|
|
Post by Kiwi on Mar 10, 2011 6:46:45 GMT -4
Good news. I called at the Feilding branch of The Warehouse today and in just the last week they had got in two each of three Spacecraft Films' DVD sets:
The Mighty Saturns - Saturn I & IB -- Cat. No. 5 039036 019620
The Mighty Saturns - Saturn V -- Cat. No. 5 039036 019613
Project Gemini -- Cat. No. 5 039036 021210
All sets have three DVDs and are $9.99 each, and $9.00 each if you buy any two $9.99 DVDs.
The catalogue numbers above are the barcode ones used by The Warehouse, so should be handy if you want your local branch to order any. Feilding branch now has only one set of each because I grabbed a I & IB set for Obviousman and the other two for me.
Again, if you see that they have any other sets, please post here. I particularly want Apollo 17 but would like to hear of any others.
|
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Mar 5, 2011 23:00:30 GMT -4
I read somewhere that the TLI is in essence a very wide orbit of the Earth, that changes to a very wide orbit of the Moon.....hence the figure of eight. Is that right? In essence that is correct, but as I suspected from your first post where you mentioned weightlessness during TLI, you are using the wrong term. Look up the definition of TLI. It is only the burn of a few minutes that gets them from low earth orbit to translunar coast, which is part of what you are talking about. The other part is TEI (the trans-earth injection burn) and trans-earth coast. To prevent misunderstandings it's important to use the correct terminology. It is rocket science! At least you understand what the author of the first "hoax" book I read didn't understand, and nor did I at the time, although I knew that his claims about photos were nonsense. It was William L. Brian's book "Moongate." He claimed that because the astronauts crossed the gravitational neutral point much further from the moon than the text books stated, the moon's gravity had to be much more than one-sixth earth's. But he was taking the straight line between the earth and the moon and the neutral point distance on the line, whereas any spacecraft going to and from the moon would hardly ever be near that straight line. Its figure eight orbit would take it mostly out to one side, and the further out it is, the greater the distance the neutral point would be from both earth and moon. Also, it take would two straight lines at different angles to join earth, moon, and spacecraft at the neutral point. Simple, when you think of it, but Brian didn't. |
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Mar 4, 2011 21:37:08 GMT -4
One thing about the TLI that has always intrigued me is the weighlessness aspect. Do you understand the situation? During Translunar Injection they would not be weightless due to the acceleration, but they would be weightless before and after the TLI burn. For instance, the Apollo 11 TLI burn lasted from GET 2:44:16 to 2:50:03, just 5 minutes and 47 seconds. Mike Collins says in his book "Carrying The Fire — An Astronaut's Journeys" (Michael Collins, Cooper Square Press, New York, 1974), pages 372 and 373, Except for any tiny forces during docking with the LM, mid-course corrections, and stopping and starting the barbecue roll, they would not have felt any significant g-force again until the six-minute lunar orbit insertion burn which started at GET 75:49:50, and Collins says on page 389, "The acceleration is only a fraction of one G". For the remaining 73 hours of the translunar coast the spacecraft decelerated due to earth's pull then accelerated due to the moon's pull, but in each case the forces were very gradual and they were moving with it so would have remained weightless and, without looking out the windows at the earth or moon, would have had no sense of motion inside the spacecraft. |
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Mar 4, 2011 10:01:50 GMT -4
Please correct me if I got it wrong, but I shook my head and wondered if he was nuts when the OP insisted that every lunar sample had to be tested before it could be stated that they all came from the moon, because he was saying the same as:
1. Nutritionists have to test every banana grown before they can state how much potassium bananas have.
2. When ordering a truckload of sand that must have particular properties, it can only be stated that the entire load is acceptable if every grain is tested and passed...
...and so on. Going by those standards, entire industries would grind to a halt within weeks.
|
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Mar 4, 2011 9:23:36 GMT -4
Very well put, Gillianren. Thank you.
