Topanga National Park was great. The location was perfect for what we needed. Unfortunately, however, being by the coast meant quite a bit of air moisture, including some light clouds. This wouldn’t have been quite as bad if the moon hadn’t been out at ‘high midnight,’ which reflected off the moisture in the air.

Nevertheless, everyone was set up and ready to go. And all things considered, our photos were great, especially considering the weather.

Now, I say, “the weather.” Most people normally wouldn’t say there was weather. The sky was, after all, clear. But when the moon reflects off the moisture that there is, you get an effect quite similar to car headlights in fog at dawn. So, all things considered, we did pretty well if you take a look at the shots.

Moreover, Scott was great. He brought two telescopes with him, centering one on Mars and the other on the Orion nebula, glowing green from the release of energy of the excited ions of gas. The aura was amazing. We all really enjoyed the work that Scott put in for us (and did I mention he made our barn door trackers for us? Thanks, again, Scott!).

    (Photo of the Orion nebula taken from Wikipedia)

A few of us went to the beach afterwards in separate groups to see what we could get there. My group ended up just north of Santa Monica pier. We took some fun shots of the ocean and the sky around us, eventually heading back from a great night around 3.

     A shot I took and edited to get some funky effects :-)))

    Apparently, wide-angle lenses are the best for capturing UFOs mid-flight.

    Santa Monica Pier blown out against the night sky around 1:30AM.

All in all, for a first run, this was a great night!

AND!!!! Scott is apparently planning to hold an event open to the public for anyone that might want to go out and take some great shots at night! We'll get more info on that later!

Ashley Zangle : Astrological Engineering

Some work by Ashley Zangle
http://ashleyzangle.com/

JPL Designer & Animator: John Howard

On Wednesday, January 26^th, we met with JPL resident animator John Howard. He entertained us with his personal animation reel of work he has done over his career then gave us a look at the pieces he has created for JPL. Howard started with his history and career in the animation field beginning with his education, which began in Science.

I think many of us are deterred from our curiosities and deep interests in science when we must face a particular unfriendly necessity: calculus. While Howard had a deep affection for science, calculus drove him to another passion of his in Studio Art. He graduated with a BA in Studio Art from University of California, Santa Barbara with an emphasis in Photography and Printmaking in 1980. When studying for his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, Howard fell in love in 3D computer graphics. Though this technology was only in it’s developing stages, he knew where this was headed and had a deep interest in the process. He completed his MFA in Electronic Imagery in 1984.

After graduating, Howard was immediately hired as a senior technical director at Omnibus Computer Graphics where he worked on animation based projects such as Flight of the Navigator. He continued working in the Hollywood Film Industry and opened up his own company, Viewport Images, in 1991.

Although he had a successful run in the film industry, Howard grew tired of the Hollywood scene. He closed his company in 2004 and pursued one that could combine his talents in animation and his interests in space and science. He contacted NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and to his surprise, there was an opening.

John Howard has been working with JPL since February of 2005 and has been creating remarkable animations of our solar system and beyond for JPL, NASA, NASA TV, media and for public viewing. He helps scientists and engineers simulate how a satellite will operate and orbit, how a rover may move and collect data. Howard takes the static designs of the engineers and makes them move and react on other planets and in space before they have even been launched.

In addition to his animation work, Howard also designs logos and branding for the many projects at JPL/NASA including the Building Curiosity project which showcases the Mars Curiosity Rover that we are all excited to see launch later this year.

As a graphic designer and amateur animator, it is exciting and encouraging to speak with John Howard. Hearing his life story and insights are uniquely valuable to me and his work is an inspiration to everyone at JPL.

Imitation Black Hole Created on Earth

"Yes, we've managed to create a black hole...or at least the optical equivalent of a black hole's extreme, light-trapping properties thanks to an ingenious combination of lasers and glass. Best of all, it offers proof of Stephen Hawking's famous radiation."

Read the rest http://io9.com/5652229/imitation-black-hole-created-on-earth-using-lasers-and-pure-glass

Magnetic Movie by SEMICONDUCTOR

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Imagine Mars

Jan 12th 2011



JPL's website describes its Imagine Mars program as "a national arts, sciences, and technology education initiative that leads students to work together with scientists, engineers, artists, and civic leaders to design and share a futuristic Mars community for 100 people." After seeing a presentation on the program, my only disappointment was that I didn't get to participate! It's such an incredible opportunity for students to use their imagination, but it also incorporates science, technology, and problem solving. I was astonished by the beauty of some of these designs for Mars colonies- some of them looked like something out of the Jetsons, others were art pieces in and of themselves.

