn't know, such as the fact that Gagarin parachuted out before the capsule hit the ground -- which was a secret for years.

"Vostok 1 - Call Sign: Kedr (Cedar). Crew: Gagarin. Backup Crew: Titov; Nelyubov. Payload: Vostok 3KA s/n 3. Mass: 4,725 kg (10,416 lb). Nation: USSR. Apogee: 315 km (195 mi). Perigee: 169 km (105 mi). First manned spaceflight, one orbit of the earth. Three press releases were prepared, one for success, two for failures. It was only known ten minutes after burnout, 25 minutes after launch, if a stable orbit had been achieved.

"The payload included life-support equipment and radio and television to relay information on the condition of the pilot. The flight was automated; Gagarin's controls were locked to prevent him from taking control of the ship. The combination to unlock the controls was available in a sealed envelope in case it became necessary to take control in an emergency.

"After retrofire, the service module remained attached to the Sharik reentry sphere by a wire bundle. The joined craft went through wild gyrations at the beginning of re-entry, before the wires burned through. The Sharik, as it was designed to do, then naturally reached aerodynamic equilibrium with the heat shield positioned correctly.

"Gagarin ejected after re-entry and descended under his own parachute, as was planned. However, for many years the Soviet Union denied this, because the flight would not have been recognized for various FAI world records unless the pilot had accompanied his craft to a landing. Recovered April 12, 1961 8:05 GMT.

"[Gagarin had been] accepted into the cosmonaut unit in 1960, at age 26. After his historic 108-min. flight around the Earth in Vostok 1... he was promoted to unit leader. Seven years later, on March 27, 1968, Gagarin died with a flight instructor in a fighter jet crash."

The footnote anniversary is that of the first space flight of the Space Shuttle, Columbia, with John Young and Bob Crippen on board, on April 12, 1981. I didn't see the launch that day, probably because it was early in the morning, and I was a college student. Two days later, however, I remembering watching the early afternoon landing on a TV fixed to the wall at the VU bookstore. A lot of people were gathered around watching, and a few cheers went up when the craft landed successfully.

Has the Shuttle program been a success? History will have to make that call. In the meantime, here's something to watch. It's hard to believe it's an unofficial NASA PSA.

St. Patrick's Horse Outside, With Bongos

Spring Break has arrived, more or less. It's a faint occasion for me, since I'll be working next week, but the girls are off starting Saturday, which will certainly change the tone of life around the house during the day. Posting will resume on March 27.

Spring is nearly here, too. This morning I heard a woodpecker and then saw it on a tree limb not far from my front yard. I spotted some robins and the very first croci peeping out. The largest piles of snow on nearby blacktops, mostly accumulated in February -- mostly on February 1 -- are finally gone.

Best of all, I ate lunch today on my backyard deck. Not ideal for an alfresco lunch, since it was overcast and windy, and I needed a jacket, but simple fact of eating outside was enough. I even saw a fly buzzing around the planks of the deck, but it was too sluggish to make a run at my lunch.

I was glad to see that Messenger has successfully entered into orbit around Mercury, the first spaceship ever to do so, which happened just a short time ago. Another marvel of the age. Something I'm more than glad to pay taxes to support.

I didn't realize until reading about the craft recently that the name's actually a tortured acronym: MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging. I'd assumed it wasn't quite so literal a name. You know, humanity's messenger to the inner Solar System. Just a quibble. Even after more than five decades of space flight, it's still a signal achievement.

I've pontificated on St. Patrick's Day before, and so far we're no closer to a time when North American calendar makers also include St. David, St. George and St. Andrew as a matter of course, but never mind. Ann came home today and wondered out loud whether any leprechauns were going to be around this evening. I said no, it's really hard for them to get visas these days. She paid me no mind.

Here's something suitably Irish for the feast day of St. Patrick. A creation of lads from Limerick, in fact, and something not suitable for your children or your workplace, unless you work, say, at a tattoo parlor.

Link for Facebook readers.

This is quasi-Irish and OK for kids, but they might not get the joke.

Link for Facebook readers.

Also, something not Irish at all. A day without Richard Feynman on the orange-juice bongos is like a day without sunshine.

Link for Facebook readers. But really, you should look at the original blog sometime.

All of You on the Good Earth

Merry Christmas to all, and a Happy New Year thrown in, since I'm not going to post until around January 2, 2011. Every new year I ask myself, how did that year-number get to be so high? Every year, the answer is tempus fugit, dude.

