Entries tagged with moon [Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff]

Last night we sat in our friends' garden in Silicon Valley, watching the moon rise over the trees that line the little creek that runs behind their house. It was the 2012 supermoon, the closest full moon of the year where the moon is 14% bigger than normal...

I had my long lens with me, and remembering that I was photographing reflected sunlight dialed up my exposure to 1/2500^th of a second. With a little judicious cropping here are a couple of shots taken as the moon floated through a gap on the acacias...

San Jose, California
May 2012

location: Willow Glen, CA

Music:: Nesting house finches

Mood::

relaxed

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We're heading from LA to Las Vegas at the moment, taking a couple of days to make it a desert road trip. It'd been cloudy most of the day, with occasional rain to green the spring desert still further, but as the sun set the skies cleared, leaving a high scattering of clouds and contrails in the dark desert night. It's the right weather for bats, out here in Bat Country.

It's high up here in Barstow, nearly 2200 feet above sea level, in the clean clear desert air, washed down by today's rain. Tonight's Supermoon is especially clear and bright, pulling the eye towards it and seeming to fill a large portion of the sky. Of course it a perceptual illusion, but it's convincing...

I've got my DSLR with me, so I fitted the big Sigma 55-200 lens and went out into the cold motel car park to try and photograph the moon. It took a couple of shots to get the speed right - I keep forgetting that when photographing the moon you need to be as fast as possible, as you're photographing reflected sunlight from a high albedo body.

A judicious crop, and here you all go - a high desert supermoon.

Barstow, California
March 2011

Mood::

tired

location: Barstow, California

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Some people see a face, some an old lady carrying a stick - me, I see the rabbit in the moon. Its long ears flop down in a line along the Mares, with Serenitatis its clearly defined head.

On a bright, cold afternoon in Paso Robles the moon was rising, half full and clear silver in the deep blue sky. I pulled out my camera, and grabbed this image, handheld with my 75-200 Sigma lens. I do like that lens...

Paso Robles, California
January 2011

location: Putney, London

Mood::

busy

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Each time I've walked out of the keynote hall in the San Jose conference centre the last few days, I've found the light on the cracked and pitted concrete floor fascinating. A low light highlighted the pits and scrapes of decades of exhibition set-ups and tear-downs, turning them into something fantastical and beautiful.

The stark halogen glow over the concrete reminded me of the first Ranger images of the moon, our initial 100 mile glimpse of our nearest celestial neigbour...

So this morning I pulled out my iPhone...

(Bonus points for spotting the title reference!)

San Jose, California
September 2010

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

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The moon is at its closest to earth tonight - and it's a bright and frosty night here in London, the moonlight almost defeating the orange glow of the streetlights.

I opened the skylight in the bathroom, looked up, and took a photograph. It's not perfect, but at 1/4000^th of a second using a handheld 55-200 lens with the camera set to a 200 ISO, I think I did OK. Speed forgives much.

Putney, London
January 2010

location: Putney, London

Mood::

tired

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There's one thing about winter in the high deserts of the American West: the clarity of the sky. It's a deep, open, endless blue, nothing like the washed out pale colours of London.

At 6000 feet up, you're high above the pollution and the smog of the low lying cities. And as the moon rises in the cold blue afternoon sky, you can almost reach out and touch, a piece of silver in the deep sky.

Petrified Forest, Arizona
November 2009

location: Putney, London

Mood::

busy

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As today is an auspicious anniversary, I spent some time delving through my music collection to put together tracks that fitted the event. Of course this is only a small selection of possible tunes - so feel free to add your own to the list.

A playlist for the 40^th anniversary of the first moon landing.

Launch of Apollo 11 - NASA - Lunar Landing
Apollo - Alan Parsons - On Air
Matta - Brian Eno - Apollo Atmospheres & Soundtracks
Let There Be Light (BT Mix) - BT - R & R
Money - N.A.S.A. (Feat. David Bryne) - The Spirit Of Apollo
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun - O.S.I - Office of Strategic Influence Bonus CD
Apollo - Way Out West - Don't Look Now
Let There Be Light - Mike Oldfield - The Songs of Distant Earth
Sleeping Satellite (12") - Aurora - Sleeping Satellite
Armstrong Sets Foot on Moon - NASA - Lunar Landing
Stars Die - Porcupine Tree - Stars Die
Sleeping Satellite (Extended Version) - Tasmin Archer - Sleeping Satellite
Pump Up The Volume - M|A|R|R|S - Pump Up The Volume
Walking On The Moon - The Police - Greatest Hits
The Great Gig In The Sky - Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon
Dark Side Of The Moon (12" Mix) - Dune - Dark Side Of The Moon
Full Moon Low Tide Remix By DJ Toshio - Afro Celt Sound System - POD
Fly Me to the Moon - Agneta Fältskog - My Colouring Book
lunar orbit four: back side of the moon - The Orb - The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld
Trip to the Moon - Alex North - 2001: The Legendary Original Score
Aristillus - Camel - Moonmadness
Moonraker - David Arnold (featuring Shara Nelson) - Shaken and Stirred
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun - Pink Floyd - Ummagumma (Disc 1)
Moonage Daydream - David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
Bike Ride to the Moon - The Dukes of Stratosphear - Chips from the Chocolate Fireball
Ticket To The Moon - Electric Light Orchestra - Time
Tsukiyo no Hikou (Moonlight Flight) - Joe Hisaishi, Azumi Inoue & Suginami Children's Choir - My Neighbor Totoro
Lunar Sea - Camel - Moonmadness
Moonshine - Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells II
Moonbase - Thomas Dolby - Gate to the Mind's Eye
Tranquility Base - Planet P Project - Planet P Project
lunar orbit five: spanish castles in space - The Orb - The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld
Lunar Ascent - Philip Sheppard - In the Shadow of the Moon
Lunar Sunrise - Terra Ferma - The Best Of Platipus
An Ending (Ascent) - Brian Eno - Apollo Atmospheres & Soundtracks

"Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

Mood::

busy

location: Putney, London

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I used to work with the chap who wrote that classic headline for the infamous Sunday Sport.

Over lunch in a Shepton Mallet pub one day he told me the story behind that (and other headlines). They spent all Thursday, after the rest of the paper had been put together, sitting in various pubs around Hull coming up with more and more insane ideas, before writing up the most weird. Sober, he was a great writer, able to churn out news stories quicker than most people I know. Drunk, well, he could out-weird Charlie Stross after 3 cans of Jolt.

I don't think Chris could have realised that we were just a handful of years away from putting a satellite in lunar orbit that would have the camera resolution to see devices smaller than that World War II bomber his art guys cut and pasted onto an old NASA picture.

But here we are a day away from the 40^th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing - and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is sending back pictures of the various Apollo landing sites, including Apollo 11's. That shadow there, between those two craters? That's Eagle's descent stage.

You know, that doesn't look like a movie studio to me.

Tranquillity Base? We can see you from here.

Now to look for that bomber.

Mood::

busy

location: Putney, London

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Friday evening I got access to the Office 2010 Technical Preview release code, and fired up the FTP engines. Just under 2GB later it was sat on my hard disk, where I installed it on my main Windows 7 test machine. By the end of the evening we'd done one clean install, and one upgrade install (just to see if it worked).

Over the weekend I:

(a) baked a lemon/peach polenta cake with

marypcb.
(b) made a red chicken thai curry for friends whow were coming round for dinner (again with

marypcb).
(c) introduced those friends to The Middleman and Jennifer Crusie.
(d) reviewed Office 2010 and wrote two articles on it, for different audiences, coming in at around 5500 words - plus 22 different screenshots.

I think I got to bed at about 4 am this morning, before getting up to finish the screenshots and captions and take part in a call with a Microsoft spokesperson.

You can check out my words at ZDNet UK here:

Microsoft, like Apple, has one customer. Apple's is Steve Jobs, while Microsoft's is the Microsoft Corporation — all 70,000 or so of it. Once you realise this, it explains much of the thinking behind Office 2010. It's a suite of tools that primarily addresses Microsoft's own organisational problems — and we're lucky that most of those problems are the same as for any other business, from the smallest to the largest.
Codenamed 'Office 14' (Microsoft skipped neatly over the unlucky number 13), Office 2010 has been some time in the making prior to this public Technical Preview. There have been some snippets of information over the last year or so (among them its final name) but Microsoft has managed to achieve almost Apple-like levels of secrecy. One fact that's been known for a while is that this is the first 64-bit version of Office, part of Microsoft's transition to the current generation of processor architectures.

Read more.

I also put together a hefty image gallery for the site, drilling down into many of the most interesting features.

The other piece was another first look piece, this time for IT Pro:

Microsoft is using its World Wide Partner Conference to finally publicly unveil Office 2010, in the shape of its first public technical preview.

We’ve been playing with it for a few days now, and it’s clear that, while there are plenty of excellent new features, this is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, release.

The Office 2010 technical preview isn’t going to be widely distributed. If you weren’t at TechEd US or the World Wide Partner conference, you’re unlikely to get access – though there is a waiting list sign-up at Office2010themovie.com. You’ll need SharePoint 2010 to get the most from Office 2010, but it won’t be available until after October.

Read more

There's more to write on the subject - we've got commissions from magazines to fulfil too.

But now, I think, it's time for an earlier night.

location: Putney, London

Music:: Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon - Twentieth Aniversary Edition - The Great Gig In The Sky

Mood::

busy

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The moon has been close and bright these last few frosty nights. Last night, as the cloud and rain of the day faded away, I opened the skylight and pointed my camera straight up.

It took a while to get the right exposure - much faster than I would have guessed.

December 2008's full moon, in a clear sky over London.

Slight crop from a larger picture.

Putney, London
December 2008

location: Putney, London

Mood::

busy

There are 4 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

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Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Supermoon 2012

Desert Supermoon

Year of the Rabbit

(lunar orbit four) Back Side Of The Moon

Perimoon

Desert Moon

It was 40 years ago today...

World War II Bomber Found On Moon

What I did at the weekend

Sleeping Satellite

January