Second, I’m really sorry they didn’t do this sooner, before the space shuttle orbiter was scheduled for retirement, because it adds a lot more interesting detail to the whole launch process. What I’m featuring here is a collection of clips during a couple of shuttle launches, taken by some of the 125+ cameras that keep track of various factors from very distinct vantage points, most of them at high-speed frame rates which provide excellent detail. You can watch the main engines ignite from front row, and actually see the explosive bolts that hold the solid rocket boosters in place on the pad fire off and release. And throughout it all are quite a few details about the cameras themselves and how they operate. Below, I include a short glossary of the abbreviations used by the narrators.

My one regret is that they didn’t either rehearse (and perhaps edit) the voice-overs, or perhaps obtain some professional voice actors. While it means a lot to have two NASA engineers explaining everything we can see, it comes off a tad unpolished. Still, I think most viewers can handle the video without the need for some infomercial-style enthusing.

Also note, there’s an HD version out there, but I had several issues with it pegging out, so I’m featuring the lower-res version here.

Glossary of abbreviations
FSS – Fixed Service Structure (“launch tower”)
KTM – Kineto Tracking Mount (great pic here)
LCC – Launch Control Complex (“mission control”)
MLP – Mobile Launcher Platform
RCS – Reaction Control System (maneuvering rockets)
SSME – Space Shuttle Main Engines
SRB – Solid Rocket Booster
TSM – Tail Service Mast

Here’s a couple of little bits of trivia. Throughout the video, you’ll notice the extensive use of water, not for cooling and protecting the launch area as one might expect, but for “sound suppression.” The thrust of the engines and boosters hitting the launch platform can actually send shock waves back up to the vehicle, potentially damaging it, so the water serves to dissipate the worst effects of the thrust. Also, note that when you see a launch producing huge gouts of smoke, bear in mind that the white clouds are not smoke, but steam (okay, pedants, water vapor) from this suppression system. The SRBs produce grey smoke, and the SSMEs produce none at all.

Also, the entire launch vehicle of shuttle, external tank, and solid rocket boosters are attached to the MLP (and transported) by just four bolts on the bottom of each SRB, the ones you see separating by small explosions as the boosters ignite. They boosters are placed onto the platform first and bolted down, then the external tank fitted between them, and the shuttle orbiter attached to that. The solid boosters are the only things not actually empty when this takes place – all other fueling and payload placement occurs after the launch platform has reached the FSS on the pad. For years, I thought the Tail Service Masts, those big blocks that sit at the base of the orbiter’s wings, served to hold the orbiter in place since it was so offset from the apparent center of gravity, but all they do is provide propellent and electrical connections to the SSMEs and RCS.

In the video, they mention the long-distance camera tracking stations situated miles away from the launch pad. When I lived in Florida, I was aware of one of them to the south, next to Patrick Air Force Base, so I went looking for the one to the north. Near as I can tell, it can be found by putting “28.702876 N 80.668605 W” into Google Maps, Bing, whatever. Thy look like miniature observatory domes. The one near Patrick is at “28.227168 N 80.599659 W”. Somewhere south of Cocoa is another, abandoned one that I have to try and find again.

By the way, the Fixed Service Structures on pads 39-A and 39-B, seen here in a pic from the wildlife refuge north of the Cape in 2004, are gone now, dismantled to be replaced by structures dedicated to the new Space Launch System, not unlike the old Saturn V system that carried astronauts to the moon (and Skylab into Low Earth Orbit.) And the Vehicle Assembly Building is going through a major overhaul inside for the same purpose – try to imagine that task. But if you really want something to imagine, there’s this:

Can you make out those faint wires stretching across the frame from the FSS? (Gimme a break – I was 3.5 kilometers away.) Those are one of the many crew escape options for shuttle launches. In the event that the crew could egress the shuttle by gantry but the FSS was compromised, for instance by a ground fire, they would have jumped into little baskets attached to those wires and slid down to the ground, whereupon they could then enter some modified M113 Armored Personnel Carriers and tool their way to safety (probably after pulling some donuts and trying to find an abandoned car to run over.) But hey, you don’t have to imagine it, because NASA was kind enough to take excellent video of the final release of these escape baskets. Trust me, I was grinning stupidly for the second half of this:

Yes, that’s the VAB you can see in the distance. Many thanks to NASA for such great perspectives!

It’s very likely that you’ve heard of the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC) at CERN, possibly because of the vapid concerns over it destroying the earth that gained far more media attention than was warranted. It’s also likely that you have no idea what it is that they’re trying to do, or that you know it has something to do with the ‘Higgs Boson’ but aren’t sure exactly what. If so, this short video animation will almost certainly help:

[The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo].

