Discovery in DC

2012-04-29.

On Tuesday, 17 April 2012, The Space Shuttle Discovery came to Washington, borne on the back of 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft NASA 905 for a grand DC flyover before landing at Dulles Airport for transfer to its final destination: the Udvar-Hazy Center Space Hangar. I got photos from Lincoln Memorial with my freshly bought NEX3, as the Shuttle made three passes over DC:

On the third flyby I tried switching to video on the NEX3. Quality was decent and the SCA/Shuttle duo looked really good in HD, but autofocus lag bit me partway through when the SCA passed behind another spectator.

And then Discovery was gone, off to Dulles for an Air and Space reception, face-to-face with Enteprise, while I returned to work.

That Saturday morning we drove to Udvar-Hazy Center to see the shuttle in its new home.

Now demated from the 747 SCA and wheeled into the Space Hangar, Discovery was still cordoned off as it was prepared for display by United Space Alliance personnel. The hangar door was being closed at the time, and the tailcone was still attached to the shuttle’s rear while assorted pieces of hardware were being wheeled about, but enough space was left in the hangar to see the shuttle from most angles.

Amy took a picture of me with Discovery, wearing the same shirt I was in when I last saw her in the VAB at the Juno NASA Tweetup:

We left before it got too crowded, but not before dropping by the store for some space shuttle merchandise:

Sad as it is to see these majestic spacecraft retired to museums, the end of the Space Shuttle is probably a good thing for American spaceflight in general. Ultimately STS was a dangerous and bloated program with inefficiencies built into the system by legislative bureaucracy, at literally astronomical expenses that cut into initiatives to develop new manned spacecraft.

The real shame now is that a superior replacement system has not yet been built, owing to insufficient will or funding from presidency, congress, and general public. Constellation suffered the same problems, and we can see the mistakes of history repeating themselves with SLS and Orion.

Today NASA stands in the same manned spaceflight gap it did between Apollo and Shuttle, with a chance to reboot the program from a blank slate with new technologies and systems — but suffering from the same political pressures and lack of support that marked the post-Apollo era. It doesn’t look good from here. But on the up side some museums get some cool Orbiters. Maybe the N can stand for “Nostalgia” instead.

More photos in my “Space Shuttle Discovery Comes to DC” photoset on Flickr, and in case you missed it last year, my NASA Tweetup experience.

Saturday: Ben’s, Space, Camera, Oysters

2012-04-16.

Fun Saturday. While Amy attended to some school tasks I went into town to meet up with mach5 from MeFi at Air and Space. But first, lunch at Ben’s Chili Bowl, my first time. (Yeah, I’ve lived around here for 10 years and never gone to Ben’s. That oversight has now been rectified.) Lunch: chili half smoke with chips and iced tea, eaten in front of a sign stating that only Bill Cosby and President Obama (plus family) eat for free.

En route to the National Mall I ran into the Cherry Blossom Festival, which I’d forgotten was still scheduled for this weekend — peak bloom having occurred weeks earlier. I had to wait a bit for the parade to pass by before I could cross Constitution Ave NW.

Down in the Air and Space Museum we looked at Skylab and spacesuits:

…and noticed that the Hughes H-1 seems to be leaking oil:

After the museum I bid farewell to Mach5 and Metro’d up to College Park (overshooting to Greenbelt, oops) to see a Craigslister about a cheap secondhand Sony NEX3 camera, as I’d been feeling like upgrading from point-and-shoot to a simple small-body mirrorless DSLR.

We ended the day at Legal Sea Foods in Tysons, where I indulged myself in a dozen mixed Northeast Coast oysters.

And later that evening I put the NEX3 and its bundled 18-55mm lens kit through their rounds with some indoor depth-of-field feline photos:

A worthy camera for the price, which should serve quite well for Shuttle Spotting when the NASA Shuttle Carrier flies over DC with Discovery on Tuesday. Here are more photos from the weekend, plus NEX3 test photos.

Inside National City

2012-04-15.