Given that the projects are coordinated with scientists and engineers, I imagine that the designs are at least somewhat viable (assuming we can get to Mars/find necessary resources like water..) All the more reason to admire these bright students and their ingenuity.

I wasn't able to find the images in Daniel Delgado's presentation on the program's website, but I'll continue to search so I can share them with all of you! Overall, I'd say Imagine Mars was the clearest and most entertaining synthesis of art and science that I've seen at JPL.

JPL: A History

       One January 19 we met with JPL Historian Erik Conway. Before working as the JPL historian Conway worked as a historian at Langley Research Center. Although his main interest at JPL was the technological development history his research and knowledge of JPL is balanced and extension in all areas. As a historian he did not just look at the past but the present and the future. His job was not only research and writing about the past but making sure whatever information we have today is stored forever. He also looked at the future of JPL and other NASA space programs and we learned that due to lack of public interest and funding it's future is looking pretty bleak. What I liked most was that even after our meeting he walked with us to our next destination answering any questions we had.  

        We learned that the institution we fondly call "JPL" was founded quite informally in 1936 by a group of young men who built and launched their own Rockets in Pasadena. During WWII the Government asked them to build rockets and from that point on the rockets became more and more sophisticated. In 1944 JPL formally became an army constitute lab and 14 years later it became the NASA branch that is remains today. 

       One of my questions that I did not get to ask during the talk but was answered after the meeting was how Wernher von Braun affected NASA at the time and afterwards as far as funding and public opinion. Von Braun who was brought to the US along with other Nazi Scientists after WWII in the top secret "operation paperclip" became the director of the Marshal Space Flight Center. I had wondered if having a former Nazi on staff had an effect on funding and if also public opinion put pressure on the government to fund his programs less. However after he said that von Braun's true identity remained a secret until after his death it is clear that his presence did not effect funding in anyway since the government brought him over for the purpose of building rockets. Of course when the public found out they were not happy, but this man had become an American hero in some ways since he basically got us to the moon. For those who worked for him and other members of NASA it was no longer that their success was being credited to a foreigner but to a Nazi party member.

JPL Materials

On our visit to JPL on Wed. 1/19, we visited the Materials Engineer Eric Oakes. Eric is also part of the Materials Testing & Composite Fabrication Group. To be frank it was awesome! We got to see and touch many of the materials that went into building the new Mars rover, Curiosity. All of the materials used are chosen for their functionality. They are the strongest materials with the lightest weight, in order to be cost-effective, as well as durable.
The most interesting material, for me, would be aerogel; it is a solid porous structure made by removing the liquid from a silicon based gel in a process called supercritical drying (like freeze drying), and replacing the liquid with a gas. This material provides excellent insulation and is perfect to protect in interior electronics of not just the rovers but for many other missions as well. Unfortunately, because of its properties, no one other than the employees contracted through JPL are allowed to handle it. :(
The good news is that we got to touch all of the other materials. Usually when people think of graphite they just think of pencils and drawing, but it is actually a very popular industrial material for JPL. They are able to shape pieces of graphite over aluminum madrals in a machine called an autoclave to custom form the housings for the electronics and robotics systems on the rover. (An autoclave is essentially a giant oven in which you can adjust the pressure as well as the temperature.)
Formed in a similar way is astroquartz, which is a quartz fiber products made from high purity quartz crystals. This material is used, not just for its structural properties, but it also helps to transmit microwaves. Astroquartz is also usually accompanied with copper, which is another great conductor. These materials go primarily to constructing the various antennae of the craft.
For wall strength of the belly pan and other removable wall components, the interior structures are made of honeycomb, usually made of paper, or aluminum, then fixed to a sheet of aluminum on either side to create a wall.
As for the adhesives, mostly resins, and epoxy that have been modified for space temperatures are used.
I could probably go on and on and on....
This visit was so fascinating, I wish we had one more day.

Dr. Yunjin Kim presents NuSTAR January 19

On LASS-O's third visit to NASA JPL, we had the great honor of meeting Dr. Yunjin Kim, the project manager for one of JPL's most recent projects: NuSTAR. Dr. Kim's unexpected humor and genuine interest in each student's personal artistic endeavors made our time together very enjoyable. Being the project manager of the mission, we really could not have spoken with a more knowledgeable NuSTAR source than Yunjin. For those who are not so up to date on their NASA news, NuSTAR, standing for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array, is an Explorer mission scheduled to launch in February 2012. NuSTAR will be mapping the universe through high energy x-rays, hoping to give astronomers a better understanding of Black Holes, and potentially even Dark Matter.