Apollo 8 Christmas Message link for Facebook readers.

Waiting for 10-10-10

No posting until 10/10/10. Got a lot to do between now and then. And what's supposed to happen on 10/10/10? A few years ago, various souls were atwitter about 06/06/06, some apparently serious and some apparently not. Billy Preston died that day, which I suppose was a bad thing, but it doesn't count as the Apocalypse.

One more thing about Sputnik -- actually the Korabl-Sputnik I satellite, also called "Sputnik IV." Not the basketball with antennae launched in 1957, but a different artificial moon launched in 1960. A part of it crashed into Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in 1962, and apparently there's a small memorial to that fact. If only I'd known that the last time I passed through Manitowoc, I could have looked for it.

The last episode of the fourth season of Mad Men will be Sunday after next. In a burst of enthusiasm for weekly TV programming we haven't felt in at least a decade, Yuriko and I have been watching regularly since the first episode of the season in July. Mostly we haven't been disappointed. In the series' internal chronology, it's now late summer 1965 or maybe even September -- so shouldn't the season finale occur during the Great Northeastern Blackout in November?

At this juncture the Fate of the Agency is on the line, and Being in the Dark would be a good way to orchestrate a cliffhanger end for the season. How could Mad Men resist that? I sound like I'm mocking the show, but not really. Sometimes metaphor pokes through the stories in all-too-obvious ways, but usually not. Then again, the show also does unexpected things, so there's no telling whether the blackout will even be mentioned. Or maybe it will be in the penultimate episode, like the Kennedy assassination was in the third season.

I don't remember hearing about the blackout when it happened, but I certainly heard about it later. Even in fiction: it seems to play a part in the Night Gallery episode that I remember called "Eyes," which starred Joan Crawford and was directed, remarkably enough, by a 23-year-old Steven Spielberg. I had to look up those details; even Joan Crawford would have meant nothing to me as an eight-year-old.

Even more remarkably, the episode is posted here and elsewhere as three separate parts, but who knows for how long. I watched "Eyes" for the first time in 40 years or so this evening, and I can see why it stuck with me. Night Gallery, having the misfortune to dwell in the shadow of The Twilight Zone, is definitely underrated.

Sputnik

Fall is in the air. It better be, since it's October. Early Sunday morning, the heater kicked in, and did so again in the small hours this morning as frost gathered outside. The trees are now a mix of green with yellow and brown added, but yellow and brown are going to be the majority in a week or so. Late last week I even saw geese fly by in standard V formation, heading south. How much more autumnal can you get?

Naturally, at this time of year my thoughts turn to Sputnik. Apparently the 50th anniversary a few years ago inspired the creation of a documentary called Sputnik Mania, which has interesting trailer at least. Once upon a time, my eighth grade English teacher, Mr. Allen, challenged us kids to name a word that had come into the English language in a single day. Some smart aleck (maybe me) suggested "quiz," but he said that story of street urchins writing the word all over Dublin sounded like blarney, and I'll go along with that.

No, he said the word was "sputnik." On October 4, 1957 -- only 17+ years earlier, but impossibly long ago for 13- and 14-year-olds -- suddenly everyone knew what a "sputnik" was. Briefly, it seems, it was a synonym for "satellite." That can be seen in the Sputnik Mania trailer during a moment that shows English-language newspaper headlines reporting the explosion of the rocket meant to carry the U.S. Navy's Vanguard satellite into orbit on December 6, 1957. OH DEAR!!! screams the (UK?) Daily Mirror U.S. SPUTNIK BLOWS UP ON THE GROUND!!! Other headlines tell of Flopnik and Phutnik.

That usage didn't last, of course. English speakers weren't about to cede such an important word to the Russians, not when the Latinate satellite was available (note also that "artificial moon" has gone by the wayside, too). My American Heritage New College Dictionary tells me, curiously, that the root meanings of satellite and sputnik are about the same. The Latin satelles means "attendant, escort" (and is probably Etruscan in origin, of all things), while sputnik is generally translated "fellow traveler" -- of the Earth, not of the Communist Party -- with Indo-European roots ksun ("with") and pent ("tread," "go"). But let's not get too pedantic. No one is considering subscribing to sputnik TV as an alternative to cable these days.

