Tag Archives: Apollo 11

Other space information in time for today’s anniversary…

I mentioned the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing earlier today. Here’s a few other “space” things that caught my eye:

themoon.jpg

  • Apollo 11 restored HD video.
  • Send your name to Mars and get a certificate.
  • For your iPhone and iPod Touch get SkyVoyager and SkyGazer for free today (normally $17.98 combined).
  • Photos of the Moon landing sites from the LRO.
  • And Google has added the Moon to Google Earth (desktop application).
  • That’s it for now. Please post any recommended links in the comments below.

    Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

    Forty Years Ago Today: We landed on The Moon!

    On this day 40 years ago Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. astronaut_Apollo_11.jpg I’m not sure what else needs to be added to that statement: “We landed on the Moon”! How amazing is that?!?

    Just for some frame of reference: The Moon is 238,000 miles away (384,000 km), if you were driving 75 miles per hour it would take you 3,100 hours. Keep in mind that’s speeding and you don’t get to pull over for any bathroom breaks or snacks!

    Actually it took them more like five days to get there, so just dividing that out, that’s around 2,000 miles per hour (assume it took them a while to speed up and slow down).

    When I was a kid, my mother purchased me a two record set of the mission. Lots of audio recordings of the launch and landing. I’m thinking there was some insert with a bunch of photos too. I played that a lot on my record player. I don’t have any idea what year she purchased that, but I’d say I was six or seven(?), and it was amazing to me!

    It’s still amazing to me. Whenever I can watch a launch of some kind or another, I always turn on the TV and still get thrills and chills. I get chills just thinking about it as I’m writing this…

    Apollo_11_bootprint.jpg
    The sad part is we only landed six times and then we stopped.

    Photos courtesy of Wikipedia.

    Karnak Temple

    Found this cool 360 degree panorama of Karnak Temple. It requires Quicktime (I was there last year, BTW).

    (I was actually looking for something on The Moon Landing which was 38 years ago today….)

    One Small Step (a long time ago and kinda far away)

    So it’s been 36 years since we landed on the Moon. I still think that is so cool. I really thought we’d be making field trips there by now but unfortunately that isn’t the case. These days I’m just excited/hopeful that we’ll get the shuttle missions going again.

    For my birthday last year (or maybe it was Christmas) I got this Apollo 11 Artifact Kit. It’s got all sorts of cool paraphernalia in it (mission patch, moon map, travel voucher, customs declaration, school photos of one of the astronauts kids and other interesting stuff) and a book too. My mother saw it the other day and commented on how much her dad would have liked it, he’s the guy who got me interested in space and science. I don’t know if he ever knew that. I remember him taking me up to the library and getting books when I was little and I remember getting something to do with space at the same time he was (my version had lots more pictures than his did). It’s that first time that I always think of when people ask me about how I got interested in science and technology. I don’t know what was going on that made him interested, maybe a space mission or the anniversary of some launch or maybe just plain old curiosity.