Art, Graphics, Woodworking, Science, Space, Technology

Artists and Scientists Unite!

August 23, 2007 kleucht Leave a comment

NASA sent out a press release today about this cool art contest for college students:

Aug. 23, 2007

Sonja Alexander
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1761
sonja.r.alexander@nasa.gov

Keith Henry
Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.
757-864-6120/344-7211
h.k.henry@nasa.gov

RELEASE: 07-179

LIFE AND WORK ON THE MOON: WHAT IMAGES COME TO MIND?

HAMPTON, Va. – A new NASA contest encourages university art and design students to partner with science and engineering departments to create art representative of living and working on the moon. The goal is for students in the arts, science and engineering to collaboratively engage in NASA’s mission to return humans to the moon by 2020, and eventually journey on to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.

The Advanced Planning and Partnership Office at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., is sponsoring the “Life and Work on the Moon” contest. Winners will receive cash prizes up to $1,000. Winning artwork also will be exhibited online and across the country.

Students in architecture, industrial design, computer design, the fine arts and other disciplines are invited to submit entries in one of three categories: two-dimensional art, three-dimensional art or digital art. To ensure artistic concepts reflect the realities of the harsh lunar environment, art students are strongly encouraged to consult with science and engineering students and use NASA’s online resources.

A volunteer panel of judges will represent NASA, other government agencies, universities, industry and the professional art community. Judges will evaluate artistic qualities and whether the entry depicts a valid scenario in the context of the lunar environment.

In sponsoring the contest, NASA hopes to encourage more collaboration among scientists and engineers and the artistic and creative communities. Such collaboration may generate new ideas for living and working in extra-terrestrial environments, resulting in more successful long-duration space missions.

Winners of the contest will be offered the opportunity to exhibit their work in NASA facilities and science museums. An online public gallery will be available through a partnership with NASA’s Classroom of the Future, maintained by the Wheeling Jesuit University Center for Educational Technologies in Wheeling, W. Va., and the Christopher Newport University Institute for Science Education in Newport News, Va. Christopher Newport University will provide cash awards for top prizes.

Entries are due no later than December 1, 2007, and results will be announced in February 2008. A high school version of this contest is planned for the spring of 2008.

For more details about the contest, including NASA’s resources about the moon, visit:

http://artcontest.larc.nasa.gov (this link disappeared from the Internet, sorry)

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

Visit the art contest website linked above for more information.

Kurt

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

Activities, Travel, Vacations, Nature, Photography, Videos

Pikes Peak & Hot Air Balloon

August 19, 2007 kleucht Leave a comment

I took the below photo in Colorado Springs a few days ago. I was there for business and went outside to exercise the first morning I was there and this is what I saw. I had my Canon PowerShot digital camera in my pocket because I had promised my boys that I would take a photo of the mountains and send it to them that day. There were actually three separate hot air balloons that took off from this location that morning. I sure would have liked to go for a ride and see the mountains from the vantage point of a hot air balloon!

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

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.