Category Archives: Travel

A small step for man…

Washington Post: The Saga Of the Lost Space – Tapes
NASA Is Stumped in Search For Videos of 1969 Moonwalk.

“As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his “one small step” onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander’s door clicked on to capture that first human contact with the lunar surface. […] Millions of television viewers around the world saw those fuzzy, moving images and were amazed, even mesmerized. What they didn’t know was that the Apollo 11 camera had actually sent back video far crisper and more dramatic — spectacular images that, remarkably, only a handful of people have ever seen. […]

The original, high-quality lunar tapes were soon stored and forgotten. Only in recent years was the agency reminded of what it once had — clean and crisp first-man-on-the-moon video images that could be especially valuable now that NASA is planning a return trip. About 36 years after the tapes went into storage, NASA was suddenly eager to have them. There was just one problem: The tapes were nowhere to be found.”

I think it would be really exciting if they manage to find the tapes after all, though the chances seem to be slim. I’d certainly like to watch the footage.

Link via Garret.

A Fan of the Desert

Hal writes that today would have been Edward Abbey‘s 80th birthday.

I discovered the author by accident when I found his book Desert Solitaire among a bunch of 75% off foreign language books at my favourite bookstore in Bonn. It must have been either shortly before or after André’s and my first trip to the USA because Arches National Park rang a bell, so I bought the book and instantly liked his writing style, as well as his descriptions of what Arches was like before it became a National Park.

I’ve since read The Fool’s Progress and The Monkey Wrench Gang, too. I enjoy his books partly because he describes landscapes and areas we visited during our trips to the US and instantly recreates the feeling of being there in my mind. I can almost smell the sagebrush…

Another book by him deserves being mentioned here: The Hidden Canyon with photos by John Blaustein. The text is Abbey’s journal of a boat tour through Grand Canyon.

In Desert Solitaire I first read about the controversy of building Glen Canyon Dam to create Lake Powell, which to me seemed strangely out of place in the middle of the desert when we visited it in 1999. If you want to see Glen Canyon the way it looked before the dam was built, I recommend the book Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World by Tad Nichols, which is another favourite of mine I wrote about before (10 Jan 2001, 3 Nov 2004). You can see some of Blaustein’s photos here and here.

Einmal um die ganze Welt fliegen…

Markus und Arnim, zwei Flugbegeisterte, umrundeten die Welt – mit einem kleinen Flugzeug, einer zweisitzigen Cirrus SR22.

Das ganze fand in zwei Etappen statt. Am 27. Oktober 2005 starteten sie in Deutschland und erreichten am 19. November 2005 Melbourne. Den zweiten Teil der Weltumrundung (den ich noch nicht gelesen habe) starteten sie im Mai 2006. Man kann ihre Reise in ihrem Logbuch nachvollziehen.

The next morning

Well, the power went out less than five minutes after my posting last night, came back one for a few minutes half an hour later but than went back out again. It turns out that there’s not much to do without power. Reading by candlelight is not much fun, so we watched a movie on André’s laptop (which had a full battery) and went to bed early. We woke up around 11:30 pm when the power – and the lights – went back on.

Right now, it’s still quite windy, and it has just started to rain. It’s not light outside yet, but it seems like we made it through the storm okay. The trees are still standing, the house wasn’t damaged, and the only thing left to do seems to be setting the clocks on some appliances.

Windy!

A storm warning for the entire country has been issued here in Germany, even an extreme storm warning for some parts.

“Der Deutsche Wetterdienst (DWD) gibt wegen des verheerenden Sturms für die Mittelgebirge, Teile der Bundesländer Baden-Württemberg, Bayern, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hessen, Thüringen, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Rheinland-Pfalz und das Saarland eine extreme Unwetterwarnung heraus. Für die anderen Regionen galt eine Unwetterwarnung.” (Quelle: Spiegel online)

Take a look at this map at the Deutsche Wetterdienst: Warnsituation.

It has been very windy here since last night, but not too bad. Even though the storm had not started in earnest yet, we ended classes early today like many other schools so the kids were able to go home safely. When I came home from school later in ther afternoon (there’s a lot of extra work at school at the moment because of the imminent report cards), two neighbouring towns had power outages and almost noone was out on the roads. As you can see, we still have electricity, but the light already flickered a few times…

But I’m not really worried that anything really serious could happen. There are no big old trees that could fall onto our house, so we should be quite safe here.