As far as I’m concerned, this is a very effective presentation. Nothing fancy or flashy needed – just a good narrator and some visual assistance.

The underlying message is interesting, too – this is a realm of science that is wide open for surprises and new discoveries, and it highlights how much we still have yet to learn. In the past century, we explored nearly all of our planet’s surface and turned our eyes to the stars, reaching farther and farther out – but another faction of explorers started reaching farther and farther inwards, delving into realms that continue to get even smaller. The very word “quantum” is a reference to the smallest possible amount that something could be reduced to. The first written concepts of this considered everything to be made of five perfect geometric shapes – this was a few thousand years ago. Much later on, we figured out that everything was made of atoms, a word that means something that cannot be divided or reduced further. The name stuck, the supposed property didn’t, as we discovered the bits that atoms are made of. And while doing all this, we narrowed down the four basic forces which govern all matter – so far, anyway.

It’s fairly common knowledge now that quantum physics has rules all its own, surprisingly different from standard physics, and it’s been a huge field of study. At the subatomic level, matter doesn’t act as it does ‘normally,’ and we still don’t know why, nor how particles that behave one way form a collective atom that behaves another. There is at least one fundamental law governing this, probably more, and it’s very likely that once we find out about it all, there will be numerous new applications in materials, communication, and potentially even travel and energy.

It’s very easy to ask questions about how or why this is important, especially in the face of more immediate concerns locally or worldwide. Yet, roughly a century ago when some of the most astounding findings of both particle physics and astronomy were made, there were countless immediate concerns too, like The War To End All Wars and anarchists in the US. They’re long past now, but the science remains. We have a serious problem with repeating history, yet knowledge moves forward constantly, and the LHC stands a good chance of being the location where another leap occurs. There’s a lot still to be discovered, and for those who favor the ideas of exploration and learning, it really is pretty damn cool.

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Thanks to Cosmic Variance for the initial introduction to the video, and PhD Comics for their great efforts to communicate these things effectively.

Source: Hubblesite.org

Yet, being the source of pretty pictures is the superficial way to look at Hubble, like judging someone by their shoes. We have obtained a tremendous amount of information from these optical observations as well, such as refining the measurements that led to the concept of “dark energy.” In a nutshell: after the initial acceleration of all the mass in the universe from a very small point, gravity should have been slowing things down, dragging its metaphorical feet against the coasting bike of space-time (no, I’ll never be asked to write popular science articles.) Instead, the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and something must be feeding energy into this. I could have continued the space-time bike simile by comparing it to going downhill, but that acceleration is caused be gravity and I’m now confusing the hell out of even myself. Let’s let someone else do this (autoplay video at that link – I wish people would stop doing crap like that.)

Hubble has also contributed a lot to our knowledge of planetary formation, as well. The photos that I highlight in this post disproved a prediction by astronomers that planetary discs would typically remain hidden from our view by surrounding dust clouds. Hubble has even imaged a planet itself around another star, something that is remarkably hard to accomplish:


There’s a little bit of trivia that is worth knowing, if you’ll permit me to return to the idea of Hubble as a camera (just try and stop me!) The bare truth is, every camera, every method that we have of producing images from light, fudges things a bit. Film emulsions contain metals that change their nature when exposed to light, forming crystals, and digital sensors generate a difference in electrical charge. But neither of these can determine the difference between wavelengths except in a very broad range, mostly what we call visible light – in other words, they cannot differentiate color. To accomplish this, they must filter light through substances that permit only specific wavelengths; in film, that’s the emulsion base, a colored gel in which the metals are suspended, and in digital, it’s a membrane over top of the digital sensor. It’s no different for the Hubble Space Telescope, which has colored filters that can be interchanged over its own digital sensors. Every color image from Hubble is a composite of several strictly monochrome images sent back to earth, edited to reintroduce the color, and in most cases enhanced to increase the contrasts between them. A typical computer display does not even remotely approach the range of light and color that our eyes can see, so to provide a better idea of the subtle differences within any photographic target of the HST, the images must be altered. It’s no different than any image I produce myself and put here on the site. This article from Sky & Telescope magazine, used with permission by Hubblesite.org, explains it in more detail.

And finally, I refer you back to this post from two years ago, which contains the video made from the Ultra Deep Field photos, simply because it’s one of the coolest animations ever made. Yeah, you might have seen it already – so? Watch it again. It’s a great dose of perspective, in both directions. While it is easy to feel insignificant in comparison to the unfathomable distances involved, there’s the other side of the coin: we figured out how to actually see this. Damn clever little apes, aren’t we?

