Eric M.’s Blog

I’m a sad panda now. The launch has been delayed until early 2009. Not sure what we are going to do about our trip to Florida now.

So a bit of a collection of space related stuff.

First off – SpaceX:
SpaceX has been working on becoming the first privately funded company to reach orbit. Their first 3 rockets failed for various reasons (first stage failure, staging problem then a second stage control system failure, stage separation failure). They have developed many cool technologies, including their own in house engines. But yesterday, at about 12:25 EST, Falcon 1 Flight 4 successfully reached SECO. Here is a video of the launch – if you fast forward to 2:35, you can see three big events – MECO, staging and a little bit later, fairing separation.

Congrats to the 550 or so employees of SpaceX!

Now, on to the upcoming shuttle flight, STS-125.

Sara and I have launch viewing tickets, and plan on driving down Oct 10th and driving back the 19th. NASA delayed the launch to Oct 14th, which works perfectly, because I have a cousin getting married in Atlanta on the 18th. We weren’t planning on going, but now we will actually be driving back through the area that weekend. Imagine that.

But now possible bad news! This weekend, The Hubble Space Telescope (where this mission is going) experienced a computer failure. The computer that failed controls the science instruments, so they still have full control of the spacecraft, but they can’t use any of the science payloads… They have a backup unit on board, but it was last tested before it was launch more than 18 years ago. They are attempting to activate that unit over the next few days. They also have a unit on the ground. If the backup unit on board does not work, or they decide to fly the spare anyways, it will require a delay of up to many months, for the ground unit to be retested (it’s been in storage for almost two decades now) and to retrain the crew. This is all just developing, so we will have to wait and see.

Labor day weekend we stayed around the house, but that was getting boring. On Labor day we decided to do something (anything), but Sara wouldn’t come up with anything, so I decided we would go down to the Detroit Riverfront. I didn’t know at the time that it was Jazz Fest and the Grand Prix that weekend, and Barack Obama had talked there earlier in the day, so it was pretty busy.

Didn’t do anything special, just wandered around and took a few pictures.

I liked this one. I wish I had taken some more, but I always feel weird doing street photography of random people:

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Water is fun

And this one:

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Running in the fountain

The lens I’ve been using get a cool (I think) vignette when it’s wide open and zoomed all the way out. I also like how the colors get somewhat washed out. Obviously that could be a problem for many types of photography, but for something like this, it works (and I can correct it in software pretty easily if I wanted):

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The River

I’m finding that I’m having to do less post production on my photos, which is good, it means I get the closer to what I want in camera. I don’t think I modified any of the images in this set, except the first one of the kid in the water – I think I lightened the shadows up a little, but I couldn’t have done that one site without lighting

Hopefully this will mean I’ll post more, since it take less time to process the images.

Full gallery below.

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So Saturday night I was wide awake, and Sara was gone, so I decided to go bum around and take some pictures.

Of course we were having a ton of rain and it was completely overcast – but it had let up and was just sporadically sprinkling.

I stopped at the hospital near us because I saw the retaining ponds were flooding (click any image to see larger):

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That's not supposed to be there

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On an island

I liked the starbursts on this image:

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Starbursts and a Flood

It was dark. Very Very Dark. It was so dark that I couldn’t even see (with my eye) that there was a dumpster there in this picture:

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A wet field

I personally love the look of night photography. To me, they always look like pictures of models, since the DOF is usually very shallow, and the colors are usually ‘off’.

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Some Trees

While I was out I also did a light trail or two:

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96

And experimented some with light graffiti:

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Hi - A little experiment

Full gallery below.

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I’ve been slacking, and have decided I need to start posting more pictures and photography related things. To that end I have added a few things into my WordPress setup (I had to hand code them…). I’ve added an option that allows me to show EXIF data at the bottom of pictures, and also will show a ‘Map It’ link if there is location data with the image. It will popup a new window showing that location in Google Maps.

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Howell Balloon Fest Kids

I take lots of pictures, and would love for those to contain position info (geotagging). I’ve wanted to do it for a long time, but never really looked into it, since buying a tagger for my cameras would be relatively expensive.

I found an application, Maperture, which allows me to add geotags in Aperture, using a Google Maps interface. It works pretty well, but it’s kinda slow and quirky to do to lots of pictures, and obviously requires me to know/remember where I was.

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Up

There are a few options I have.

1. I can keep doing it with Maperture.
2. I can use a GPS data logger (or any GPS unit that can export GPX files) which can then be combined with the images based on time stamp in gpicsync.
3. I can use a GPS that inputs into my camera, which will code it at the time of capture strait into the image.

Number 2 can be done a number of ways. I even have a old hand held Garmin GPS that would work – but it’s really bulky. Something like this would work very well, and could just clip onto the camera strap, and would give me a full GPS track, showing where I went even if I didn’t take pictures. This option of course requires me to reconnect the location data to the images in the import work flow, and my camera clock better be accurate, or the sync won’t be right. Battery life might be a problem, not to mention the $100 I don’t have .

Obviously #3 is the more strait forward in terms of work flow. But there are pretty few options. I can use just about any hand held GPS unit that does NEMA serial out, including the one I have, but I also need a relatively expensive cable, and that would be really cumbersome. Nikon, along with the D90, announced a new geotagging device, called the GP-1, that comes out in November (price TBA). That clips onto the hot shoe or camera strap, and has a short cable the runs to the camera.

GP-1 - Nikon Image

Unfortunately, nothing is really known about it, most importantly cost.

Because my camera can take standard NEMA serial in, I could actually make my own small unit, using things from SparkFun. It would be small, about the same size as the GP-1 or the data logger, and draw power from the camera, but I’m not sure if I could come in much below the $100 for the data logger (although I would guess I would come in quite a bit below the GP-1, but we’ll have to wait and see where they price that). But I would get the best of both worlds. I get a camera powered, can camera encoded GPS unit, and I would still be able to store and access the full GPS path if I wanted to (instead of just have the location of each pic). I’m such a nerd…

So for now I guess it’s Maperture. I’ll probably experiment with my GPS unit, and see how much of a pain it is to combine the GPS track with pictures in post.

So I’m sure everybody has of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), but I just came across this video. It’s a nice, easy to follow explanation of how it works. I love the bit about things getting more massive as they get closer to c – by the time they collide, the protons have 7,000 times more mass then when they are at rest. Also here is a link to a comic by a person who went on a tour of the facility (amusing comic normally, but this series is more informative)

Ok, just a few random items.

The launch of Atlantis has been pushed back to October 10th at the earliest due to delays from Hanna. Sara and I have LTT tickets to see the launch and we are working out if we are going, and if so, how we are getting down there.

Things have been hectic at work. The semester started on Tuesday, which is always the busiest time of year, and now the parking lots are always full. Suck.

Finally a wonderful clip from the Daily Show: