Just yesterday, I had no idea there was going to be a lunar eclipse this morning. Then I skimmed an article somewhere and got the impression it was only going to be visible on the east coast, And then I read about it on Bad Astronomy and realized I had it backward. Not only would I be able to see part of the eclipse, but I’d be able to see the moon in totality! All I had to do was get up early in the morning and find a place with a clear view of the western horizon. I considered driving down to the beach at 5am, but thought I’d start out by seeing how visible it was from home. As it turns out, I should have gone to the beach to start with, but I had some good viewing before I left.

So I set my alarm, woke up at 5am (plus the snooze button), and went out to see what I could see. To my surprise, I actually had a decent view of the partially-eclipsed moon from across the street. It was about half-covered at this point (as shown in the first photo above). So I stayed out there for a few minutes deciding what I wanted to do, went back in to have some coffee and breakfast, then went back out shortly before 6 to watch as the umbra covered the disc the rest of the way. I found it interesting that it didn’t look particularly reddish this time, just brown.

Awesome viewing, though it was clear the moon would dip below the roofs of the houses soon. I needed a less obstructed view.

As soon as the moon went into totality, I went back inside, woke up Katie just enough to let her know I was going, tossed the rest of my coffee in a travel mug and hightailed it down to the beach.

The eastern sky was already light when the total phase of the eclipse began. As I drove, I crested a south-facing hill and saw the southeastern horizon lit up deep red, with silhouettes of Saddleback and the San Gorgonio mountains in the distance. (Keep reading – I’ll come back to this.) I came so close to stopping, but figured eclipses are only visible from here every few years. Sunrises happen every day. So I kept driving.

I went to an area of Redondo Beach or Torrance (I’m still not sure exactly where the city boundaries are) where a street runs along the top of a cliff, with occasional stairs leading down to the beach maybe 30 feet below. There’s parking along the street, and benches where you can watch the waves or the sunset…or this morning, where you could watch the eclipse. There were maybe a dozen or so people spread out along the cliff, several of them with tripods. Clearly I wasn’t the only eclipse hunter who had thought of this spot.

Unfortunately, I got there too late. By the time I parked the car, the sky was light enough and the moon was behind enough haze that it was virtually invisible. It would have been a great full moonset under ordinary circumstances, but the refracted earthlight just wasn’t enough to light it up against the dawn sky.

Everyone still there was packing up.

I stayed for a few minutes, then decided I might as well catch the sunrise while I was out. The closest place I could think of that had a clear view of the east was the hill I’d crested earlier, which had a good view…except for the the skeletal towers of a cluster of power transmission lines. I wasn’t the only one out to watch the sunrise, either. Aside from the people walking their dogs in the park nearby, there were two other guys standing around by their cars (carefully not parked near each other), looking at the eastern horizon.

I’ve always found it interesting that you can see distant mountains silhouetted at dawn and dusk that you can’t see during the day. The San Gabriels at left are often visible from the South Bay (just as they are from Orange County), but it’s rare to be able to see Saddleback from out here. And the mountains in between? Very rare. I think they’re the San Gorgonio range.

If you look carefully in the higher-res version, you can see that there’s another mountain sticking up behind the Santa Ana Mountains, near the north/left end of the range. I’m not 100% certain, but I think it’s San Jacinto!

Anyway, I walked a little ways down the hill to where the towers didn’t block the spot where the sky looked brightest, and waited. It wasn’t very long — I’d cut things pretty closely — before a bright spot appeared just a little above the horizon. Oddly, it looked like it appeared between the horizon and the tops of the mountains south of Saddleback, which I chalked up to the same sort of refraction that causes the sun to look higher than it actually is.

After the sun cleared the mountains, I stared to head back to my car, when one of the guys asked me, “You’re here for the eclipse, right?” It turned out that he’d misunderstood an article describing where and when to look, and so he went out to a spot with a view of the eastern horizon a little after 6:00. The moon had been behind him (and a hill) the whole time. I showed him some of the photos I’d taken earlier, so he at least got to see them second hand, and then we both drove off.

As I drove home, I noticed other people out just looking at the view. At one point I caught a glimpse of Downtown Los Angeles, with several skyscrapers reflecting the sun like columns of light.

I’m not usually up that early in the morning these days, especially not on a weekend. I’m more of a night owl. But sometimes I can definitely see the appeal.

When I was twelve, I went with my mom, brother and a family friend to see the Space Shuttle land at Edwards Air Force Base. It was the first mission after the Challenger disaster, and the orbiter was Discovery.