Holy Week was a fairly busy time, especially musically: church choir was singing for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and of course lots of Hallelujahs for Easter Sunday. Good Friday was the climactic musical event for me, when we sang with the National City Christian Church choir in a joint performance of Theodore Dubois’ “The Seven Last Words of Christ,” a late 19th Century Passion cantata, sung in the National City sanctuary in their church building. I’d been wanting for a while to see the inside of their church and hear the grandeur of their pipe organ, and did, through the course of two rehearsals and the performance itself.

National City Christian Church sits on Thomas Circle NW in DC, notable for its neoclassical architecture, designed by John Russell Pope in the 1920s.

It’s worth noting that the main doors to the church are usually closed, necessitating entry through the attached office building on the right. I found this out the hard way, but got a nice elevated photo of Thomas Circle from the top of the stairs.

Inside, you can drop by (but not sit on) the James Garfield family pew:

The sanctuary itself is standard neoclassical, with the dome over the chancel echoing other similar structures by John Russell Pope, like Jefferson Memorial or the National Gallery West Building. Note in this photo the damage on the capitals topping the pillars; that was from last year’s earthquake.

And oh, the National City organ. Gloriously, swellingly powerful yet at the same time delicate in its nuance of tone — even as its lowest, deepest notes literally shook me in my choir seat and rattled the structure above me. Lon Schreiber, our esteemed church organist at First Baptist DC, played this very organ for years, including at LBJ’s funeral service.

Here’s a panoramic stitch of the sanctuary and chancel I took during rehearsals, for an idea of the view I had while I was singing:

The Dubois cantata came out nicely.

ATREX

2012-04-03.

“T minus three minutes.” There was my cue to head upstairs. It took two and a half minutes to get to the roof deck (I’d measured this before) plus another 30 seconds to set up the camera. Cutting it close, but I wanted to spend as little time in the freezing cold as possible, while also seeing the rockets. It was early morning, March 27th.

Continue reading ATREX

Cherry Blossoms 2012

2012-03-27.

Peak bloom came early this year: March 18th, owing to the warm winter. That was Sunday, so right after church we went down to mingle with the tourist crowd for the standard afternoon of DC hanami.

We don’t do a full circuit of the Tidal Basin anymore when we go to see the blossoms. Too crowded, too tiring, too far a walk. Instead, for the last couple of years we’ve approached West Potomac Park from the Lincoln Memorial, walked along the Potomac River for a bit, then entered the FDR Memorial to trace it back along the Tidal Basin to the original cherry blossom grove from 1912, and ended with the relatively younger grove by the Washington Monument.

This route means skipping Jefferson Memorial and its attendant crowds, along with most of the tourist traffic around the Tidal Basin, in favor of concentrating on the older, gnarlier, and more full-volumed cherry trees of the original grove, plus the much more peaceful Washington Monument grove.

As we walked along the Potomac River side of West Potomac park, planes flew overhead on the river approach to DCA.

Of course we had to drop by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s corner and say hi. I’m wearing my Scottevest Transformer.

I started to feel a bit of photographic ennui as I snapped photos of familiar views. Every shot I took of blossoms backdropped by some DC landmark, I felt like it was a photo I’d taken at least two or three times before.

Still, along the way I got this shot of the MLK Memorial from across the Basin, definitely a new view since the memorial is freshly opened.

Cherry blossoms can sprout from just about any part of the tree — branches, roots, trunks — and even inside cracks in tree trunks.

At the 1912 grove, someone was dressed up as a tree and getting photographed for … something.

The old stone pagoda was of course a high-demand posing subject amongst touring groups, but we managed to get a few seconds alone with it.

At the much-less crowded grove near the Washington Monument we tarried just for a bit to pose with the trees and monument before heading home.

Quite a lovely day for some cherry blossom viewing. Full photoset here, and full collection of past cherry blossom photos here — an unbroken series of cherry blossom photosets dating back to 2004!

Air and Space Autostitch

2012-03-15.

While Amy had classes and workshops at the American Indian Museum and National Gallery a few weekends ago, I wandered around the Air and Space Museum with my iPhone and tried out Autostitch to get some wide-angle shots of Gallery 101 and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project:

I also saw a couple of student orchestras play some classical music and viewed A Song for the Horse Nation. More photos from that day here.