It's a bit late now, but I was going to ask LO to allow kimchijjigae back after a suitable time in his well-deserved purgatory. Watching the devastation that is slowly and resolutely wreaked by an overinflated ego -- as it slashes and burns and shifts the goalposts -- is so utterly fascinating.
|
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 23, 2011 6:55:26 GMT -4
Yep, I'm fine, thanks.
Amazing scenes on TV tonight of a house that had a big rock, probably at least two metres wide, roll down a hill above, right through the centre of the house, demolishing two or three walls on its way, out the other side and further down the hill, stopping beside a road. Fortunately the family in the house had all left it temporarily a little earlier.
|
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 18, 2011 7:36:31 GMT -4
I've been checking out some so-called UFO sightings I have to ask.. why?  So I can tell them what their "UFOs" really are, although I don't expect them to believe me and I do expect that some of them won't like me. One guy said that his UFO appeared about 3:30am and stayed until the sky lightened around sunrise. I checked in my planetarium program and found that Venus was rising in his area around 3:36am and was actually bright enough to be a naked-eye sight in blue sky right through until it dropped to about 20 degrees elevation in the afternoon, before setting. Many thanks for your information -- it confirms what I suspected about video cameras. So the pulsating size-changes and colour-changes of the "UFO" are actually the camera itself trying to make sense of what it sees. Is the camera operator likely to hear or feel it making those adjustments if the environment is quiet and still enough? Unfortunately I can't look at your video because I'm on super-slow rural dialup, but hope to be on broadband within a few weeks. Can you post any stills somewhere? It occurred to me earlier today that the UFOlogy world needs its own equivalent of Clavius. |
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 17, 2011 6:08:26 GMT -4
I've been checking out some so-called UFO sightings in 2009 that, as far as I can tell, are in many cases the usual ones of Venus and Jupiter, particularly back when Jupiter was at opposition and therefore at its brightest around August 2009.
While I know a fair bit about still cameras and photographs, I know little about movie cameras and even less about video cameras, and would like to know what exactly can be expected when someone turns an amateur video camera on Venus and Jupiter in dark sky.
A few comments I've seen say that without the camera's zoom being changed, the size of the "UFOs" change and that they pulsate periodically and their colour changes. Could these effects be caused by an automatic camera changing itself because of the oddball subject, a small bright light in dark sky?
I imagine that at least some of the comments about the UFOs darting around the sky are due to good old-fashioned camera-shake.
Does anyone have links to websites that show examples of what video cameras can produce under such circumstances? I've Googled the subject, but the term UFO produces hits for a hell of a lot of crank websites! I'm interested in any sites by debunkers or video techies who show exactly what the cameras do with such subjects.
Many years ago there was a bit of a flap over one particular "UFO" caught on movie film, but someone later showed that the same effect could be produced by aiming that particular make and model of camera at any artificial light that was backed by blackness and that the camera was actually focusing on its own internal mechanism.
