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One of the most beautiful sunsets we witnessed in Wadi Rum. The light was soft yet interesting. We found a lot of this plant called sea squill all over the rocky areas of the desert. Some flower stems were still attached, slowly moving in the evening wind.
Our last sunrise in the desert, from the top of a long smooth rock ridge. This place really looked straight out of Dune. The sand and rock were less colorful in that part of the desert, the cliffs and mountains taller and the valleys and canyons narrower. This is the best place in Wadi Rum to hike over a couple of days in my opinion, and it's the spot where I'd like to go back the most in the area.
There were a lot of these plants in the more rocky areas of the desert. While they sometimes have flowering stems (pictured in a shot I posted earlier), I particularly loved the contrast between their soft, green-blue leaves with the red rocky landscape. Here's my favorite shot of them at twilight.
Beautiful afternoon light seen from a rock arch in Wadi Rum. The sky was so nice that day, and I was surprised to see clouds that often during my stay, considering it rarely rains. Perhaps there are no peaks high enough to trap the moisture and empty the clouds ?
Sunset over one of the largest dunes in the heart of Wadi Rum, where the cliffs and mountains are particularly impressive. The colors were very vibrant that evening.
The Milky Way galaxy over some jagged hardened mud badlands in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.
I first discovered these amazing badlands while photographing the wildflowers here a couple months ago. At that time, I couldn't wait to head back out here to shoot the Milky Way when it would be in the desired position in the sky. While I've been exploring this park for many years, I didn't really notice this scenery until recently. Perhaps the above-average rainfall earlier in the year helped sculpt this landscape?
While the galactic core of the galaxy "officially" rose at around 11:35 PM, it wasn't in a good position to be seen or photographed until about 1:15 AM. This was due to the clouds, haze, and light pollution on the horizon to the southeast. Also, a tiny blob of a cloud is covering part of core slightly right of center. I illuminated the foreground with a Nichia 219BT LED. Shot with a Canon 6D and Sigma 15mm EX DG lens at 15 sec f/2.8 ISO 3200.
Anyways, once the galaxy rose into position, I couldn't wait shoot it with these epic badlands in the foreground.
@weddingmandk joined me and we got some amazing shots.
Moonlit night shot in the Salt Basin badlands south of Death Valley National Park. We camped a couple of washes over from this; it made for a pretty awesome night.
A nice photo-mosaic of lunar images taken by Mariner 10 shortly after launch.
~8.5” x ~11”. From the estate of Eric Burgess.
From the following extract of the online version of NASA SP-424, “The Voyage of Mariner 10”. Additionally, the image, linked to below, was used in Figure 5-9:
“…Very soon after launch, the planet-viewing experiments were turned on, a first time for planetary missions. The aim was to calibrate the instruments in the well-known environment of the Earth-Moon system. The charged particle telescope was turned on within 3 hours of liftoff, the ultraviolet experiment within 7 hours, and the TV cameras shortly thereafter. First TV pictures of Earth were obtained 16 hours and 15 minutes after liftoff.
There were some problems. The two thermal strap-heaters surrounding the aluminum lens barrels of the cameras were designed to hold the camera system at a temperature of 4 to 15°C (40 to 60°F). But they failed to operate as programmed following launch. Mission controllers, watching the engineering data coming back to the Mission Operations Center, saw that the heaters were not activated. Quickly a command was sent to the spacecraft to deactivate the heaters and then to activate them by triggering the relay switch, which seemed to have stuck. Nothing happened. The telescopes continued to cool down.
There was concern that without the heaters operating the television cameras would cool down too much and affect sensitive optics so as to distort pictures of the planets and cause a degradation of camera focus. Part of the problem was caused by the screening of the spacecraft against solar heating. It was so protected by a sunshade and by surface coatings and thermal blankets that when the camera heaters failed to come on, the cameras began to cool. Engineers from JPL and Boeing studied the problem to determine how heat might pass from the rest of the spacecraft in place of that missing from the heaters. They found that the thermal insulation of the spacecraft was so good that there was no way to heat the cameras from the spacecraft itself. The fall in temperature had to be lived with. They also checked the backup spacecraft poised at Cape Kennedy in an attempt to determine what might have caused the relay to stick. Had this problem degraded the spacecraft capability to an unaccepted degree, it would have been necessary to launch the backup.
Fortunately, the cooling stabilized at an acceptable level, and the cameras did maintain their sharp focus. The lens elements and the optical tube elements were self-compensating to changes in temperature. But an ever-present danger was that the Invar rods might contract, fracturing the vidicon potting compound if the temperature fell below -40°C ( - 40°F). Project scientists halted this temperature drop by keeping the vidicons switched on to maintain some heat within the cameras. Normally the vidicons would have been rested in the cruise between the planets, but it was considered prudent to change this mode of operation and take the chance that the lifetime of the vidicons might be shortened somewhat rather than risk the cameras' becoming too cold. This [47] being done, the temperature of the cameras stabilized, at low but livable values-the vidicons were about -10°C ( + 14°F), the backs of the optics were -20°C ( - 4°F ), and the telescope fronts were about -30°C ( - 22°F).
Mariner's cameras transmitted good pictures of the Earth and the Moon despite the temperature problem. The pictures of Earth (Fig. 5-2) provided stereo photographs of clouds with revealing depth and structure. They appeared to be the clearest pictures yet received from a television camera in space. If the spacecraft returned similar-quality pictures from Venus, the project could obtain a completely unprecedented look at the brilliant clouds of that mysterious planet.