Dr. Kim explained to us LASS-Oers that many scientists believe every galaxy to have a huge black hole in the center of it, and it is their hope that through the high-definition information sent back from the NuSTAR telescope, these theories may be proven and further explored. NuSTAR will look into the Galactic center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and maybe even come across some evidence of Dark Matter. "We would love to find Dark Matter, but we probably won't. If we do, we'll probably win the Nobel Prize" said Dr. Kim. We learned that NASA will have control of all observations made by NuSTAR for the first two years, and then the use of NuSTAR will open up for community research (via application process) in the next one to three years.

After hearing Dr. Kim speak, I have no doubt that NuSTAR will be a ground breaking mission to write some significant history. The ideas of Black Holes and Dark Matter are still such foggy concepts to many, and to be able to capture high-definition photographs of these mysteries seems almost too good to be true! Dr. Kim's passion for this mission was evident throughout his talk, and it really got me excited and curious about these perplexing Black Holes and Dark Matter; I came home from our JPL field trip just to dive into online research, papers, opinions and discussions on this fascinating subject matter. If you choose to follow the progress of one NASA JPL mission, I would strongly recommend you make it this one!

IMAX: Hubble 3D!!!

IMAX: Hubble 3D was pretty darn amazing.

3D glasses fill your eye balls with gigantic-multiple-stories-tall images of rockets launching, tadpole solar systems, a curved horizon of the Earth, stars coming at your face, swooping into a galactic valley spanning unfathomable distances, swimming through the universe at the rate of millions of lightyears per second on the grace of Leonardo DiCaprio's wonderful wonderful voice... oh so very super-mega-ultra-really-really-really... amazing.

We all met up at the California Science center after our day at JPL on Wednesday, January 19th. No big deal-- I just saw Tron in IMAX 3D (also another amazing movie), and so there was no way some NASA film was about to top that...right?


Wrong. They say that it will "change your view of our universe." I don't mean to speak for the entire class, but for me personally, I think I can whole heartedly say that it did. Just to see the Earth from a grand vantage point and to see solar systems at such a towering perspective--even if it was all an illusion--things clicked: just the beginning of untangling my brains to stretch and wrap my head around these obscure ideas of scale and proportion that scientists express whenever they point to those tiny, dim dots in the sky. It's refreshing and humbling to escape the Earth as we physically know it and to feel the greater picture, and to feel so terribly small...even if it's for only an hour or so.


Moral of this blog-story: Amazing. It's basically a $10 instant trip into space, and you'll be back in time for dinner (or in our case, in time for some Baja Fresh.) See it, and untangle your brains! At the very least, walk away with your eye balls filled to the brim with visually arresting images. It's a win-win.

Topanga State Park and Astrophotography

On the night of January 15th the class went to Topanga State Park, and there we used our film and digital cameras to capture the star trails. The sky was clear and the temperature of the area wasn't that chilly. In order for us capture these star trails, we mounted the camera onto a barn door tracker, that Scott Mathews kindly made for us, then placed that onto a tripod. Attaching the laser to the side of the barn door tracker helped us to line it up to the north star. We then used a cable release to keep the camera shutter open for several minutes instead of several seconds, so that it was able to capture the movement of the stars. The only negative aspect of using a film camera was that I wasn't able to see the images immediately after they were taken, and since this was my first time doing this, I was afraid that my images would ultimately come out screwed up. But that did not stop me from further enjoying that incredible night.

We were definitely fortunate that night, because not only was there one telescope, but three of them were set up. They allowed us to see clusters of stars, nebulas, the planet Jupiter, and the moon up close. Since the moon was a closer distance to the earth, the details of the craters were clearly visible, and that just really rocked my socks. Don't get me wrong though, looking at the nebulas and Jupiter were also equally pleasing to the eye. Also a potluck was set up between the students, which made the gathering even better, because nothing can go wrong when there's food.

When coming into this project, I had no idea how to use a camera, but that activity really taught me the steps of loading the film, and choosing which bulb setting is right for taking pictures of the star trails. Despite the drive and almost getting lost in the dark, I 110% recommend going through the process of learning how to do astrophotography. It was an amazing opportunity, and it is something that I wish to further experiment with.