|
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 16, 2011 7:42:57 GMT -4
On the Spacecraft Films Apollo 11 DVD of the EVA, in the 16mm film the ring can be seen as follows: 0:15:25 109:35:56 Armstrong: Yes, it is. It's - I'm sure I could push it in farther, ... [Neil holds the ring up and it is clearly visible at "push".] 0:15:28 ...but it's hard for me to bend down further than that. [The thrown ring appears in flight at "bend", in the triangle of light in front of Neil, about 8 o'clock from the bottom of the contingency sampler handle which he previously pushed into the ground. It is just visible as a faint blur in one frame and a little clearer in the next frame, next to a small crater on the left.] To save other members reinventing the wheel, here's how to quickly view the appropriate places on that DVD -- mine is the first version of Apollo 11 by Spacecraft Films: Pause the 16mm film at 0:15:25 when Neil says "Yes, it is. It's - I'm sure..." Press the step button and watch Neil's right arm coming up and revealing the ring in silhouette. When it first becomes visible it is a little unclear, but becomes very clear on the seventh frame. Start counting from one after that one. On the 14th to 17th presses you'll see the Andrew Chaikin blip, over the far edge of the medium-sized crater (the first of a line of three) which is almost in line with the RCS thruster. Keep pressing and counting from No. 18 to No. 78, when the ring first appears as a light fuzz over the bottom of the shadow of the contingency sampler handle. The fuzz moves across the patch of sunlit ground, and between frames 84 to 87 the ring is clearly visible next to the small crater on the left. And there you go! This worked best in my "proper" DVD player and didn't work well in my computer's DVD drive, where I got anything from 61 to 68 presses before I saw the ring in flight, so obviously some frames got dropped. (With apologies to the video techies who are probably cringeing at my use of "frames.") |
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 14, 2011 10:17:32 GMT -4
Jairo, whenever you have the number of a lunar surface photo, go to the Image Library of that mission at the ALSJ and look up the caption of the photo. In this case the caption mentions the ring and provides a link to the discussion in the journal. |
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 14, 2011 10:04:35 GMT -4
It is the metal ring from the contingency sample collection bag which Neil removed then threw. It appears that he may have just given a small flick of the wrist to throw it as there is hardly any motion from his arm.
Go to the ALSJ and the page "One Small Step" for the information at 109:36:08 and links to various photos of the ring.
Andrew Chaikin got it wrong about seeing the ring in flight -- what he refers to is just some dirt on the 16mm film in front of the RCS thruster. A few frames after that the ring can be seen moving through a patch of sunlight on the left of the screen.
On the Spacecraft Films Apollo 11 DVD of the EVA, in the 16mm film the ring can be seen as follows:
0:15:25 109:35:56 Armstrong: Yes, it is. It's - I'm sure I could push it in farther, ... [Neil holds the ring up and it is clearly visible at "push".]
0:15:28 ...but it's hard for me to bend down further than that. [The thrown ring appears in flight at "bend", in the triangle of light in front of Neil, about 8 o'clock from the bottom of the contingency sampler handle which he previously pushed into the ground. It is just visible as a faint blur in one frame and a little clearer in the next frame, next to a small crater on the left.]