But then, I guess we would think that…

Here’s how it works. A normal lens, as almost anyone can tell you, “bends light,” but what this actually means is not as well understood, and often poorly illustrated. Let’s say you have a star, which only looks like a point of light from our distance (I added the twinkle for artistic statement.) It’s emitting light in all directions, so we can take a few paces to the left and still see it, or across the continent, or (should we be able to travel that far) all the way on the other side of it. The light from it is actually a spreading globe of photons, and we see just the one stream that meets our eyes (yes, that’s an eye in the upper part of the illustration.) A lens, however, catches all of the streams that meet its surface, essentially a cone, and bends the light to make all of these streams converge back down into the ‘dot’ of the star – provided that you’re the right distance for that particular lens, called the focal length.

Gravity can be strong enough to bend light. This is not entirely true, since what it does is curve spacetime, which is what the light travels through – you can draw a straight line on a piece of paper and then curl the paper, curving the line. Close enough. With very large galaxies, or more often a whole cluster of tightly-packed galaxies, the gravity can be dense enough that the light from a distant star or another galaxy, out of our sight behind the first, is bent away from its original path that would normally have not even come near us, going instead to Proxima Centauri or someplace. If the alignment is just right, we can see multiple distant objects in several mirror positions around the lensing galaxy, as the light path is bent according to the strength of the gravity at certain points around the lensing galaxy. Placed exactly right, and with fairly high uniformity in gravity around the galaxy, and the distant hidden subject gets distorted into a surrounding ring, which is what we see here with yellow galaxy LRG 3-757. It obscures our direct line of sight to the distant blue galaxy, but we get a nearly spherical path from around the edges, as it were.

What’s interesting about gravitational lensing is, if we were along the line of one of those original paths from the distant star or galaxy, continuing an imaginary path unbent past the gravitational lens (see point A in the illustration,) we would have a perfectly clear line of sight to the distant subject and never see it, since the light was redirected. And in fact, we can only speculate how often this actually happens, since we have no way of knowing. Gravity distorts the path of all light, but usually in such small increments that it doesn’t matter much.

When Einstein proposed General Relativity, which indicated that gravity wasn’t an attractive property but rather an effect of spacetime itself, we didn’t have the ability to test it out in any way, but plenty of astrophysicists hashed out the details looking for errors or implications. One Fritz Zwicky extrapolated it to mean that areas of very high gravity, such as close-packed galaxy clusters, could bend the light paths from more distant objects. It’s simply fascinating to see theories of such a bizarre nature be proven with remarkable images such as this. Another curious implication of General Relativity is the collapsed neutron star usually called a black hole, which would also lens light that passed a certain distance away, but completely capture light that passed too close. We should be able to see lensing from such as well, except that, to our knowledge, black holes have only occurred in the centers of galaxies, and might even be necessary for galaxy formation. Thus it is entirely possible that the lensing galaxy you see in this image is home to a black hole deep in the center, but we do not see a ‘hole’ because it is surrounded by stars well outside of its event horizon, the imaginary sphere around it where light cannot escape. There is even a very very faint chance that some of the light in that central smudge is from stars on the opposite side of a central black hole, bent towards us by the gravity.

As lenses go, by the way, LRG 3-757 is a whopper. About 4.6 billion light years away at the time the light left, it’s one hell of a focal length. It’s also a tad heavy to carry around, as you might imagine, so not really useful to look at anything else. And as seen, its field curvature is kind of egregious.

Here’s another cool thing. The universe is expanding, and the light reaching us now is from objects that have long since left those positions. The distances between LRG 3-757 and the warped galaxy forming the ring are changing, and this curious optical affect will vanish after a while – probably well outside of our lifetimes. At the same time, others that we cannot see now may appear later on as the cosmic focal length changes.

Be sure to check the original APOD page and click on the image to see the high resolution version, which shows much more surrounding detail and is a nice starfield image on its own. And reduces the resemblance to HAL 9000. Once again, we have these images thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is Photographer of the Decade (twice in a row) as far as I’m concerned. I’m gonna be frustrated when it’s decommissioned…

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My thanks to Chris L. Peterson at Cloudbait Observatory for supplying a pertinent detail regarding LRG 3-757 on the Starship Asterisk forums, a great place to ask questions.

Nature photographers, as well as amateur naturalists and simply people interested in animals, need to get out from time to time to places where close encounters are virtually guaranteed – in the case of nature photographers, it’s to build stock images and add some portrait and interest-style pics, but it also helps to learn a bit more about whatever species you can. Sylvan Heights Bird Park has been on my list for a few years now, but it sits in a remote town in NC called Scotland Neck, which really isn’t close to anything except I-95. However, it’s well worth the special trip, and more than once, too. It’s not just the variety or good opportunities for avian photos, but the fact that it is almost interactive.

