Zarya, Zvezda, etc ...

So ... "What on Earth are Zarya and Zvezda?" you ask? Well - actually they are NOT on Earth! They are 2 modules of the International Space Station (ISS) that is orbiting around the Earth ;-)

Zarya was the first module launched, then Unity, then Zvezda (If you are interested, there is more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya ... and from there you can follow the links to Zvezda and other stuff ) This website - http://www.zarya.info/ - has some interesting info on the use/history of the name Zarya (it was initially the call sign of mission control for the flight when Yuri Gargarin orbited the Earth ;-)

Zvezda means "Star" ... which is about how bright the ISS now looks when you watch it fly over!
Zarya means Sunrise/Dawn ... symbolising the dawn of a new age of space exploration or something ... and I guess there are definitely some exciting things happening at the moment (like the failed Phobos-Grunt in a decaying orbit and due re-enter the Earth's atmospehre at some random time in approximately 2 days time, and the MSL mission (Curiosity rover) due to land on Mars this August ... I hope they have another CSIROTweetup for that, and if they do - I hope I can sneak off from work to go to it!)

Talking about Dawn ... that is when I went to bed "last night" - LOL  but - there is one advantage in having been still up at that stupid hour of the morning - I got to go outside and see the ISS fly overhead at 4:12am ;-)
(it has also been visible here in the evenings this week - but either I forget to look until too late, or it is too cloudy ... sigh)

To find out when you can look up and see the ISS fly over, one can just search on Google/etc for ISS sightings or something ... or go to http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/ or http://www.heavens-above.com/
If you are into Twitter - you can also follow @twisst to get sent alerts when it is due to be visible flying overhead ;-)
And if you have an iPhone or an Android phone ... there is at least one App that tracks satellites/etc and tells you where to look in the sky (the app I have on my phone tracks lots of stuff, including ISS, and the doomed and soon to re-enter Phobos-Grunt)

I did take a photo of the ISS with my phone - but it just looks like a tiny white dot on a black background - not worth uploading here ;-)
I don't have any recent/new photos of a Sunrise either, but I did take a photo of this Sunset over the house as we drove off to have tea at a pizza place with a name starting with Z, a couple of days ago.  lol


[the next day] ... seeing this was meant to be my Z post for ABC Wednesday, I probably should have uploaded the photo and posted this yesterday (seeing it was already late then, and is now even later) ... but I kind of never got that far ... sigh ... but I might have a couple more Sunset photos now ;-)  I took some on my phone when I was walking the dog this evening ... and then the dog and I got home just as the ISS was flying overhead ... not directly overhead, and some thin cloud - so not bright enough for any decent photos (besides - I would probably need to set up the camera on a tripod to get any photos that actually looked like anything other than a white dot in a black background - lol)


Anyway ... Here is the Sunset over the house the other day:

 yes - it really was that colour!

And here are the other Sunset/etc photos I took, with my phone, while waking the dog this evening:
(I took some with my camera too, but they are not on the computer yet)

pink sky and hills

this is what normally happens when trying to take photos of the dog, or the cat:
photo of said animal at least part way OUT of the photo!

orange Sunset

closer up (taken just after other one)

a few minutes later (from a slightly different place)

Sunset reflected in the pond

more Sunset reflections in the pond

Diesel, wishing I would let him jump in the pond  and chase the swan that has come over  - probably to see  if we have any food ;-)

Just for fun - the same photo after I played with it in GIMP (a very useful bit of  photo editing software that can is free to download from the www) I was going to make it a bit lighter because the original (above) is rather dark ... but it didn't look any good when I made it lighter (all the colours became distracting and ruined the effect - the darkness is part of what makes it a photo I like - kind of moody looking, or something ;-) but I quite like the effect in this one too.

