I know I've been out of the loop of most things lately, but when exactly did Hanover Fiste become the NASA administrator?
I had a really busy day at work and didn't get to see The Atlantic's photo article showing prep for the launch until tonight. From 2 February: Jennifer Briggs / ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters
100% this. You'd think for an historic mission like this, they'd have some primo camera work. But it was an absolute shit show.
Pro tip for the main one trying to follow the action: if you want to keep something coming toward you sharp, roll the focus ring to the right. If you want to do the same to something moving away from you like, say, a rocket heading to orbit, roll the focus ring to the left. Every video lens functions that way.
Holy shit... those are some breaking flaps right there. I'll bet he hates going out on a really windy day.
Anyone else stick around long enough to watch the pilot practice re-docking? Was texting my son during that. I watched Clone Wars while he was geeking out over it. All I could think is “how fast do you think those objects are moving?”
I can't remember the name of the documentary, but they interviewed one of the camera controllers from the Apollo 17 mission and he talked about all the effort he put into framing and timing the remote camera on the moon so he could get a good shot of the Challenger taking off from the surface. He talked about how he knew this was important because there were no further moon missions planned. In the end, the shot was perfect. If that guy is still alive, they should have hired him. NASA couldn't even frame the lift-off of Artemis II properly.
A guy from a little town about an hour from where I grew up works for the New York Times and made these photos yesterday. Kenny Holston: And this one he posted on his Instagram that didn't make the NYT article. He must've remotely fired the camera that took the second photo because the distance between locations would've been impossible to cover in that short a time. I found out a few weeks ago that he and I have a mutual friend, which is really cool.
Ah. I found an answer. A photographer named Steven Madow posted this on his Instagram and thanked NASA for letting people place sound-activated cameras much closer to the launch pad than people are allowed to be. Nearly a year ago he posted that his cameras activated on their own and took this photo (among others) while he was on an airplane.
Okay, I watched some of the Trans-Lunar Injection burn. WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE POOR VIDEO QUALITY? We had high-definition video coming from unmanned Mars probes, fer crissakes. Am I missing something, or is NASA really screwing the pooch with the video from Artemis II?
It doesn't make sense to me either. The Mars video is somewhat different because of the distance involved. At its closest, it takes about four minutes for video from Mars to reach earth. That delay may be part of the reason the images are so good from there. Whenever I'm connecting a bonded cellular backpack to our grid and the signal is shitty because the transmitter is in an area with weak cell service or in a place where lots of other people are sucking up the available data, I can improve the image quality by increasing the delay. But still being relatively close to Earth, I don't know why the video quality from that event looked so shitty.
Heh. I was wondering if he was out there yesterday and he was. He used a Sony broadcast camera, a Sony camcorder, and a Sony cinema camera and 200-600mm lens like the one below (not his rig). Set up a little more than eight miles from the launch pad. The tripods he used are much better than the one in that photo.
There's a digital "hack" for Canon cameras, CHDK that can be used with a large number of Canon cameras. You can set up sound or motion activation to take photos, time lapse, RAW capture, exposure control from over half an hour down to 1\60,000 of a second with ISO, focus, aperture control. The best part about it is that it doesn't overwrite the firmware, it just lets you gain control over features that are locked out or not accessible. The hack runs off the SD card and if the camera "bricks" you just turn off the camera or remove the battery and the camera is back to normal. It can be used on almost all Canon PowerShot newer and older cameras. It basically unlocks all the features available on their DSLR cameras for their point and shoot cameras.
Since the ship was on the night side of earth (which is why you can see lights on the continents), someone edited the photo to more accurately depict what the crew saw. The 51,200 ISO and 1/4 second exposure boosted the detail of the dark side of the planet, illuminated only by the moon. It's cool that you can see the aurora borealis and aurora australis in the same frame.