In case that's not enough sputnik, there's always the unlikely combination of rockabilly and space in the song "Sputnik" by Jerry Engler and the Four Ekkos, which includes lyrics along these lines: "Oh! We're gonna get our kicks/ On a little ol' thing called a sputnik/I said spoo-spoo-spoot-a-nick-a-chick!" The song is here, complete with a video featuring of a rocket program unrelated to the first satellite. More (there's always more) about the song and songwriter is here, at a site promising "Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security."

Or, you can listen to the beep-beep-beep.

Views From the Hubble Telescope

Late January is just the right time to buy a new calendar, I figure. The discount is steep but you still have a little more than eleven months' usage of the thing. I had that in mind on Saturday before noon when I found myself at a calendar kiosk at the Woodfield Mall.

I needed a calendar for my little office at home. Each calendar at the kiosk was $4, which is a next-stop-landfill price. The one I finally bought has a MSRP of $13.99/Can$16.99/£9.99, including VAT for that last one. Seems like the Canadians are getting the short end of that stick; I did a quick conversion at the useful XE.com and the loonie is stronger than that ($13.99 = Can$14.80).

Lots of calendars were on the racks, but few showed much imagination. The usual suspects include dogs, cats, lighthouses, sports stars, young women in small swimsuits, celebrities du jour, classic cars, and so on. Tucked away toward the bottom of one rack was "Space: Views from the Hubble Telescope," published by Pomegranate Communications of Petaluma, Calif., and Scientific American. That looked promising.

So promising that I now have it on my wall. The photos are as picturesque as you'd expect, clear and colorful shots of impossibly distant places with hybrid poetic-catalog names: Spiral Galaxy M71, Giant Nebula NGC 3603, Galaxy Cluster Abell S0740, just to name three illustrations .

Even better, there's more than the run-of-the-mill text on the calendar itself. U.S., U.K. and Canadian holidays are all represented, as well as the phases of the moon and the solstices and equinoxes, but so are birthdays and death anniversaries of an assortment of astronauts, astronomers, cosmologists and others.

The anniversary of certain launches toward space or encounters with other worlds are noted too -- and not just the ones you might think. Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket launch on April 16, 1926 rates a mention; so does Valentina Tereshkova's ride into space on June 16, 1963; and so does the French launch of its first satellite on November 26, 1963, the A-1 Astérix. And what was the next French launch? The Obelix?

The 20th anniversary of the launching of the Hubble telescope is duly noted on April 24. That also happens to be the day in 1970 that China -- Red China in those days -- launched its first satellite, Dongfanghong I, which transmitted the song of that name -- "The East is Red," to give its English title. Those were the days. Nowadays Chinese satellites probably transmit newer songs, such as "The East Has a Trade Surplus."

SETI Without All That Fancy Equipment

Man, am I in the wrong profession. From an AP kid-in-the-balloon-not-in-the-balloon-no-really-it's-not-a-hoax-six-year-olds-do-
the-darnedest-things item on Thursday: "When the Heene family aren't chasing storms, they devote their time to scientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials and building a research-gathering flying saucer to send into the eye of the storm."

Scientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials? DIY SETI? I think I saw a SETI kit at Costco once, and a cheaper one at Sam's Club, but I might have been imagining things. I have a better idea anyway. Put up a sign that say "UFO Landing Site" or "ETs Welcome" or something similar in my back yard, facing upward of course, and every day at (say) 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. check to see whether any spaceships have been attracted to the landing site. Make a note of the results each time.

I think there's some bits of scientific method to that -- testing a hypothesis, careful observation, reproducibility. Maybe there's some grant money out there for such studies. Wasn't that one of the phrases at the beginning of The X Files? -- "The Grant is Out There."

Zero Hour, 9 a.m.

Another September 1 rolls around and we're at the top of that long slide into cold short days. Already the Sun goes down much noticeably sooner than before, but at least it still provides warm days, like today. The crickets are still singing and the grass is still growing. I could do without that last one.

Rocket Men (Craig Nelson, 2009) is a pretty good read so far, especially when it talks about some of the lesser-known aspects of German rocketry and then the American and Soviet space programs, such as the horrible fate of cosmonaut-in-training Valentin Bondarenko (talked about in some detail mid-way through this book chapter by Soviet space program expert James Oberg).