While I was playing with photos in GIMP ... I decided to play with the lightness and contrast of another photo I took this evening - I was trying to take one of the ISS as if flew over (using my phone ;-) but it was way too dark and the photo just turned out black, with no sign of the ISS or even the stars in the sky ... but when I upped the contrast as far as it would go, and same with the brightness, but one number less - I got this rather interesting "noise" effect, which I quite like - it kind of looks like an abstract art quilt or something ;-)

oh ... one more Z thing I just have to mention seeing this is meant to be a post for the letter Z ... something that someone Tweeted reminded me ... a piece of music that I love, partly because it was used as the theme song in the film "2001 A Space Oddesy" but also because I like it anyway - is a rather dramatic piece called "Also Spake Zarathustra" ... LOL
Oddly enough ... I just looked it up (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Also_sprach_Zarathustra_(Strauss) ) and it says that the initial fanfare - the bit that was used in the film - is called "Sunrise" - which ties in nicely with where this post started - the name that I already knew, that gave me the idea for this blog post - Zarya, which means "Sunrise" ;-)

(so now that I have gone full circle, maybe it is time I hit the "post" button before I bore you all so much that you turn into Zombies? ;-)

Tweet, tweet, tweet ... Having a terrific time at the #CSIROTweetup

Ok ... Yesterday I left work early and Went out to the CDSCC (Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex - http://www.cdscc.nasa.gov/ ) and spent an absolutely wonderful evening at the #CSIROTweetup (news article about it here - http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/21/3354487.htm ;_) ... we then stayed the night out at a school camp near there, and we are now in at CSIRO Discovery and the talks are about to begin ... And tonight we go back out to CDSCC to do it all again ...
Actually I can probably keep blogging during the talk, in between eating bites of my lunch ... Multi tasking?! LOL

Actually it is kind of funny ... A whole bunch of "tweeps" having a Tweetup in a radio quiet area (the telescopes need to be able to "hear" the signals from the spacecraft they are tacking, and there isn't any phone signal out here, in fact we have to turn all wireless devices off or to airplane mode ... so we have all been cut off from our usual connections to the www/etc. ... Apart from several computers they set up for us to use :-)
... So here we all are ... back in town with mobile phone coverage and guest access to a wireless network ... So everyone is sitting in the lecture theatre, phones/iPads/Netbooks in hand busily tweeting, emailing, checking phone messages and what have you ...
(I am trying to do this on the iPad but I am adding the links and a few other bits later when not using the iPad - LOL )

[later the same day ... er ... actually it is the next day, just - have not gone to bed yet - late night coming up]
oops - the lectures got too interesting (actually the first one was too - but I had already heard almost the same one a couple of months ago so I could kind of listen and blog and still understand it all ;-)

After the lectures/etc we had some spare time - which a few of us spent the first part of at the pub - lol - then we headed out to a nice picnic area by the river on the way out to CDSCC and had a BBQ ... and then we all arrived here at CDSCC for an entertaining evening of sharing computers to tweet/etc/eating party pies, watching stuff on the big screen at the front of the room, listening to someone talk about NASA and stuff, and generally have a good time ... now we are watching the NASA live coverage of the launch (of http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ for those who have not looked at the other link at the top - lol)

ooh "T minus 1 hour and 9 minutes" ... woo hoo - getting excited ...

ok ... time for some photos ... yes - I was the first one here to look at the computers and think to myself "oooh - usb slot - might try connecting my phone/camera"... worked fine with both of them ... but first ... here is a photo that I DIDN'T take - this is a group photo that one of the other "Tweeps" took and tweeted a little while ago - and is now saved on my phone - LOL

And here is a photo I got someone to take of me, last night ;-)

And guess who?! ... well - I had the wig with antennae so I had to put it on ... and the person organising things just took this photo and tweeted it ... so I "borrowed" it.

and now that I have monopolised the computer for way too long - someone else's turn ... should be just under an hour till launch now ... time to see if there are any party pies left ... LOL

I wonder if I can call this an early Wednesday ABC post, seeing we are up to the letter T in a couple days?

[edit: I decided "yes, I will ;-)" just added the letter T link here and am about to go add this link to the linky thingy there]

Some Roses are Red ... and So are lots of other Somewhat Random things ...

Really? ... who would have thought ... lol

... yes - if you think I write about some Rather Ridiculous stuff - you are proabably Right ... but I am not going to Refrain - I will go Right ahead anyway - because it is past time for those of us doing the ABC Wednesday thing to post about stuff starting with the letter R and now it is time for the letter S ... and there is at least one of these R things (which I was also going to post about again as an S thing anyway, because it really is S related ;-) that I Really wanted to post about anyway ;-)
I decided to make this an R and S post because I am not sure I will have time to do another totally S post between now and next week ... (if I do then I guess it could be a Second one?)  ... although most of what I will be posting about, if I do get a chance to post Stuff this week, is also Related to, and part of, what I was planning on blogging about for my letter T post ;-)