I took a roll of slides using a manual SLR camera and (for the landing itself) a telephoto lens. With the last shuttle mission ending tomorrow, I decided to track down the slides and scan them.

From what I remember, we drove out the night before and slept in the car. It was still pretty dark when we got up, even though the landing wasn’t until mid-morning.

We were out on the edge of a dry lake bed, far enough away that we couldn’t see the landing strip.

There was a bit of a festival atmosphere, with vendors selling food, sodas and souvenirs. Mostly, though, everyone was clustered as close to the fence as they could get to see the best view.

I put on a telephoto lens for the landing itself. When Discovery first came into view, it was barely a white dot in the sky…even through the camera.

Here’s that same shot, cropped so that you can see it at the original scanned resolution. What’s amazing is that even at this distance, you can make out the shape.

My grandfather, who had given me the camera and was teaching me a lot about photography, showed me how to make prints in his dark room. I made an 8×10″ of this shot of the shuttle approaching the landing strip, though I think today I would go for the next one instead:

I took the telephoto lens off after the landing. This should give you a better idea of just how far away we really were from the shuttle. NASA wasn’t taking any chances with civilians!

Here’s the line of cars waiting to leave the base. I don’t remember how long it took to get out, but I do remember that we shut the engine off for a long time waiting for the cars in front to move.

On the way out, I caught one last shot of the shuttle in the distance. You can just barely see it near the center of this photo.

I’ve uploaded the full set on Flickr. I know the photos themselves aren’t fantastic — we were several miles away, and I was only twelve after all, but there’s something special about photos you took yourself at an event you witnessed personally.

• SMBC: Where does the time go when you play online games?
• XKCD: Server Attention Span
• The Joy of Tech: The Internet is running out of tubes. (via @brionv)
• Classic Spamusement: They hold a whole lot of it. I had no idea….
• Bizarro on Facebook slacktivism (at Failblog).

Sci-fi and fantasy:

• Keeping Up With the Cardassians. For months, this is what I heard every time someone mentioned the Kardashians. (What can I say? My brain is more attuned to Star Trek than to reality TV.)
• Author Robert J. Sawyer answers pointed questions about Flashforward and the TV adaptation, including what went wrong. I have to agree that it was really hurt by focusing too heavily on the conspiracy arc.

Coolness!

• Discovery spacewalk seen from the ground (Thierry Legault, of course!)
• Majestic Snow Batman towers over Vermont
• Ultra hi-res moon. The full-sized image is 24,000 x 24,000 pixels and half a gigabyte!
• Flash Coffee is a product tie-in just waiting to happen! (That F’ing Monkey). It would fit right in with the Central City Track Team shirt.

Tech stuff:

• Gmail accidentally reset thousands of accounts last month. (They got it back — this is Google after all.) I’ve come to rely heavily on Gmail, but I still keep a local copy of all my email in case something like this happens. (Engadget, via @pobox)
• 6 ways to use public Wi-Fi hot spots safely (C|NET).
• Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• Map of smartphone marketshare by OS & manufacturer. It’s a 3-way split between iPhone, Android and Blackberry. iPhone & Blackberry are of course one manufactuer, while Android is divided mainly among HTC, Samsung and Motorola. (via @androidandme)
• Things Real People Don’t Say About Your App or website (via @brionv)

Comic Strips

• I found a printout of this User Friendly comic strip while cleaning out my old desk last month. Ah, tech support! Help, I can’t send e-mail!
• XKCD on spambots vs. constructive comments (warning: language)
• Two comic strips about book collections: Wondermark and Girl Genius. I stumbled on the Wondermark strip at Long Beach Comic-Con (write-up should be done today is online) and it really hit home, between the fact that I grew up loving books for exactly this reason, and the impending arrival of the next generation. As for Girl Genius, I think Castle Heterodyne’s library could give the Beast’s a run for its money.
• Fake Science explains the difference between regular and decaf coffee. Insert obligatory “It was ground this morning” joke.
• C-Section Comics shows the difference between iPhone, Android and Blackberry users. For the record: Android user, picked up the link from an iPhone user. Hmm…

Photos

• Incredible star trails and a derelict ship at APOD.
• Usability study: Photos as Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• Amazing close-up photos of comet Hartley 2.
• Twitter Fail Whale Hat.