Still, the book also features all kinds of odd errors, such as this peculiar description of the Apollo 4 launch: "Two F-1 rockets abruptly quit during liftoff, at which the stack pulled a U-turn and headed screaming back to the ground. But the guidance system righted the vehicle, and the CM dummy capsule was successfully put into orbit."

That's a Saturn V he's talking about, during its first unmanned test in 1967. "Pulled a U-turn?" A cartoon rocket could do that, maybe, but it's hard to image that happening for real without being followed by an absolute disaster. And besides, everywhere else (such as in the remarkable Chariots For Apollo, for instance), the Apollo 4 mission is described as an unqualified success. Apollo 6, on the other hand, was a near failure with various problems with some of the engines, but nothing along the lines of making a U-turn.

Things to Do When You're Off Line

Some Internet connectivity issues around here on Thursday night. Was it fallout from the worldwide hacker attack by Burandan rebels as part of their liberation struggle? That bit of direct action might have put Twitter on hold as well, I hear, a disaster of such proportions that I expect panic in equity markets on Friday.

More likely, it was my ISP being its not-quite-perfect self. So I went out to look at the full Moon, except it was cloudy. A couple of days ago I spent a few minutes out on the deck after dark, looking at the nearly full Moon. It had an unusual luster, probably caused by obscure, temporary components of the atmosphere, or maybe I was just more receptive to it for obscure, temporary reasons having to do with brain chemistry.

And again, I thought, looking at the white orb and its gray patches: a dozen men walked there. Were sent there by dint of enormous effort. It's a hell of a thing, really. A marvel to go with the luster of the Moon. No wonder the thought befuddles simple people.

Item From the Past: Men on the Moon, Me in Ardmore

Usually I only post my own pictures here, but today I have to make an exception. It's a public domain photo, of course, borrowed from NASA's web site, and probably the most famous photo of a footprint ever made. Or more exactly, a bootprint. But it speaks volumes.

On July 20, 1969, the summer I turned eight, I arrived in Ardmore, Oklahoma, having accompanied my Uncle Ken, Aunt Sue and Cousin Ralph in their car from San Antonio. I was to stay with them for a week or so before my family picked me up and we took our own trip around the South. Last month, I visited some of those same places, including my Aunt Sue's home, where I'd watched the Apollo XI lunar landing unfold 40 years earlier.

I'm sure we heard about the descent of Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface on the car radio as we drove north. I remember my Uncle Ken (RIP, uncle) doubting that we would make it to their house in time for the actual landing. But we did make it. I've heard the words so many times since then that I can't remember the first experience, but I know I heard them then: "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

That's the phrase that clinched it; there was still uncertainty about the landing before that. "One small step" was a good enough line, but it was only icing on the cake.

Anniversaries are times to remember, and Apollo XI's 40th is getting a lot of play. Maybe the unspoken, melancholy fact is that Armstrong and Aldrin, or many of the other seven surviving Moon walkers, may not be with us when the 50th anniversary rolls around. Interestingly, every jack man of them except for Alan Shepard was born in the 1930s.

Never mind that now. I'll always be glad I am old enough to remember Apollo XI and all the others.

Awesome Kepler

I just finished a short article about the Kepler space probe, the ingenuity of which is breathtaking. Next time you look up at the Summer Triangle -- I look at it many summer nights -- you'll be looking more-or-less in the same direction as Kepler, at least when gazing in the direction of Cygnus and its main star, Deneb.

The probe's mission is to detect Earth-sized exoplanets by pointing its powerful light meter at 100,000 stars and then some, and never blinking or pointing away for three or four years while it watches for transits of those relatively small exoplanets. Small compared to almost all of the known exoplanets, which have a way of being Jupiter-sized gasbags or even bigger.

And what if Kepler discovers dozens or hundreds of Earth-sized planets among just those 100,000-plus stars, a tiny fraction of the starry night? We'll all still have to make our mortgage payments every month, do the dishes and take out the trash, but it will be an awesome bit of news in the older and more storied sense of that word.

Earth-sized probably doesn't mean copies of Earth, but presumably a fair fraction will be in that "Goldilocks zone," not too hot, or too cold, and have some water, though Kepler won't be able to determine that. Teeming with new life, maybe, but new civilizations? I suspect that at any given time we might be wondering about it, 99.999+ percent of any life-bearing planets in the cosmic neighborhood will be inhabited by the equivalent of blue-green algae. Still an awesome thought, if you asked me.

