Category Archives: Science, Space, Technology

Miscellaneous, Science, Space, Technology

R/C Helicopters Are Cool!

August 23, 2007 kleucht Leave a comment

On my way to work the other day, I saw something out of the corner of my eye that caught my attention. It turned out to be a Remote Controlled (R/C) Helicopter in an old unused parking lot just a mile or so from my neighborhood. Not being in a huge hurry or anything, I pulled into the parking lot and watched for a while. I also took a few snapshots:

R/C Helicopters are pretty fun to watch and I bet they’re fun to fly too. These things can fly just about anywhere, too! That’s what really struck me when I was watching. To fly an R/C Airplane, you need an open field with a decent landing strip. But you can take off and land one of these babies from the bed of a pickup truck, if you had to! 🙂

Kurt

Nature, Photography, Videos, Science, Space, Technology

Nature meets launch pad

August 5, 2007 kleucht Leave a comment

I took the below photo from the Kennedy Space Center Beach House (Conference Center) a couple weeks ago. We had finished up our meeting and I stepped outside to look at the approaching storm. I took this photo with my cell phone camera, so it’s not the best quality. I also tried to get some video of the lightning, but the frame rate was slow and it didn’t capture any good lightning strikes.

Click here to go to my photo gallery which
contains higher resolution versions of this image.

Nature, Photography, Videos, Science, Space, Technology

STS-117 SRB & ET Launch Footage Compilation

July 4, 2007 kleucht 2 Comments

I recently merged some STS-117 NASA launch video footage from four of the six Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) cameras and also the External Tank (ET) camera into a single synchronized video compilation. Below are a few teaser frames from the compilation:

The video compilation is about 10 1/2 minutes long and runs in real time starting from launch all the way through SRB splashdown and even through Orbiter (Atlantis) separation from the ET. It’s a pretty cool video to watch because you get to see what happens behind the scenes with the SRBs after separation.

I used Adobe Premier Elements version 3.0 to compile the video. It’s a very powerful consumer video editor program, but it’s also quite user friendly so you don’t have to be a video editing expert to be able to use it. It costs a hundred bucks, and you can download and use a free 30 day trial here: http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/

Below is a high bandwidth link to the finished compilation video. It is in Windows Media Player 9 (WMV) format. Enjoy!

Kurt

STS-117_SRB&ETLaunchFootageCompilation (LAN Quality – 1150 Kbps – 960×720 – 30fps – 90 Megs)

Here is the lower quality YouTube version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-e0Fam-Za4

P.S. For those in the audience who are complete perfectionists, I did not attempt to synchronize the time counters in the corners of each of the videos to each other. That would have taken me much longer and would not have ended up looking very much different. All I did was synchronize major events (like liftoff and SRB separation) to occur simultaneously to my own eyes. Actually the video in the lower left appears to be a few seconds off from the rest on it’s time counter. Especially towards splashdown of the SRB’s. So synchronizing that video’s time counter would have actually thrown it off from real time.

Miscellaneous, Science, Space, Technology

Norris Gray: A Spaceport Legend

June 21, 2007 kleucht 2 Comments

While at work today, I had the great pleasure of meeting Mr. Norris Gray, who helped bring Werner Von Braun and other German rocket scientists to the United States after WWII. He also helped launch the first Bumper rockets, which were derived from the German V-2 rockets, from Cape Canaveral.

Chief Gray, as everyone calls him, was the Fire Chief and Emergency Services Officer for the Bumper program here in Florida. He’s close to 90 years old now, but he’s as spry & spunky today as he was back in 1950 when he launched the first Bumper rockets from launch complex 3. He talks about his experiences and the history of the Spaceport with a gleam in his eye.

Today, Chief Gray often volunteers to support NASA’s KSC Press Site for launches and landings. He absolutely loves the space program. It was a real pleasure to meet and work with Chief Gray today and I hope to work more with him and hear more of his early spaceflight stories again soon.

Here are some good Internet links about Chief Gray:

Kurt

Art, Graphics, Woodworking, Science, Space, Technology

Space Shuttle Challenger mural at my high school

February 17, 2007 kleucht 4 Comments

When I was a student at Deer Creek Mackinaw (Dee-Mack) High School in Mackinaw, Illinois (1984 thru 1988) I was really into anything that was even remotely related to art. I loved drafting classes and all of the different art classes too. Our art teacher, Mrs. Schultz, organized some of the best art students there and had them paint a few organized and approved murals around the school. I was allowed to paint a Space Shuttle mural upstairs on the big 2-story wall just outside the library. I was also into space, and I had some NASA photos and mission patches and I basically just painted a collage of some of the items in that material. I dedicated the mural to the crew of the Challenger mission that was lost during their launch on January 28th, 1986. This large mural was a big project for a high school student … and I never actually technically finished the mural. I had intended to paint land masses on the earth, but never got around to it. I took these photos in the summer of 2002, so the mural was at least there for 14 years. I think they had to paint over it a few years ago, though.

Kurt