Scott Mathews and the barn door trackers

Our class was presented with a unique opportunity to meet with Scott Mathews, an MSL Engineer and amateur astronomer. He visited our class class on Thursday, January 6th, to prepare us for the astro-photography/stargazing night at Topanga State Park. He put together a presentation full of pictures taken by amateur photographers including some he took himself and he described some of the techniques used to capture these photos. One picture that I found to be particularly incredible was a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy. The picture above is one example of that galaxy but I was really impressed because a person can sit in their driveway and take a picture of something two and a half million light years away. The process of capturing this image requires a mosaic of images taken with different color filters in order to put the entire picture together. It takes a long time but it ends up as a spectacular picture.
There are many factors to consider when taking pictures of the sky including the atmosphere, surrounding light, and the rotation of the earth. In order to counter-act the rotation of the earth, Scott provided us with "barn door trackers. A barn door tracker, in the picture above, is made up of two boards connected by a hinge. There is a place to attach the tripod on the bottom and the camera on the top. on the end opposite of the hinge, there is a screw with a knob that comes up through the bottom board and when it is rotated, it slowly pushes up the board. Ours was made to raise the top board one degree for one full rotation. In order for this to be true, the distance the screw goes up through the board must be calculated. Then the screw must enter the wood at a certain distance away from the hinge so that the angle of the two boards increase by one degree after one rotation. Fortunately we had a NASA Engineer, Scott Mathews, to figure out all the math behind it and he made a tracker for everyone. The point of the tracker is to rotate the camera opposite of the earth's rotation to take in more light from a static sky which allows the camera to pick up more faint and distant stars at a longer exposure. without the tracker, there wouldn't be as many stars showing up in the pictures and the stars would streak across the sky. The key to making sure the tracker works is to line up the hinge with the north star, which happens to be about the same place as the rotational axis of the earth. To line up the hinge, we attached a straw with glue to look through like a sight on a gun. the straw didn't work very effectively but we also used a bright laser pointer and that helped us line up our trackers pretty well. The tracker knob should be rotated one full rotation per minute of exposure. The tracker isn't a perfect instrument because of the human error caused by aiming the hinge, and small movements when rotating the knob and looseness in the hinge. It is effective up to about a 5 minute exposure and you can still get some awesome pictures with it.
On behalf of the class I'd like to thank Scott Mathews for sharing some of his experiences and knowledge and providing us with the barn door tracker. It was a lot of fun taking pictures of the night sky, especially with tips and tricks to improve our chances of getting a good photo. I'm looking forward to some opportunities for a clear sky so that I can continue practicing and improving.

Wormholes by The League of Imaginary Scientists at MOCA

Wormholes by The League of Imaginary Scientists from MOCA on Vimeo.

(At about 3:30 in the video you can see James and Cassandra!)

On Thursday, January 6 our class met at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles around 7 pm. Arriving at different times, we went through a series of events before entering the wormhole together. Different stations located around the MOCA courtyard provided instructions for our journey, as well as tedious tasks such as receiving a boarding pass and registering it at the computer they provided or on your personal smart phone. Registering the ticket wasted time and was completely unnecessary because after the line for the computer had become too long, an "Imaginary Scientist" came around to write an arbitrary number on your ticket. We were then motioned to wait in a slow-moving, weaving line of at least a hundred people, but luckily a few students had already been waiting and we all joined them in their place in line. Located in the line were themed miniature "wormhole" displays where one viewer could occupy the ridiculous wait time and take a look. I didn't quite understand them, nor did I want to. I happened to look into one that was a cylinder covered in glittery fabric and saw some lights projected on a sock. As much as I tried to believe in the idea of it, I could not fully enjoy these displays and ignored the rest.

After an estimated hour of waiting, all of us students were able to enter to enter the "wormhole" as depicted by a white tent. At the front was a television that told viewers their particles were going to be blown apart and transferred to the other end of the wormhole. This process was carried out by a pathetic gust of air blowing at one side of your head the way a blowdryer would. You would then move through the "wormhole" to mimic images on a television as the "scientists" captured you and sent your particles through the wormhole and out the other end where your image would be projected on a screen and you would play a game to shoot the worms. The controller tool was inverted, and there didn't seem to be a purpose to playing the game, or at least it was not made clear.

All in all, the League of Imaginary Scientists are extremely creative in their ideas and the way they display them. They created an environment that intrigued a curious audience, making art from science, which was the reason for our class attending. Though the wormhole did not fulfill my expectations, I do appreciate the idea of this creation and the efforts into the details. It was an enjoyable experience to participate with the entire class and gave inspiration for our own creations.

Some pictures from our last trip to JPL

Carl Sagan & NASA- the Frontier is Everywhere

Decent test of the new MSL Rover at JPL this week!!!

I wanna be your lover IN SPACE

I hereby christen this blog

with Carl Sagan autotune!