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PakledHostage

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  1. This is getting ridiculous. It isn't uncommon for them to crack. This shouldn't be news. It's usually just the outer pane that cracks, often due to a problem with the anti-ice heating system. The structural pane is in the middle, protected by polymer and glass layers. And even if the structural pane breaks (e.g. due to a bird strike), the polymer layers can sustain the pressurization loads. Nobody freaks out when someone's minivan window cracks... they stop and get it fixed. That's all that would have happened here, just like the other dozens of times it happens around the world in any given year.
  2. Seems Tom Stafford died today. Another pioneer gone.
  3. Right, but adding significant empty mass to the booster will impact that "if". The original idea didn't involve hot staging, but when that didn't work on IFT-1, they added the exhaust deflector. I recall seeing in the CSI Starbase video below that the deflector has as much mass as an empty Falcon 9 booster. Adding that much has gotta smart...
  4. Do we know anything about the performance that they're actually achieving? They've succeeded in getting a mostly empty, 50 metre long shell into a sub-orbital trajectory, but so did the Space Shuttle. Of course the Space Shuttle's main tank was never meant to reach orbit and Starship is supposed to eventually be able to fill a lot of that empty space with heavy cargo, but how much? Are they achieving their goals? For example, it sounds like the exhaust deflector that was added to the booster to allow hot staging was massively heavy. How much did that impact payload performance? We all know from playing KSP that "the tyranny of the rocket equation" is real... and that's just one example of the payload performance hits that they've had to suffer to make the thing work. What sorts of payloads are they actually going to be able to achieve, after all the dust settles?
  5. That's hard to find reasonable... Starship hasn't reached orbit yet, and it seemingly hasn't maintained attitude control in zero-g, either. Who would put a non-expendable payload on it before it's been proven more capable? (Maybe some Star Trek red shirted crew want to go for a ride?)
  6. Anyone have any thoughts on Everyday Astronaut's hypothesis that the liquid oxygen was freezing around the cold gas thruster nozzles, partially blocking them and affecting the resulting thrust force and direction sufficiently to screw up the control system? He figured SpaceX may have to add heaters on the nozzles.
  7. Well, what the heck... all this talk about the 2017 eclipse made me go and book a trip for my family and I to go see totality again. Fingers crossed that the weather cooperates.
  8. No filter at all during totality. I used a solar filter on my 600 mm camera lens ahead of totality and after, but nothing during. As @cubinator said, the corona isn't much brighter than the daylight sky, so simply adjusting shutter speed is enough to manage exposures. Edit: I should add that the corona's brightness changes by several orders of magnitude from near the sun to its outer edges. The human eye has the dynamic range to take it all in but the camera doesn't. You have to stack images to get anything that looks like what you can see with the naked eye. I wrote my own stacking code because I wasn't happy with the results in LightRoom. Writing my own gave me the flexibility to merge the images in a more continuous gradient rather than in discrete layers. Also, I used Eclipse Orchestrator to manage the camera automatically so that I could enjoy the eclipse. I set up a script to take about 40 different shots over the 2 minutes (some of them duplicates). The diamond rings and prominences require precise timing, taking into account your location to a handfull of metres and time down to a couple dozen milliseconds, because they must be shot precisely when the eclipse begins and ends. Edit 2: I should also add that I learned a trick while practicing dry runs with my script. I would use Stellarium's ocular feature to estimate how long it would take for the Sun to move from the edge of my camera's field of view to the middle. If that was, say, 4. 3 minutes, I'd then line up the tripod with the sun at the edge of the field of view at 4.3 minutes before totality and let it drift to the centre. My lens is a 150 mm - 600 mm lense, and my camera (Canon 70D) has a 1.6 crop factor. That means fully zoomed in to 600 mm is effectively 960 mm, which is a fairly long focal length.
  9. Here are three of my photos from 2017: Diamond ring Prominence Totality This is a stack of about 8 photos with different exposures to get all that corona in one shot without being blown out or under exposed. I used a medical imaging software to align the individual bitmaps based on the sun's disk and then I wrote my own software to create a composite using vector addition of the RGB values in the bitmap pixels to get the smoothness of transition between the layers that I was hoping for. That's Regulus you can just see in the bottom left of the image. I was part of a project called the "Eclipse Megamovie", and they had coaching and practice sessions before the eclipse to help ensure that participants could get the best shots possible. https://youtu.be/Z5xOcjC5-oo
  10. I managed to capture a photo of a prominence during the 2017 eclipse. I had a program on my laptop called "Eclipse Orchestrator" that controlled my DSLR based on a pre-arranged script. I used a 600 mm lens and exposure settings that I found online. I also synced my computer's clock to a GPS beforehand for maximum accuracy. I was able to get both "diamond rings", a prominence and about 40 photos of the corona at different exposures. I will try to upload a couple to imgur so I can post them here. Which reminds me of my favorite memory from that day: I was busy checking on my camera when totality first started, but shortly after that, I looked over to where my daughter was sitting in her little chair (she was just small then). She had a deathgrip on the armrest and was looking at the sky with her mouth agape. I picked her up and she said to me "I'm not scared, Daddy". I could tell she was just acting brave. For a pre-scientific mind, it's understandably frightening to have the sky suddenly go dark in the middle of the day. My wife then snapped a photo of my daughter and I looking at the sky together. It's one of my favorite photos.
  11. Yes. They agree with what I said. I wouldn't post BS.
  12. You can look at totality without eye protection. In fact, you want to remove your eye protection or you'll miss it. In the moments before totality, look at the horizon. If there are clouds around, you'll see the moon's shadow sweeping in over them from afar at 3000 kph or so. Then once totality starts, it'll be one of the most profound experiences you'll ever have. It gets cold and quiet. All the creatures stop doing their creature things. The sky is dark but there's twilight all around the edge. But don't look at the eclipse before/after totality without eye protection. Even looking at it with the naked eye a couple of seconds before/after can damage your eyes.
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