Working... Earth on the background...

Oooppsss, there we go...

This footprint probably remains exactly how you are watching it, despite being 30 years old :)

3 decades ago!

If it was 30 years ago, I would be writing something like this "today the world will probably achieve what we didn't even have the technology to do, 8 years ago". Of course I would be writing about the first ever men on the Moon.

In May 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, then President of the USA, did a speech where he stated that the nation should commit to the most ambitious and demanding project of all times: to land an american on the Moon. JFK recognized that the country did NOT have the technology to do it, and in some cases, there even was no early investigation going on, on crucial knowledge areas. So it was the hardest project he could think of. The whole world remembers the sentence "...not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." :)

My ASTRONOMY / APAA* website - only availed in european portuguese language - is currently dedicating its front page to the commemoration of the 30 years of the APOLLO 11. It is showing some quality pictures, a video and a MP3.

For those who don't understand portuguese, you can download the MP3 of JFK's speech about going to the moon, right here [1564 K ZIP]

From APAA* you can also download a MPEG video of the moment when Neil Armstrong touched the Moon. This video shows exactly what most TVs were receiving, by 11 pm, eastern daylight time [1100 K ZIP].

During this week, the name of Neil Armstrong will probably pop up in every Internet page, TV show and Newspaper, but that might be very unfair to the militaries on the mission: Edwin Eugene Aldrin - the mission commander - and Michael Collins. Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, because he was a civilian, and the USA wanted the achievement to be, to a certain extent, a "world achievement".

Click on any picture on your left, for a full screen, full quality version.

*cancelled, 2004-06-24

The voyeur strikes again! Below, voyeur's digital camera...

The voyeur & the flag

Being a portuguese, that was not even born yet in 1969, it might seem strange this passion of mine relative to the USA. I love the USA, not because of the movies and the TV series; not because of the people, the language, the beliefs or the story; not because of the Space Program, the Internet and the scientific work of some schools, but because of ALL of it, put together. The voyeur is showing you a glimpse of the north american flag, that is hanging on my wall, since... I don't know... 1994?

The original picture was aimed @ Bart Simpson. This picture was taken with SONY's DIGITAL MAVICA still camera, using a low flash on a badly lit room, in normal quality JPEG mode. Please notice that on your left you only have a very downscaled version of the original, with much less quality.

Despite not being SONY's top of the range, the FD91 model is second only to the D700. The FD91 has advantages and disadvantages, relative to the D700. As advantages, you can count the better optical zoom (14x against 5x), the higher shutter speeds (1/4000 against 1/2000), and the fact that it uses floppy disks to store the pictures.

As disadvantages, the most significant are the much lower shutter speeds of the D700, as low as 1/4, which allows you to photograph under lower LUX conditions. Higher shutter speeds are of interest for speed captures (moving cars, etc). The D700 can use a memory stick of up to 8MB, which allows it to hold more and higher quality pictures than a floppy, yet, when the stick fills, you have to dump the contents to a PC, while with the FD91, you can just change the floppy :)