The first indication of what kind of a day it would be came early on, having entered the park and started out on the deck observing the first pond. While comparing the number of birds, mostly ducks, that were coming up for morning chow, The Girlfriend began making excited attention-getting sounds while being unable to create any actual words. I was trying to remember the procedure for the Heimlich maneuver when I saw what had her attention, which was a young crane eagerly following a park worker up the path like a puppy. The worker heard us, and on return helpfully came over to allow us a closer look. Her companion was a nine-week-old Sarus Crane (Grus antigone), about 80 cm (2 ft) tall and still in the needy stage. That alone probably would have sealed the deal, at least as far as The Girlfriend was concerned, but it was only the start.

The park has several aviary sections with gates that the public is invited to enter, which puts them among a wide selection of fowl each time. Typically, low fences separate the public from the natural areas for the birds, but this doesn’t mean that some of the birds won’t come by out of curiosity or the thought of a handout (food is available to be given out to the birds if desired.) From a nature photographer’s viewpoint, this has both bad and good points. The fencing and netting is a necessary part of having a public attraction such as this, but it does produce a number of limitations if you’re trying to leave such things out of your images (and you should.) However, most of the areas are fairly large and provide angles to eliminate the man-made aspects, so while it isn’t possible to photograph every species this way, most can be exploited with a little effort.

For the Abyssinian Ground Hornbill (Bucorvus abyssinicus) at top, I was able to shoot through the fencing by putting the lens against the openings, producing only the subtle staggered background seen behind her head. The fence was necessary, however, as she tried to greet my close approaches with that massive beak, and while she might simply have wanted a handout, finding out the hard way that she was being protective of her territory is something I’d prefer to avoid.

The other side of this coin was the pair of Victoria Crowned Pigeons (Goura victoria) who came up to the fence at our feet and hung out for portraits, then hopped onto the railing to really mug it up, even nibbling on The Girlfriend’s lenshood in the vague hope that Canon had finally made one that was edible (we’ve all been waiting.) There’s always a part of me that’s prepared for the defensive peck or bite, since what appears friendly to us is often intended as a menacing warning sign from birds, but the Vics were totally blasé about our presence. Another Crowned Pigeon, this one alone in a cage nearby, began producing a remarkable call, so bass that it was hard to trace and almost disturbing – I can recommend bringing either a sound recording device or video camera to capture the full range of experience within the park. Also, when shooting digital, be sure to snap the identification signs as you go so you have a record of the species later on.

The various bird calls, of course, form a jungle-movie soundtrack of background noise throughout the park, occasionally interspersed with someone’s piercing cries just, apparently, for the hell of it. The Argus Pheasant (Argusianus argus) could produce a “Wooo!” that would have made Michael Jackson give up in frustration, and started a string of calls that got gradually faster until it sounded like a siren. A Dark-winged Trumpeter (Psophia viridis) favored us with a rattling sound much like the local crows, which I imitated by dragging my finger against the cage fencing, thereby eliciting a brief conversation. I have no idea what either of us said, but I suspect the bird was simply correcting my pronunciation.

The park itself is the offshoot of a decades long breeding program by the founder, Mike Lubbock, who started it as a private preserve in 1989, only opening the public center in 2006. Thus, much of it is dedicated to threatened and endangered species around the globe, and a whole portion of the facility is separate from the public park, which is where breeding programs for zoos and conservation efforts take place. There were several species that we saw that we already knew from the NC Zoological Park and the three NC aquariums, and we suspect we now know where they came from.

It also provides the opportunity to see some rare and endangered species up close and personal, as well as some really vivid ones, like this startlingly iridescent Himalayan Monal Pheasant (Lophophorus impejanus,) also known as an Impeyan Monal or Danphe. The difference between the male and female (the male shown here) is so drastic as to convince virtually anyone that they are completely separate species. And the nice thing about two people shooting is that one of you can save the ass of the other when they fail to get a decent image, as happened here.

I’ve never been too excited about ducks, which admittedly is where the strength of this park lies – there are more species here than I’ve seen in any other facility or collection, from every continent. Regardless, if you’re into birds in the least, this is a great place to visit, showing off species, plumage, and behavior in prime viewing conditions. Photographers won’t need a long telephoto lens to get decent photos – most of my shots were done with my 24-135mm workhorse – but a tele can produce great portraits from even the shy residents. The park is also kid-friendly, handicapped accessible, and picnic lunches are welcome. Check it out!

Coming up: more photos and encounters from the park… which can now be found here.

But not beer…

See? I knew guilt trips would work…