Righto ... let's get Right into it?  ... first R thing is the Rover that will be Rolling over ... the Surface of Mars - "the Red planet" ... no - not the the ones that, Remarkably, are Still Rolling Round the place (well at least one of them is ;-) but the one that is now Sitting on top of a Rocket, Ready to Roll onto the launch pad Rather Soon - the Mars Science Laboratory - which is a Rather large Rover called Curiosity - due to lift off and head out into Space (which is why this is Really an S thing too ;-) in 9 er ... make that about 6 (because I didn't finish this the day I started and it is now about 3 days later) days time (and Land on Mars next August I think)... unfortunately I live a bit to far away to just Rock up to watch the launch, but, provided it does take off when planned, I will be doing the next best thing - I will be Right in the middle of the action at the CSIRO Tweetup, here at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex ;-)
Strangely enough, the launch has just been delayed by a day, meaning it won't be happening in the wee small hours of Saturday morning (Australian time), but in the wee small hours of Sunday morning instead - which is a bit Sad for those poor Sods who booked cheap flights that they can't change, or have other places they have to be on the Saturday night - because they will miss the actuall launch ... but, because it was too late to change all the other plans (guest speakers and Stuff) all the other fun Stuff, apart from the live cross to the USA during the launch, will Still be happening ... and then we get to go back again on Saturday evening for more fun Stuff and do the live cross for the launch at about 2am Sunday morning, and get to spend another night out at the place we get to Stay at on the first night. (provided the launch isn't delayed/Scrubbed or something ... which, unfortunately, is possible)

So ... this S part of this Rather odd post might only be a fairly Small part of it - but it is a Rather Significant bit as far as I am concerned - LOL
If any of you lot (all 3 of you? lol) reading this are on Twitter - I am @UTLAU - and even if you are not signed up to Twitter yourself, you can find, and look at, my twitter page at http://twitter.com/#!/UTLAU
(I am not sure how often I/we will be "Tweeting" during the actual event - for one thing - we are going to be rather busy having our guided tour, eating dinner, listening to all the guest speakers, etc ... and the other - there is probably no phone/etc reception out there anyway, and even if there is - the place we will be during the guided tour, and the launch of the MSL mission, is a "radio quiet" area so we will have to turn our phones/iPads/whatever off, or to "flight mode" anyway ... but we will have some access to computers that are connected to the internet ;-)

Anyway ... now to Resume the previously written R post ... which I should have posted a week ago, but it took me a few days to get around to writing it/finding what photos I wanted to put in, and then a few more days to actually get said photos onto my blog ... not sure if it is me or them, but uploading photos seems to be a pain lately ... works ok for a while, sometimes, and then it just seems to hang ... grrrr ... and unfortunately I do sometimes have to do other things besides sit at the computer getting lost on Youtube or something while waiting to see if things are working or not ... sigh ... LOL


R is also for Round and Round in my head ... which is what is currently happening with David Bowie's song "Life on Mars" - LOL
(note to Self: maybe I Should put that Song on my phone, so I can play it /sometime during the Tweetup ;-)

R is also for Remembering what other Relevant R things I was going to post about ... but I know I have Rather a lot of photos that I have taken Recently - an amount would be several Rolls of film, if it wasn't for the Recent Replacement of that technology by Digital - what a Ripper of an invention that one was ;-)

I guess I should go and Rummage around in my photos, and See what Results I find ... it is amazing how many Random things I found to photograph Recently, that were Red, or otherwise R Related ...

btw ... when I decided to walk the dog late this afternoon, I only had room for 3 more photos on the memory card in the camera, so I took that one out and put an empty one in ... it now has 72 photos on it!
(and I also took a few more photos with my phone ;-)

[a day or 3 passes]
er ... I Really should finish this post before I Run out of days in the week before it is next Wednesday (and time for the letter S)
(oops! LOL)
... and I think that Red is a bit TOO Red Mars seems to look a bit more like this colour in the photos anyway ... LOL

I guess I should stop Raving on about Random stuff that is probably Really boring, and find a few Reasonable "R" Related photos to put in here ...