Hey, do I get to wear the "I Corrected Andrew Chaikin" teeshirt?
From the ALSJ:
|
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 13, 2011 19:42:59 GMT -4
They don't even have this sort of things in all the stores over here PW, does this mean the New Plymouth branch of The Warehouse didn't have them? Feilding and Palmerston North branches don't have them now, but it looks like some branches might have also had the Saturn V set, because some Trade Me sellers have grabbed them and are trying to double their money, plus up to $7.20 for NZ courier post. www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Dvds/Popular.aspx?search=1&sidebar=1&mcat=0003-&searchString=mighty%20saturns&54=mighty%20saturns&164=DVDs&generalSearch_keypresses=0&generalSearch_suggested=0So at least the I and IB set is still available for about half the normal US price, but only New Zealanders and, I think, Aussies can join Trade Me, which is the local equivalent of Ebay. The main question is, has anyone seen any of these Mighty Saturns DVDs still in any branch of The Warehouse for $9.99? I notified the NZ Spaceflight Association about them, so some of their members might have also grabbed a few. |
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 13, 2011 8:41:42 GMT -4
...I am somewhat concerned about where we're going as paper is displaced by online media. Same here. I'm an amateur genealogist and historian. Getting off topic, but... For a start, we need a standard for storing electronic writing long-term in a way that can be easily accessed in the future. I don't agree with the Project Gutenberg way of everything in plain text and a return at the end of every line, especially if paragraphs don't have two returns between them. It's better than nothing at all, but not by a lot. We need the electronic equivalent of the research library, independent archives that regularly collect, index and store everything available to the public so there can be a reliable, unalterable historical record. But the amount of data is vast, and there are also significant legal and privacy issues to consider. At the very least, any such system should allow reasonable and common formatting such as bolding, italics, superscripts, subscripts, underlines, strikeouts, tabbing, indenting, different fonts and sizes, and all the ASCII characters. Colour changes, justification and a few other things should probably also be possible. In switching to Open Office and saving documents as Word 95 (a perfectly good and common standard), I lost all the special characters in my gazillions of documents -- pound and yen signs, fractions, degree symbols, etc. -- and I only found out after they had gone because I didn't expect that to happen. Bloody annoying! There's also "revisionism through ignorance" to consider. Quite a few times on TV I've seen Neil Armstrong supposedly stepping on to the surface of the moon and saying "That's one small step...", but in fact he is jumping down to the footpad the second time, over a minute before he took the first historic step off the footpad and onto the moon. I think that bit of footage and audio might have been pinched from "For All Mankind", which is a wonderful work of art with video and audio well mixed up, but it clearly mustn't be taken as a true record of how things happened. |
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 11, 2011 11:45:32 GMT -4