In all, Mariner 10's cameras provided a series of five Earth mosaics (Fig. 5-3) within the first few days of flight. These mosaics revealed intricate cloud patterns at about the same resolution expected during the Venus flyby. The Earth pictures could provide valuable comparisons with the Venus clouds. Earth observations also provided in-flight verification of the cameras' "veiling glare" performance, thus confirming that the preflight calculations of settings of camera exposures for Venus were correct. This was important, since Venus encounter geometry did not allow an incoming far-encounter sequence to check the exposures.
Another problem arose almost at the beginning of the flight when, on November 5, the plasma science experiment was turned on. Scientists were surprised to find that no solar wind particles were being observed. There appeared to be a good vacuum in the detectors, and the device was scanning back and forth as it should. Engineers performed a series of tests and sequences of switching commands without positive results. One possibility was that the instrument door had failed to open so that plasma could not enter the detector. Another was that the high-voltage sweep was stuck at the high end, thus permitting only a few high-energy particles to register. The operation of this experiment was, unfortunately, restricted throughout the mission, and it was concluded that the protective door had failed to open fully. However, plasma data were obtained by the scanning electron spectrometer part of the instrument, which was unaffected by the failure of the door.
As the spacecraft left Earth, the ultraviolet air glow instrument looked back at the home planet, observing the same emission regions that it expected to check later at Venus and Mercury. Lyman-alpha hydrogen emission was recorded, together with helium emission at 584 angstroms.
All subsystems of the spacecraft were performing exactly as expected. The trajectory was also very good; less than 8 m/see (27 ft/sec) of the spacecraft's total maneuvering capacity of 120 m/sec (396 ft/sec) was expected to be needed to move the Venus aiming point of the spacecraft and change the arrival time about 3 hours to bring Mariner 10 to its later pass within 1000 km (600 mi) of Mercury's surface.
Mariner 10's series of five Earth mosaics was intermixed with six mosaics of the Moon (Fig. 5-4) within the first week of flight as calibration tests for the Mercury encounter. The path of Mariner allowed images to be obtained of the north polar region of the Moon (Fig. 5-5), which, because of constraints on paths of other space vehicles, had previously been covered only obliquely. The Mariner 10 photographs provided a basis for cartographers to improve the lunar control net, the relationship of points on the lunar surface one to another in precise definitions of lunar latitude and longitude of craters and other features. The exercise in lunar cartography provided a useful prelude to applying the same techniques to map Mercury using the images to be obtained during the flyby.
Diagnostic tests were conducted on November 6, including photography of stars (Fig. 5-6) and additional tests on the Moon (Fig. 5-7). The Moon tests, as well as providing better information about how the TV system was performing, allowed scientists to evaluate the practicality of proposed measurements of the diameter of Mercury. At this stage of the mission, optical performance of the television system continued to be good even though the TV optics had not yet stabilized in temperature. As of November 7, Mariner 10 had returned almost 900 pictures to Earth. Experimenters were enthusiastic about the excellent quality. The Moon pictures recorded objects a mere 3 km (2 mi) across (Figs 5-8 and 5-9 ).
history.nasa.gov/SP-424/p53.jpg
Since the pictures to be returned from Mercury were expected to be of three times higher resolution than those of the Moon, there was good reason for excitement. At last, it seemed, mankind would have a chance to resolve those dusky markings on the innermost planet, those indistinct features that earlier astronomers had interpreted as Marslike, even erroneously with linear "canal" type features. Another test conducted was photographing the Pleiades cluster in the constellation of Taurus: a galactic cluster in the Milky Way which is visible to the unaided human eye as seven faint stars and is often called the "Seven Sisters". These stars are about 20,000 light years from the Sun and are immersed in nebulosity. A total of 84 pictures were taken, verifying the focus of the television system.”
Above at:
The Stairs of Cirith Ungol.
That's how I imagined it.
Kodachrome 64 ISO
Seen on Explore, Highest position, 196 on Friday, September 28, 2007
Devon Island lies in a polar desert biome with icecaps and tundra. Its Mars-like environment has been used by research institutes to simulate the challenges of living and working on that planet. A distant polar bear crosses the gravel plains and bedrock near the coast of Stratton Inlet while waiting for freeze-up in Lancaster Sound to hunt offshore.
What you see around here is corroded stone. It is mainly red because of the iron ore and as a reason large mining facilities are around here everywhere. But as the distances around here are vast it isn't exactly as if you would be going from mine to mine.
Bloodmoon on the 21st January 2019 seen from my backyard.
Shot with my Panasonic G7 and the Kit-Telelens
It really is like being on Mars around here. The heat is incredible as every single square centimeter is radiating heat. Walking around in shorts seems to be futile as the air is already 50 ° celsius, but the heat emitted by the road is even more intense.
Heading south from Coober Pedy towards Woomera along the Stuart Highway in the flat desert countryside of central South Australia.
Heading south from Coober Pedy towards Woomera along the Stuart Highway in the flat desert countryside of central South Australia.
An eroded dike in the Eilat mountains. The softer layer of lime stone was eroded while the tougher granite remained. The Northward motion of the African tectonic plate buckled the usually horizontal layers to a vertical position.
The dikes are about a meter wide.