"Can I have your autograph?"

I woke up today at about 10:30am after that great experience with the sunrise. I ate breakfast then went to the dome to offload my early morning pictures. We then loaded up the Buick and headed into Tucson to meet a former student of Dr. Leake, Adina, at the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona. The LPL is basically a paradise for a planetary scientist. Among large hanging 3D panoramas taken from the Mars Pathfinder mission and the latest from the Mars Global Surveyor, I could just feel the research bug flowing through me. Adina showed us her office then took us up to the Space Imagery Center. A place where Dr. Leake spent hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours when she was a grad student, the SIC holds nearly every image taken from exploratory missions through the Solar System. Volumes of pictures from the Moon missions, Voyager, and Galileo fill folders on shelves from wall to wall to ceiling. If I attended UofA I would be in that room every day trying to make my way through every single image. One thing about the LPL that fascinated me was a strange feeling I felt. I really had a kind of star-struck (no pun intended) luster about me. When Adina pointed out to me that the man who just passed in front of me was the same man who recently discovered a new moon of Uranus, I was dazzled. It was like any fan wandering the streets of Beverly Hills and being told that Sean Connery just passed by. So much talent is stored along with reems of data at the LPL. Sure thing that if I ever conducted research at the LPL I'd have to refrain from asking for autographs.

After a short lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant (I had a shiesh kabob!) the monsoons slapped the entire city of Tucson. Our car was a mile or so away and Dr. Leake and Jason G. took pitty on my and my bum foot and were awesome enough to brave the deluge and pick Jason, James, and I up. Wet as dogs (but not smelling as badly), Jason G. drove us home with Dr. Leake in the front seat. The usual clicking of digital cameras accompanied us home.

The night brought about another series of images we use to clean up data that we may [someday] get of asteroids. After the series of biases, darks, flats, and lamps we all decided to stand outside and attempt to take pictures of a electric storm blazing on and off in the southern sky. Although not successful with my no-shutter-control digital camera, I discovered one thing about the distant storm. Although very beautiful and impressive, the storm we saw tonight was silent because of its distance from us. And for some reason I could barely take my eyes from it. The only reason I could think of for this lightning-induced paralysis is that the distant flashes were alluring. They only last for a millisecond or two and illuminate the clouds and provide glimpses of your surroundings. The catch is their duration. Since the image is only briefly projected into the eyes, the mind has only a limited amount of information with which to produce an image. A normal broadcast television image shoots 30 frames per second at a viewer. The brain is kinda slow realizing what's going on and puts all the images together into a moving picture like we see in our everyday lives (except in 2D). Since the lightning only shows for a frame or two's length, the brain wants more to put together an entire image - moving or not. So, they're alluring and believe me, I was captured.

Thunder storms are great and everything but, we really need some clear skies. Optical astronomy ain't worth much when it's cloudy.

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Wed. July 7, 1999

"Can I have your autograph?"

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