Astronauts, Cosmonauts & Taikonauts

Been raining here much of the day, and I've been writing about the financial debacle all day, so I'm tired of it. But it will go on tomorrow and so will I.

Question for today: Did Chinese astronaut Zhai Zhigang sing a bit of "The East is Red" during his spacewalk last week, the first ever for the People's Republic? Maybe not. That's an oldies song, after all. Maybe the Chinese need to come up with something new, like "Tainted Exports are Glorious."

The Communist Party is like the Sun,
Wherever it shines, we make some dough.
Wherever there is a Communist Party,
Huzzah, sweatshops make the nation rich!

That doesn't rhyme because insisting that it rhyme would represent interference in the internal affairs of China.

Actually, I've read that Chinese astronauts are sometimes called taikonauts, a hybrid of Chinese and Greek, but does every country have to call its astronauts something different? "Astronaut" and "cosmonaut" were fine back when there were only two space programs, but now we're at risk of many competing terms for the same thing.

There's other space news, too. The Messenger probe will fly by Mercury on October 6, and come back to orbit that inhospitable little planet in 2011. It's always a good thing when such a spaceship passes near a relatively unexplored planet. Coincidentally, I just read the chapter on Mercury in a book called The Planets by Dava Sobel, a fine book (so far) by a woman who not only knows her planetary science, but also the planets' attendant mythologies and the history of their exploration.

A page or so of the Mercury chapter was devoted to the elusive planet Vulcan, postulated to orbit even closer to the Sun than Mercury. I'd read of it before, but only in passing. It was thought in the 19th century that the gravitational presence of Vulcan would explain some oddities in Mercury's motion. These oddities were in fact later explained by non-Newtonian physics, so astronomers looking for Vulcan looked in vain, but at least Star Trek had some use for the name.

Upon the Mock Brine of a Luna Sea

I insisted at about 9:15 this evening that Lilly go out and see the lunar eclipse. That's the kind of dad that I am. She objected that the pit of winter this year has been unusually long and narrow, with clay walls that are making it difficult to scale. Actually, she said, "But it's cold, it's cold!"

And it was. Around about 10° F., but at least it didn't register colder, since there was no wind. From our backyard deck, the full Hunger Moon had been dipped copper-orange and parked slightly above a leafless honey locust, the one overhanging our driveway. It was all very painterly. It could have been a lost canvas of Casper David Freidrich. After a few seconds, we were back inside.

I probably saw one earlier, but the first lunar eclipse that I remember was in May 1975 -- late in the evening of May 24, but according to the records of such things, the eclipse was on the 25th, Greenwich time. It was a Saturday night for me, and what did us 13- (almost 14-) year-olds do for fun in San Antonio on Saturday nights in the mid-70s? Watched repeats of Star Trek that aired (I think) at 10:30, in case we hadn't gotten enough during the weekday airings after school. Before Saturday Night Live, Saturday nights were an underutilized time on TV.

After the episode was over, or maybe during the commercials, I went outside to see the copper Moon. Unlike Illinois in February, Texas in May is warm and lush, encouraging a longer gaze at Luna.

This doesn't have anything to do with the Moon, but the only other thing I remember about wasting mid-70s Saturday nights watching Star Trek was the August 3, 1974, "We Interrupt This Program" report on the bloody conclusion of the Huntsville, Texas, prison siege. Not as famed as Attica (not nearly as many people died, and Al Pacino never used the name in a movie), but it was big news in Texas at the time. We did not live in a 24-hour news world then. Programs were interrupted when the story was violent enough.

This does have something to do with the Moon: I'm glad that the writer's strike is over, but only because it's good that people can carry on with their livelihoods. Otherwise, who cares? It isn't as if there isn't enough entertainment that I haven't seen yet. Even if 90 percent of that total is worthless -- a reasonable rule of thumb when it comes to movies and television -- that still leaves plenty left to see. Taken at a pace that people who have work and other obligations should watch it, enough to last for years.

Take the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, the final episode of which we saw on DVD last week. It's 10 years old now, but every bit as extraordinary as when new. I especially liked the sometime focus on people other than the astronauts, and the focus on Apollo astronauts other than the usual suspects (the crews of 11, 13 and maybe 8). And who would have thought Dave Foley would do such a good turn as Alan Bean?

Who's alive and well, I'm happy to say, and putting moondust in his artwork.