Category: And Beyond The Infinite

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...And Little C Makes 4 ...And Little E Makes 3 And Beyond The Infinite Gaming Television & Movies

Everybody’s geekin’ for the weekend, part four: do it again!

Whoosh!In February, the fine folks at Oklahoma City’s Starbase Studios announced another of their open house events, during which all and/or sundry are invited to tour their exquisitely detailed replicas of the original Star Trek shooting sets, free of charge (though it’s hoped that visitors might be impressed enough to drop a few coins in the hat, donating to the upkeep of those sets so future fan-made productions can make use of them. My wife was pregnant with Little C when Little E and I tagged along with some friends to visit the sets last year, and that was before they had built sickbay and started work on a transporter room (!). There was no way she was going to miss out on this open house.

As the date got closer, Little E expressed disappointment that we weren’t going to repeat the entire trip with the Martins – i.e. Friday night at Arkadia Retrocade, and a visit to the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma (almost an hour further west from OKC). Since he was so keen on doing it all again, we reserved a hotel room in Weatherford and decided to make it a whole geeky weekend getaway. (It should be pointed out that the timely arrival of a tax refund was pretty much the pivot point where we went from “go to OKC and back” to “make a whole weekend of it.”)

What follows is a ridiculous record – over 60 photos – of the geeky weekend in question. Ready to beam up and go to the moon?

OKC+WXford trip
Click on any photo below for the full-size version – I took “the good camera” this time and didn’t rely on my phone for much of the picture-taking this time around.… Read more

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And Beyond The Infinite

The 67P Project

Halley ProjectWhen I was a teenager, my friend Rob Heyman and I used to geek out over a computer game built around exploring and navigating the solar system, The Halley Project. The game would give you cryptic directions, as if issuing instructions to Charlie’s cosmic angels, as to where to go. Sometimes it would be “go to the third moon of Jupiter.” Sometimes it would rely on more fine-grained space knowledge: “go to the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere.” (In which case, of course, you’d go to Titan, the large moon of Saturn.) You’d complete each round of tasks by returning to the “base” of the Halley Project, Halley’s Comet itself. Yeah, sure, land on a comet. The game was criticized by some educators and scientists for mixing its science with science fiction.

Philae

Those critics evidently couldn’t see a mere 28 years into the future. A robot launched in 2004 by the European Space Agency has now put a lander on a comet. … Read more

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And Beyond The Infinite

The outskirts

Pluto and CharonI’ve initiated a new category here at Scribblings to encompass my rants, musings and occasional artistic dabblings on the subject of real space exploration. If there’s a surprise here, it’s that I haven’t had a category for such things in the past.

One of the things that inspired this change is this exceedingly brief movie from the outskirts of the solar system. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 And Beyond The Infinite Gadgetology

Everybody’s geekin’ for the weekend, part two: Space (race)

Gemini and ApolloWith everyone in agreement that the two space-related destinations in central Oklahoma were worth going to, we set out from Fort Smith in the Martins’ vehicle to strike out westward. The kids were surprisingly well behaved for the whole trip; it occasionally got a bit noisy, but since the back set was filled with boys, that’s hardly a surprise.

Our first Saturday destination: the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma! And then to the stars. Warning: there are over 50 photos after the jump. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 And Beyond The Infinite

Wave at Saturn!

Saturn itselfToday was the day everyone on Earth was supposed to wave at the planet Saturn, low on the eastern horizon in the afternoon. Way out there at Saturn, the Cassini space probe is looking back this way as Saturn eclipses the sun, and the pictures it takes during this event – while Saturn is blocking out the direct light of the sun from Cassini’s vantage point – should show Earth as a tiny bright-blue half-pixel reflecting the sun’s light.

Since it was clouded over and trying to rain on us, we made our own Saturn out of a styrofoam ball, with paper clips holding up a somewhat floppy construction-paper ring. Obviously, Douglas Trumbull isn’t quaking in his boots. … Read more

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The storm at the top of the world

WARNING! GIGANT-O-GIF AFTER THE JUMP!

Remember the delightfully huge aniamted GIF of the polar vortex at Saturn a while back? Cassini recently completed another relatively close pass of Saturn’s north polar region, effectively initiating another staring contest with the huge hexagonal eye that sits there spinning at the top of the ringed planet. The results were simply too awesome not to animate.

Be warned that the GIF animation here runs about 22 megabytes and will take a minute or two to load and run through once, after which it will run at full speed. This is a cropped, reduced-size version; you can click on the link to see the full-size, 84 megabyte (!!) animation to best effect. … Read more

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And Beyond The Infinite

Crisis On Infinite Earls!

Though I try not to get hung up on it, my mind is really good about playing the what-if game: what had happened if the course of my life zigged – presumably for great justice – when, as we all know by now, it zagged with a vengeance. Sometimes it’s “what if I’d passed on the chili dogs at Sonic and eaten something else or, perhaps, nothing at all” (a not uncommon thought when I’m on bathroom trip #7 at two in the morning), sometimes it’s major life decisions, and the beauty of the human brain is that it can pierce the veil of the possible and imagine what didn’t happen. I sometimes wonder if, perhaps, we’re closer to being Douglas Adams’ “pan-dimensional beings” than anyone truly imagines. But every once in a while, one pauses to consider a cosmic “if… then” statement that defies imagining. … Read more