Mike's Astro Photos

Mike with some Jawas

My in-laws gave me tickets to Starwars In Concert as an early Christmas present. The show was amazing and like nothing I have ever seen before. Anothony Daniels (C3p0) was the host and it was a thrill to see him in person. We had great seats so close to the stage I could easily have pegged Daniels with a thermal detonator.

The music was performed by a live symphony orchestra while a cleverly edited remix of the movies played on screen behind the stage. Each song was centered around a specific character, event or theme and Daniels introduced each song by telling a story about the character or event. The video footage playing during the song was a cut and mix of conceptual art and footage from all 6 of the films. It was a very stimulating and interesting way to see Star Wars and by the end of the show it felt like you had watched the entire saga in a little under two hours. I was reminded by Daniels that the ‘odds of successfully navigating an asteroid belt are approximately 3720 to 1′. I think finding a piece of an asteroid in Lancaster are slightly worse than that.

Props from the original movies apparently taken from George Lucas’s private collection at the Skywalker Ranch were setup throughout the concorse. It was a great display with all of the usual suspects and well over 20 exhibits. Live characters from a Star Wars fan club walked around the halls in full costumes. The costumes were great and the club was well prepared. There were no-duplicate characters present (except for storm troopers) and all characters were well represented.

Visit the Star Wars in Concert website to check show times and watch some videos. The tour is about 1/2 over but there are still available dates. If its in your area, I highly recommend it. Even the non-star-wars-fan would be impressed.

Thanks to my in-law’s connections at Lucas Film, I got VIP tickets and was able to access the show a couple of hours early. This let us look at the exhibits before the crowds arrived and we even got to watch the orchestra warm up a little. Here are some pictures from the show.

Jedi Master Yoda

Tusken Raider

Storm Troopers

X-Wing Pilot

Jedi Couple

Darth Vader Fighting Youngling

Mike With Chewbaca

C3P0 - Human Cyborg Relations

Anthony Daniels on Stage

Wife Getting Force Choked

Original Score - Written In Pencil!

Here’s are a few quick video clips I took before and during the show:

Who says aliens and UFOs don’t exist?

Mike with Alien & UFO

Here is a pretty cool space video a friend sent me:

We Are All Connected – Watch more Funny Videos

Fake Meteor Crater In Latvia

A report about a 20 meter meteor crater and burning meteorite came out Sunday night. Minutes after the report surfaced meteorite experts called foul.

Today scientists have reported that the crater was man made and concluded this was not caused by a meteor and must be some sort of hoax.

Possible non meteor explanations include:

1) Publicity stunt to increase tourism perpetrated by Borat and the Latvian Government
2) Russian weapons test gone bad
3) Underground natural gas explosion
4) Latest experiment from balloon boy’s dad

At this point most news organizations outside are reporting this as a hoax. The people who created / reported the incident made a pretty cool video though.

The Mars Rover has found another big meteorite on Mars. Interesting article with some great pictures:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0910/11meteorite/

I have to do a lot of shadow analysis with all of these new videos so I went googling and found this program written by someone at MIT.

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/g8rghr/297509

It has been pretty useful conceputally interpreting the shadows. We will need percise measurements of the shadows in order to get anything tangible out of the shadow videos.

NASA is set to crash a rocket into the moon at 7:30 AM EST tomorrow morning.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/10/08/probe.moon.crash/index.html

hmm… this could be interesting.

here’s NASA’s official site for this event:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/index.html

Meteor Impact Reveals Ice Under Surface of Mars

Ice On The Moon

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Google is the best

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A friend sent me this video. It is the coolest space video I have ever seen.

I get this organic ice tea for lunch everyday that has fortunes on the bottle caps. I got a good one today that really validates a personal belief I have always held:

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic. — unknown

A friend of mine sent me this video and it was too funny not to post.

MC Hammer Vader Busts a Move – Watch more Funny Videos

Sirius is one of the brightest stars in the sky, if not the brightest. It looks like a diamond when you look at it thru the eye piece.

Sirius

I had a great session Friday Febuary 6th 2009. It started out with numerous shots of m42 (my novice obsession). Later in the night I cycled thru several objects in the goto tour. All of the pictures with the exception of M42 are single shots. The lunar and Saturn shot are short exposures < 1 sec with relatively low ISO. The deep space shots are 30 second exposures @ 800 ISO. All shots were taken with a Canon 20Da DSLR camera attached to a CPC1100 fork mounted scope. No guiding is taking place, the 3 star align GOTO tracking is enabled.

Random Star Cluster -- not sure which one.

Ghost of Jupiter

The Moon

M42 Orion Nebula

Saturn

Unknown Aberration