Skyehaven’s Cool Thing of the Day

These could really spruce up the old romance in a pool or hot tub, provided you’re good at selecting sexy music. What a nifty idea!!

KSC is perhaps one of the coolest places I’ve been to. They’ve really made some awesome improvements to it in the last few years, but the best reason to go is from 40 years ago.

On the bus tour, you stop at an Apollo/Saturn V exhibit. After a brief history of the trials and tribulations faced by NASA as they tried to figure out how to get to the moon, you’re ushered into a gallery behind the original launch control room and experience a re-enactment of the countdown and launch of Apollo VIII. This was not the first mission to land on the moon, but it was the first mission to orbit the moon and get a good close-up look of our ultimate destination.

We were there today and, despite the fact that this is the 4th or 5th time I’ve seen this “show”, it never fails to bring a lump to my throat, a tear to my eye, and a pitter-patter to my heartbeat. There is no way that a video can adequately convey the nearly heartstopping moment when the overwhelming sound of a Saturn V begins to rock the launch control room. And I do mean rock – the whole place shakes and the windows rattle until you’re certain they’re only moments away from complete failure. Even the rosy glow of the rocket as it lifts off is simulated.

After the show, you have a few moments to get a close look at the control panels. Everything in the room is original. It’s hard to remember for those of us old enough (and would seem completely alien to the rest) that all the equipment used to first send our men into space was analog: rotary dial phones, plain steel flip switches, status lights with actual bulbs in them. LED bulbs didn’t come into common use until that same year! Yet, despite all this, we managed to cobble together an extremely sophisticated launch and landing vehicle and escape earth’s gravity entirely.

If you ever find yourself within reasonable driving distance of KSC, I can’t recommend it strongly enough. And be sure to block out time for the bus tour!

A while ago I linked to an awesome street art stop motion animation project. I’ve come to the conclusion that I find stop motion animation to be cool, period. Here’s another very nifty one, done all on a whiteboard.

This week’s time waster is Juggler. It’s kinda zen.

Going back to an old standby in the cool department, we get this report from the Galaxy Zoo team:

A new class of galaxy clusters has been identified by volunteers and astronomers of the Galaxy Zoo project, together with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These clusters are rare, and have apparently gone unnoticed before, despite their unusual linear properties. Astronomers believe the identification of these types of clusters depend on the visual inspection of large numbers of galaxies, a feat which has only recently been made possible by the Galaxy Zoo project, and this may explain why they haven’t been discovered until now. “Space is, after all, really big,” said the Galaxy Zoo scientists, “and full of really surprising things.”

Be sure to read the whole article! The original paper can be found linked from the Galaxy Zoo blog.