...the [Apollo 10] LM crew said they had to fight the urge to close their eyes and lift their legs to avoid dragging them on the mountain peaks not far below. Sure that wasn't Jim Irwin? Just when you think you've discovered all the really interesting stuff in Apollo, you come across something you never heard of before. That's the beauty of Apollo, and it makes me feel sorry for the likes of Hagabardceline who are incapable of removing their blinkers and seeing Apollo for the truly magnificent feat that it was. I doubt that any interested person could ever stop learning. There's so much fascinating stuff we can delve into, such as John Houbolt's incredible battle to get lunar-orbit rendezvous recognised, or Ed Fendell's career with Nasa. I spent a fascinating time learning to identify MOCR staff in Nasa's Apollo documentary movies. At 0:08:19 in Al Reinert's movie "For All Mankind" one guy is incorrectly labelled Steve Bales, and I was keen to identify another guy in "Apollo 13: Houston, We've Got a Problem" who sometimes has the real Steve Bales sitting next to him and is doing something that's rare these days: Working out involved sums on a piece of paper with a pencil. That was Will Fenner. Young people sometimes scoff at Nasa when they see film clips of exploding rockets, but they don't realise that when you're learning to do something that no-one else has ever done, trial-and-error is sometimes the only way to go, and you're bound to make a few mistakes. I feel really privileged to have seen Sputnik 1 (or the rocket that put it up) passing overhead less than a week after it was launched, and to have listened to the first moon-landing live on the radio. Those were exciting times. |
|
|
|
Post by Kiwi on Feb 10, 2011 11:40:19 GMT -4
Details of what's on the DVDs. Change [ * ] to a tab to improve the formatting.
One frustration: It takes 1 minute 22 seconds before you can do anything useful with the DVDs. An absurd waste of time.
Opening Notices
0:00:00[ * ]FBI notice
0:00:10[ * ]Attention notice
0:00:20[ * ]20th Century Fox logo
0:00:30[ * ]Spacecraft Films logo
0:00:49[ * ]Liftoff movie
0:01:22[ * ]Menu
The Mighty Saturns — Saturn I and IB
Disc 1
3:09:04
The I and IB Program
0:00:00[ * ]1 The early Saturns
0:01:56[ * ]2 The task and the team
0:13:04[ * ]3 SA-1 through SA-5
0:19:31[ * ]4 SA-6 through Apollo 1
0:33:34[ * ]5 AS-204 through Apollo-Soyuz
0:38:56[ * ]6 Credits
0:42:31[ * ]End
Bonus Material
Building the Saturn
0 - 13:34[ * ]S-I stage fuel tank installation
0 - 05:15[ * ]S-I stage test firing
0 - 02:58[ * ]S-IV stage insulation and handling
0 - 02:08[ * ]S-IV stage test firing
Onboards
0 - 01:13[ * ]SA-5 TV feed
0 - 02:49[ * ]SA-5 S-I stage tank interior
SA-6 Onboards
0:00:00[ * ]1 Camera pod A
0:02:52[ * ]2 Camera pod B
0:05:39[ * ]3 Camera pod C
0:08:25[ * ]4 Interstage separation TV
0:13:10[ * ]5 Separation forward
0:14:12[ * ]6 S-I tank interior
0:17:00[ * ]End
Onboards
0 - 02:33[ * ]SA-8 Pegasus deployment
0 - 24:47[ * ]AS-203 liquid hydrogen tank interior
Pad Operations
0 - 27:27[ * ]SA-1 pad operations
0 - 05:04[ * ]SA-5 pad damage
0 - 15:17[ * ]AS-204 pad operations
0 - 21:01[ * ]AS-206 (SL-2) pad operations
0 - 05:27[ * ]AS-210 (Apollo-Soyuz) rollout
The Mighty Saturns — Saturn I and IB
Disc 2
2:47:34
Saturn I Launches
SA-1 27 Oct 1961
0:00:00[ * ]1 From service structure
0:03:38[ * ]2 H-1 ignition below engines
0:05:17[ * ]3 Ground level
0:07:06[ * ]4 Ground level B
0:07:25[ * ]5 Long cable mast retract
0:08:11[ * ]6 Base 1
0:08:31[ * ]7 Base 2
0:08:46[ * ]8 Hold downs
0:10:14[ * ]9 Ground level lower third
0:12:13[ * ]End
SA-2 25 Apr 1962
0:00:00[ * ]1 On pad and ignition
0:02:18[ * ]2 Launch travel through frame
0:02:27[ * ]End
SA-3 16 Nov 1962
0:00:00[ * ]1 Short tracking
0:00:57[ * ]2 Tracking through staging
0:04:05[ * ]3 Static / smoke
0:04:27[ * ]4 Static ground level
0:04:49[ * ]5 Base of launcher