NY/NJ for President’s Day

2012-03-12.

We’re at the New York Academy of Art for The Ones, an exhibit of work by alumni from 1991, 2001, and 2011. Amy’s turn to show work should be in five years for The Sixes, if this pattern keeps up. Studio tours follow, with Canadian student Cory Dixon showing us around. Lots of ecorches about, which Amy finds familiar. (I note down the websites of especially interesting artists, but lose the notes later in a phone upgrade.)

Plastics. I hadn’t known New York still had a downtown plastic district, with various sorts of plasticware such as you would find in any home goods or crafts or office supply store — but all domestically produced, higher-priced than your standard Made-in-China plastics, supposedly better quality, and in greater varieties of shapes and uses, custom orders accepted.

It’s all so anachronistic, I can’t not post a photo of this scene without the requisite “one word” quote from The Graduate.

Hey look, New York has a Sea World:

Having once eaten at “Good Dumpling House” in the past, we decide to try “Excellent Dumpling House” on Lafayette Street. Most of the fare is decidedly not more Excellent than the Good, but they do serve xiao long bao soup dumplings, which are indeed excellent.

Then, a trip to the Met to view Renaissance Portraits. I think this is the trip where we break even on our Associate Membership (assuming a full donation for every visit).

A lovely sunset graces the afternoon sky as we exit the museum later.

At 86th and Madison, a taxi is being towed.

At church, the next day, we celebrate a member’s 95th birthday. While we talk with a Russian member at length about Yakutia and her home town of Severny, my father-in-law plays the accordion.

On the road home, I record the vibrant scrolling retail tableau of Route 22, a very New Jersey scene:

We pick up some lunch the next day at a pizza place called “Goombas,” the interior decor rich with pop culture mob references. Again, a very New Jersey scene. You couldn’t call a place “Goombas” anywhere else in America, I don’t think.

It was a good weekend. I close with the very best vanity plate ever seen on a Mazda MPV, anywhere, seen outside Chestnut Chateau in Union:

Full trip photoset here.

Pandora Suffers Complications

2012-03-06.

There has been a side effect to Pandora’s health problems I had not anticipated: jaw dislocation. According to the vet, renal failure causes calcium-phosphorus imbalances that can lead to bones softening or changing shape. In Pandora’s case her jaw sometimes has these infrequent but alarming moments of orthopedic disengagement (don’t watch if you’re squeamish about injured cats making bone-grindy noises):

The clicky grinding noises you hear are her joints not meeting properly, and you’ll notice she actually paws at her mouth trying to self-correct the error. Smart cat. She was able to fix her own jaw after a minute, but I did take her to the vet after this incident. The vet said she couldn’t find evidence of injury or inflammation, and was very thankful for the video to help her diagnosis.

Additionally Pandora has been experiencing occasional litterbox aversion, and has urinated on the couch more than once recently. Fortunately we had anticipated this given her age, and the couch is lined with machine-washable waterproof changing pads just for such occurrences. The vet says these episodes are most likely caused by urinary tract infections, to which Pandora is now more susceptible due to renal failure making her urine more watery and less germicidal.

Pandora will soon need subcutaneous fluid therapy to help her kidneys along. This will involve home injections of medicated solution directly into her tissues; she’ll find it unpleasant at first, but hopefully the added fluids will prolong her life without pain for years yet. We’ll see how good I am at injecting a cat with a large needle.

Trip Roundup: Holiday 2011-2012

2012-02-22.

Here’s a summary in links of our trip to the Philippines and Hong Kong through Christmas 2011 and New Year 2012:

Photo and Video

Travel Log Entries:

HKG-ORD-IAD

2012-02-14.

A few notes on the trip from Hong Kong back to DC:

We were originally supposed to fly through SFO on a 777 but at some point United did a schedule change and it became a 747 to ORD. The change meant departing an hour earlier, and our seat reservations were wiped. We lost our pair of rear window seats and had to settle for middle seats, one by the aisle. This turned out okay since I got an empty seat beside me. Our plane was a B744 with registry N122UA.

Continue reading HKG-ORD-IAD

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