Other Stuff

• Someone wants to buy a cosmic treadmill from me: Umm…Not For Sale?
• Wrapping up Cyber Security Awareness Month at @sans_isc. If you use a computer, you should at least take the time to look through this.
• Gotta love the MPAA’s priorities. A brief scene of therapeutic swearing earns the same rating as an entire film full of graphic, gruesome torture: The King’s Speech vs. Saw 3D.

Nmap has a nice visualization of the Internet’s top websites: Icons of the Web

Leverage has put up a set of short video clips from their Comic-Con presentation. Let’s go steal a Comic-Con. (Interestingly enough, they picked some of the same bits I did for my own write-up of the event.)

Hilarious. People working on viruses are actually sending their crash reports to Microsoft — including the malicious code!

The Bad Astronomer presents: Top 5 Ways the Universe Could Wipe Out Humankind. He goes into these threats (some likely, some unlikely, and some certain — but not for millions of years) in a lot more detail in his book, Death from the Skies!, which is a fascinating read.

A Scott Pilgrim fan tracked down the real-life locations in Toronto that Brian Lee O’Malley used as reference, then took photos to match them up with the comic panels.

It reminds me of a story that O’Malley told at Comic-Con last(?) year about the movie production. They tried to use actual locations when possible, and at one point went to film a scene with a particular phone booth, only to find it had been torn out. They rebuilt the phone booth for the scene!

How To Be a Retronaut has a fascinating gallery of illustrations from the 1976 Soviet edition of The Hobbit. (via @dixonium)

Copyblogger presents: Five Grammatical Errors that Make You Look Dumb. Please, people: learn the differences between your and you’re, and between they’re, their and there! (via This Is True)

A university library has put together a great parody of the Old Spice ad campaign: Study Like a Scholar, Scholar. (also via This Is True )

NPR story: In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don’t Matter

New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to their beliefs. The finding raises questions about a key principle of a strong democracy: that a well-informed electorate is best.

This makes me feel a little less enthused about the next two items:

It’s incredibly cool that we’ve got photos of the Apollo 16 landing site. But that won’t convince people who are absolutely certain that the landings were faked.

And a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation of Toyota crashes blamed on sudden acceleration has implicated driver error in nearly all cases. Of the 75 fatal crashes investigates, only one could be verified as a problem with the vehicle: the Lexus crash last August in which the accelerator was caught on the floor mat, leading to a recall. Of course, the court of popular opinion has already made up its mind…

It’s the aurora australis, or southern lights, seen from above! It was taken May 29, 2010 from the International Space Station. Bad Astronomy talks about what causes aurorae in the blog post where I found the picture.

Seriously: The aurora. From space. How cool is that?

• The Zodiac is the set of constellations through which the sun, moon and planets appear to move when seen from Earth. #
• In a dark sky, away from light pollution, you can sometimes see Zodiacal light after the sun has set. #
• Due to cycles in Earth's orbit, the present-day constellations of the zodiac no longer line up with those used by astrology. #
• In a REALLY dark sky, you can see the Gegenshein: sunlight reflecting off of interplanetary dust. #

At the age of 34, I’ve finally seen the planet Mercury.* It’s notoriously difficult to spot, but when I read that it was going to be very close to Venus for the next few days, I had to try.

As it turns out, I was able to see it from a local grocery store parking lot. I left the car just as Venus was becoming visible, concerned by the clouds starting to drift past, and left the store to a clear twilight sky and a “star” below and to the right of Venus…exactly where Mercury should be!

*Of course I’ve seen photos, but I’d never seen the planet directly with my own eyes — or if I have, I didn’t recognize it.

I couldn’t remember whether Venus was visible in the evening or morning (or at all) right now. It was roughly in the direction of an airport, so it could easily have been a helicopter or an airplane traveling at an angle roughly in line with my line of sight. By the time I got home, buildings and trees blocked the horizon, so I didn’t think much more of it.

I’m in California. Interestingly enough, thousands of miles away in Ohio, people have been seeing a bright light in the west every night for the past week and making UFO reports.

Last night I decided to see how early I could spot Venus, and caught it fairly high in the sky just after sunset. It was hard to see without really looking for it because the sky was still light, but it became a lot easier as the sky darkened. Not surprisingly, as it set and brightened in the dimming sky, it passed through roughly the area I remembered seeing the unidentified light last week. Mystery solved.

I don’t understand why, in a world full of airplanes, helicopters and the occasional blimp — not to mention a world where we see stars and planets every night (barring clouds and light pollution) — people jump past these mundane explanations when they see a light in the night sky and decide it must be an alien spacecraft.