Yesterday was a momentous day in our flight. We switched from our targets far from the sun—mostly what we call the “axehead” in Vela—and moved a region in Lupus very near the sun. To celebrate, Tristan danced to the region’s theme song: Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. (Yes, all of our targets have theme […]
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Since launch I have not taken a lot of photos. This is partly because there’s less to take photos of, and partly because I’m too constantly busy for new photos. The upside of this is that it’s easy for me to catch up to the present (almost) in a single post. This starts the first […] Before launch day, I had collected some more Christmas-related pictures that I was planning to post. But, they were preempted. Now they have been “deempted” and I don’t have many recent pictures to post instead. This includes two Christmas-related sets: The Christmas Eve party on the 24 (from Matt), Christmas dinner and MAAG on […] The final installment in my agonizingly prolonged series of posts about launch day. This picks up with the beginning of inflation, and ends when everyone goes inside to start doing real work. Or, at least everyone goes inside and agonizes over altitude data until we can start doing real work. The most disappointing part about […] The second phase of my launch pictures starts with rollout of all the equipment to the pad. Mark, Matt and Elio also head out because they need to physically interact with the gondola. Eventually they radio for me with the “urgent” job of taking some official pre-launch picutres. In my capacity of official photographer, I […] For the first phase of launch photos, I have preparation. This is from when we arrive in the morning (actually people like Matt start preparation before that by sending commands from their dorm rooms) to when we roll out for the launch pad. For people wanting to check on loved ones, this will be the […] Because I recently learned how to use a panorama stitching tool (you probably noticed), I felt like taking several panoramas on launch day—especially when it became clear that we would actually launch. But because I am now really busy and (at least for now) sleep deprived, and because the interestingness of photographs might drop off, […] At a little after 17:00 local time, BLAST-Pol launched! I have almost one thousand photos to sort through, and they will appear once I have a chance to do so. As a bonus, in the launch date pool I had predicted today at 16:00. I am thus the winner of a “fabulous prize”. Yesterday, having scrubbed in advance, we had Christmas off. So, with Laura, Nick, Tristan, and Matt, I went to Castle Rock again. Unlike the first time, we decided to climb the rock, and we brought trays from the galley for sledding down the big hill onto the permanent ice. The expedition also served as […] Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the BLAST team showed up to work and halfheartedly ran through the pre-flight checklist. The weather was poor, and we were pretty certain we weren’t even going to go outside for pickup. We didn’t. Early in the morning, we officially scrubbed for the day, and for the next day […] |
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