I just Realised that will Require me to Remember, or look at the blog post to Remind myself, which ones of my Recent photos I have already posted (I Remember that the Red hot poker flowers were in my P post ;-)

Hmmm ... a couple of these photos could be S photos as well ... which is probably a good thing, Seeing this R post kind of became an R and S one - lol
I uploaded the rest of them last night, but it was a bit late to stay here adding captions when I had to get up for work today ... so I will add them now, and then I can hit the "post" button before this post becomes as Ridiculous as the Rather Strange R post I found Saved in my "drafts" (I might have to be Silly and post that one next time we ABC Wednesday is up to the letter R, if I don't think of something better ;-)



Red flowers, looking Rather Striking actulaly ;-)



the roof of my car just before I went to work last Monday morning - there is a tree next to where I park the car (there is a branch of that tree poking into the top right corner of the photo) and it dropped a whole pile of bits of flowers, and sticky nectar as well, onto the roof of the car ... and then a whole pile of those plague soldier beetles gathered there - I presume to continue eating the nectar.



this is about 15 or 20 minutes later - after driving to work (at speeds of up to 80kph) - some of the beetles are Still on the Roof!

this is a closer up shot of the flower bits and beetles (taken a few days later I think)



Some Red and blue Recycling bins Ready for me to put them in the Science classroms at the school I work at.

Sunset, Refleced on the water (while out walking the dog)



Red Sky ;-)



Reddish light Reflected on the path ... which also has a heap of Snails on it ;-)
(btw - my mobile phone Rang just as I was trying to take this photo - lol)

Roses ... Some Red and Some ... not ;-)

Red Roses ... Rather wet ones (I was walking the dog in the Rain ;-)

Srange Red light - from the Street lights Reflected in the foggy Sky

Same Reddish Sky, with the moon - this was the Sky just to the Right of the Sky in the previous photo ... lol

Red flowers in a coutryard at work (same Red flowers as the ones in the first photo, which are in my garden at home - in fact I think the ones in my garden were grown from bits that fell/were broken off these plants at work ;-)

Red chairs in a corridor at work ... in front of the principal's office actually ;-)

Red flowers ... "Bottle Brush" flowers ... a species of Callistemon (not sure which one - they are an Australian native that has been bred into a lot of different new varieties for gardens/etc)

Rainbow colours in the camera lens (and another one of those Red flowering Callistemon bushes ;-)

a Rose



a Red gutter, and a Rock at the front of the school I work at
(actually the long building in this photo is part of the science block - where I work ;-)

Rust dyed fabric ... actually Rather Rotten too - this is what happens when you decide to "dye" some fabric by wrapping it around some rusty wire and stuff and bury it in the garden for 2 or 3 days  ... but then don't Remember that you did that until it has been there for 2 or 3 MONTHS ... oops? LOL  (I will still find a use for it eventually ;-)



a Reddish orange Grevillia flower ... we have some Strange looking flowers here in Australia ;-)

Ok ... photos now have captions ... which I am still not sure I like the look of how blogger does that ... but it takes ages to get them all lined up neatly if I try and write in between them because all the html tags that get added with the photos tend to mess up the formatting or something, which it also does a bit doing it this way, but not quite as badly ... and the only way to make things look neat/how I want them to is to edit the html code and delete them all - and that takes ages ...

btw ... for those who want a closer look a a weird flower/beetles making beetles/whatever other weird thing in one of these photos ... these are actually quite large photos (they will probably not be quite so large after a while if I keep posting this many every time I post to my blog - there is actually a storage limit for photo on here ... but, from what I read somewhere on a help page, because I have google+ I get to keep uploading stuff after the limit is reached, but anything over a certain size will be made smaller automatically). Anyway ... if you want to see these photos even bigger than they come up in that thingy you get when you click on one - do a right click and open it in a new tab/window and it should come up the full size (which even if I have reached the limit and my new photos do get re-sized as I upload them, they will still be a lot bigger than they appear in the blog posts ;-)

One last S related thing ... DD (Dear Daughter) came wandering in to the room the other night, while DH (Dear Husband) and I were watching TV or something ... and she asked if it would do anything bad to a keyboard if you drew/wrote on it ... when asked why she wanted to know that she answered: I want to write "the final frontier" on my Spacebar ...

(and if you don't get why she wanted to do that - you need to go and watch a few episodes of Star Trek ... even one episode ... or even just the Start of an episode - lol)

A is for ... ABC ... Again ...

A is for ...

