brainwagon

Totally amazeballs. I had goosebumps.

Well, it’s not pretty, but I was just using a 17″ whip antenna on my VX-8GR, recorded it with Audacity, and then decoded it with MultiScan on my Macbook. The first bit of the recording is pretty rocky, so I had to start the sync myself. I’ve bean meaning to do some experiments with bad […]

I didn’t get up early enough. But here’s the video of the launch. Is it just me, or is this rocket tossing off a lot of debris? Anyone else notice this?

Okay, it’s mostly just a lark: sending your name aboard the first test flight of the Orion space vehicle (scheduled for Dec 4.) but it’s kind of fun.

Yesterday was an important day in the history of space flight: for the first time a commercial entity launched a resupply mission to the International Space Station. I thought it was a pretty big deal, but you’d never have known by watching the news yesterday. ABC news cut away from their coverage of politics and […]

Today, around 10:31 Pacific Time, Curiosity successfully landed in the Gale crater on the surface of Mars, and has already sent back a couple of small black and white images. Carman and I were watching it on a combination of Nasa TV on our laptops and the CNN coverage. Thrilling stuff. Here are some of […]

50 years ago today, American astronaut John Glenn completed three orbits of the earth aboard Friendship 7. Glenn would later become Senator, and would return to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery as part of the STS-95 crew, becoming the oldest person to fly into space. These three orbits started fifty years of an American […]

Qu8k – BALLS 20 – Carmack Prize Attempt – High Altitude Rocket On-board Video – YouTube

NASA astronaut Ron Garan snapped this awesome picture of a Perseid meteor from his vantage point on the ISS: Astronaut Photographs Perseid Meteor… From Space : Discovery News No additional commentary: it speaks for itself.

Sweet.

Tonight the amateur satellite AO-51 made an evening pass that was almost directly overhead, and was sending a congratulatory message for Apollo 11, along with a slow scan TV image. I managed to record it, although not the greatest quality, using my little Yaesu VX-3R and my Arrow antenna. Here are links to the recording […]

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has begun its mission around the moon, and has managed to image most of the Apollo landing sites. Check out the following link: NASA – LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites.

40 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two astronauts to step out on the surface of the moon, as Michael Collins orbited the moon in the Command Module astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins launched aboard Apollo 11 on their way to the moon. I was only five at the time, […]

I haven’t been goofing around much with receiving APT weather satellite data, but I was going to try to record some passes now that the days are longer and we get more daylight passes over North America. But I hadn’t programmed the frequencies into my radio, and was forced to look them up. So, here […]

Earlier, I blogged about the collision between Iridium 33 and the defunct COSMOS 2251 satellite. Today, I noticed that Celestrak had orbital elements for 134 fragments resulting from the collision. I was curious what the resulting pattern would look like, so I wrote a bit of code to suck them all in and plot them […]