0:05:04[ * ]6 Tracking through staging
0:07:52[ * ]7 Static medium shot
0:08:15[ * ]8 Tracking medium
0:13:32[ * ]9 Closeup base tracking
0:19:57[ * ]10 Blockhouse foreground
0:20:42[ * ]End
SA-4 28 Mar 1963
0:00:00[ * ]1 Base from tower 1
0:01:38[ * ]2 Base from tower 2
0:02:44[ * ]3 Base from tower 3
0:08:14[ * ]4 Long shot tracking
0:12:08[ * ]5 Medium shot static 1
0:13:56[ * ]6 Medium shot static 2
0:15:49[ * ]7 Medium shot static 3
0:17:36[ * ]End
SA-5 29 Jan 1964
0:00:00[ * ]1 Closeup static S-I stage
0:00:29[ * ]2 Medium tracking into cloud
0:01:32[ * ]3 Static pass through frame
0:01:49[ * ]4 Closeup pass through frame
0:02:39[ * ]5 Long tracking
0:05:51[ * ]End
SA-6 28 May 1964
0:00:00[ * ]1 Closeup static
0:04:43[ * ]2 Looking down from tower
0:06:57[ * ]3 Hold down
0:08:19[ * ]4 H-1 ignition through liftoff
0:10:30[ * ]End
SA-7 18 Sep 1964
0:00:00[ * ]1 Closeup forward umbilical
0:03:01[ * ]2 Low angle 1
0:05:02[ * ]3 Low angle 2
0:08:13[ * ]End
SA-9 16 Feb 1965
0:00:00[ * ]1 Tower looking down
0:02:38[ * ]2 Low angle
0:05:40[ * ]End
SA-8 25 May 1965
0:00:00[ * ]1 S-IV umbilical
0:03:49[ * ]2 S-I umbilical
0:06:33[ * ]3 On pad and ignition
0:12:04[ * ]End
SA-10 30 Jul 1965
0:00:00[ * ]1 On pad
0:05:01[ * ]2 Ignition
0:05:41[ * ]3 Medium shot
0:08:15[ * ]End
Saturn IB Launches
AS-201 26 Feb 1966
0:00:00[ * ]1 Static lower stage
0:01:40[ * ]2 CSM through frame
0:03:52[ * ]3 Medium tracking
0:08:17[ * ]4 Static base
0:09:37[ * ]End
AS-203 5 Jul 1966
0:00:00[ * ]1 Static medium shot
0:02:12[ * ]2 Closeup base
0:08:44[ * ]End
AS-202 25 Aug 1966
0:00:00[ * ]1 Static medium shot 1
0:03:25[ * ]2 Static medium shot 2
0:06:44[ * ]3 Static base
0:08:17[ * ]End
AS-204 22 Jan 1968
0:00:00[ * ]1 Medium shot 1
0:00:20[ * ]2 Medium shot 2
0:00:39[ * ]End
AS-205 (Apollo 7) 11 Oct 1968 - See Disc 3
AS-206 (SL-2) 25 May 1973
0:00:00[ * ]1 Long shot 1
0:00:27[ * ]2 Long shot 2
0:00:57[ * ]3 Tower cam
0:02:44[ * ]End
AS-207 (SL-3) 23 Jul 1973
0:00:00[ * ]1 Medium shot static
0:01:28[ * ]2 Tracking into cloud
0:02:17[ * ]End
AS-208 (SL-4) 16 Nov 1973
0:00:00[ * ]1 Tower cam
0:01:30[ * ]End
AS-210 (Apollo-Soyuz) 15 Jul 1975
0:00:00[ * ]1 Tower cam
0:01:24[ * ]2 Medium shot static 1
0:02:18[ * ]3 Medium shot static 2
0:03:15[ * ]4 Long shot
0:04:16[ * ]5 Long shot tracking
0:06:09[ * ]6 Long shot tracking through staging
0:10:32[ * ]7 Closeup base
0:14:21[ * ]End
Bonus Materials
0 – 08:01[ * ]AS-204 Lunar Module 1 Checkout and Mate
0 – 02:32[ * ]AS-206 (Skylab 2) Crew Pictures
0 – 05:21[ * ]H-1 Engine Installation
The Mighty Saturns — Saturn I and IB
Disc 3
2:25:35
AS-205 (Apollo 7) Launch
Perimeter and Overall Views
0 - 02:50[ * ]Service structure
0 - 02:53[ * ]Overall launch
0 - 00:46[ * ]Overall medium
0 - 08:27[ * ]Camera E13
0 - 04:20[ * ]Camera E49
0 - 04:19[ * ]Camera E51
0 - 07:48[ * ]Camera E63
Tracking Views
0 - 08:01[ * ]Tracking A
0 - 07:56[ * ]Tracking B
0 - 05:45[ * ]Tracking C
0 - 08:03[ * ]Tracking D
0 - 07:46[ * ]Tracking E
0 - 08:10[ * ]Tracking F
0 - 08:21[ * ]Tracking G
0 - 07:56[ * ]Tracking H
Swing Arm/Tower Views
0 - 01:09[ * ]Tower S-IVB aft swing arm
0 - 04:13[ * ]Camera E42
0 - 03:03[ * ]Camera E43
0 - 02:32[ * ]Camera E45
0 - 04:19[ * ]Camera E50
0 - 04:50[ * ]Camera E52
0 - 06:19[ * ]Camera E53
0 - 01:44[ * ]Camera E55
0 - 04:21[ * ]Camera E56
0 - 00:32[ * ]Camera E104
Pedestal Views
0 - 01:39[ * ]Camera E21
0 - 01:30[ * ]Camera E23
0 - 02:48[ * ]Camera E24
0 - 01:26[ * ]Camera E25
0 - 02:10[ * ]Camera E26
0 - 01:28[ * ]Camera E27
0 - 01:48[ * ]Camera E29
0 - 01:52[ * ]Camera E36
0 - 01:44[ * ]Camera E85
0 - 02:15[ * ]Camera E86
0 - 00:32[ * ]Acknowledgments
|
|