Alphabet! ... and All the letters in it! LOL
yes - ABC Wednesday is now starting it's 5th round ... so - let's see how well I can keep up this time ... lol (it is a wonderful excuse to try and post at least once each week - lol)

A is Also for All that stuff I posted about last time (Arachnids and Aykayem and All sorts of other Amazing ... or was it Awful? ... stuff)

And ... er ... And! - that word that one should NOT start a sentence with - lol

A is for Antarctica!
... An Amazingly Awesome place that I really want to go to ... which is why I decided to try and blog my way to Antarctica ... trouble is ... I will need more than 2000 votes to win (someone else already has 2002 votes, and a few others are not far behind) ... And I don't think I have Any yet ... sigh ...
(maybe I need to change that Awful profile picture? ... or do some Advertising ... maybe I should tell the ABC radio people About it? - I could tell them that they need to help me, by doing an interview/publicity/etc, because it should be an Australian who wins? - LOL)

A is also for Astronomy ... which is Also Apt - not just because 2009 is the International Year Of Astronomy (As I mentioned in the other A post) but it is Also for the Aniversary of the first Moon landing - 40 years ago this week (I could have said "Today" if I had posted this on time - lol) and Apollo 11 and the Astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who were the first to set foot on the moon. (First humans, and first Americans ... much to Russia's disgust ... hmmm - I wonder if humankind would have made more/greater advances, or made less progress, if America and Russia had been working with each other rather than against each other?)

A is also for ACTTAA - the ACT Textile Arts Association (which I am a member of) ... and the theme for our exhibition (in a couple of months time) is partly to do with it being the year of Astronomy - the theme is "Heaven And Earth" (the other thing is the fact that it is also the year of natural fibres)
... I guess that theme kind of covers everything ... well Almost Anything Anyway ... it could be possible that there might be some where/thing that is not part of Heaven or Earth? lol
I Assume one would have to ask an Astrophysicist about that one?

I Actually had an Amazing and Awesomely odd thought About Astrophysics last night ... (it was to do with Black holes and the Big Bang theory - But that can wait for next week ... or whenever I get around to doing my "B" post - lol)

hmmm A is also for the Absence of Any images ...

... In order to make this post more Attractive, I might have to Add one:



This is from my Geocities page (the one that is about to be Absent because it will not exist any more once yahoo "flick the off switch" sometime soon) in fact I just went and copied this one from the geocities page because I can't remember where on the computer I put the original (bigger) copy of it!
(it is Also possible that it is Absent All together ... As in ... it isn't where I put it Anyway ... the likelyhood of that Awful fact being Applicable is dependant on where I Actually put it in the first place ... And ... it is possible that the image IS where I put it, but where I put it is not in Any of the places where I think I ought to have put it - it could be in Another folder Alltogether ... maybe even the other "Andrea" folder, which is on Another computer ... Ahhhhrrrrgggghhhh ...)

So ... what is it? ... well - this is what I have written under it on my geocities page:

This picture is actually an image of gaseous pillars in the Eagle Nebula, M16. It was Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, on April 1st (!) 1995 .
The image is courtesy of the Space Telescope Science Institute (ST Sci), operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., for NASA., and NASA.Material created with support to AURA/ST ScI from NASA contract NAS5-26555 is reproduced here was reproduced on my geocities page with permission.
I drew in the fuzzy bit at the top right hand corner (because it had nothing there, just black squares - the image is actually made up of several smaller ones, and there were a couple missing in the corner).

I still think there is something kind of weird and eerie about that image ... that tallest pillar on the left kind of looks like someone got a whole zoo of animals (both real and imaginary) and kind of squidged it all up together ...

... maybe some Aliens did that to it, just to drive us nuts?

A is Also for the Awfull smell of whatever DD just cooked herself for a Midnight snack (toast I think) which would probably smell ok if I was hungry and I wasn't half alseep, and hadn't had black pudding for supper A little while Ago ... hmmm - DD should be in bed - she has school in the morning ... then again - so should I, because I also have school in the morning! (actually I have to go to work in the morning ... but ... I work at a school - lol)

I can think of At least one other A word ... but that could be a bit Awkward (As it is a bit Awfull) because I want to try and keep this blog "family friendly" ... or at least not too bad mostly - lol

so .. I will bid you Adieu (or however u spell that word) ... and I could say a goodbye/goodnight/etc in a couple of other languages that have words for it that start with A, but I can't be bothered looking up how to spell them ...