Apollo 11 on PBS

There are so many things happening to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing, and I just don't have time to absorb most of it. I did read a couple of interesting pieces in the New York Times (iPod edition) this morning, including a nice reminiscence by John Noble Wilford who covered the Apollo program for the Times back in the day (if you search nytimes.com for "wilford moon" you can pull up his original articles, though you have to pay to read such archive articles). Good thing I've been absorbing the Apollo program for a good 45 years myself or I'd really be feeling some pressure this week!

Thursday is the anniversary of the Saturn V launch for Apollo 11 (July 16, 1969), and I'll be at the Boston Children's Museum again, helping out with their "living in space" exhibit. I plan to use Orbiter to launch a few simulated Saturn V's for the occasion. And that evening I plan to watch a PBS special, "Apollo 11: First Steps on the Moon," which will air at 9 pm on my local PBS station (WGBH Boston). The video here is a brief trailer for the show.

New Tune: Achin' All the Time

I posted a new tune on Garageband.com, "Achin' All the Time." I actually wrote it and started the recording on it in 2003, but did some additional work on it recently with Roger at the Tremolo Lounge (pictured) to get it ready for the new album I'm working on. I need to remember to take a camera to my next session so I can get some studio shots with Roger's beagle sidekick Mr. Henry.

This is a song that started out in Band-in-the-Box, using a reggae style backing track. I'm not much of a reggae artist so when we recorded it, we went for more of a straight rock ballad. Steve Mossberg played some keyboard tracks, and I especially like the organ solo he did. Lyrics are on the Garageband page. I also added the song to MySpace Music.

Apollo 11 Memories

We're coming up on the 40th anniversary days for Apollo 11 - the mission launched on July 16, 1969, and the first moon landing was on July 20. I just listened to Nancy Atkinson's 365 Days of Astronomy podcast from July 11, "Apollo 11 Through the Eyes of a Young Girl." Nancy even put some of her memories into musical form with a folk-style song called "Who Flies the Ship When Mike Collins Goes to Sleep?" Neil and Buzz get all the glory, but it's good to remember Mike, too (pictured above, training for Apollo 11 - it's hard to find photos of Mike in space!).

My own memories of this time in 1969 are not musical (yet!), but they are pretty vivid. As I wrote back in 2007, that was the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, and I was lucky enough to spend six weeks of it at Ohio University in an NSF-sponsored Student Science Training Program. There was a TV in the lounge of my dorm (I think it was Washington Hall), and that's where I watched with a bunch of fellow high school science students from all around the U.S. as Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon (it wasn't all science - we had some great field trips and I even had time to develop a serious crush on a girl from Virginia).

I had just turned 16 in June and was still planning to be an aeronautical engineer - it really seemed like anything was possible that summer, and that the way to do "anything" was through science and engineering. I finally ended up an optical engineer (with a few detours along the way for computer science, physics, and music), but I certainly attribute my strong interest in science, math, computers, flying, and space to the U.S. space program, especially the Gemini and Apollo programs that I followed intently through my elementary, junior high, and high school years, 1962 to 1970.

Heartwood: Cool Guitar Site & Blog

I'm working on updating my guitar/voice repertoire of "covers" (songs by people other than me), and this has me searching for good quality chord/lyric sheets (and also tabs, though I prefer chord/lyric sheets for most songs). I was specifically searching for the part that Paul Simon plays on the intro of his classic song "Homeward Bound" when I hit the jackpot with Rob Hampton's site, Heartwood Guitar Instruction. Rob is a guitar instructor in Seattle, and his web site has a lot of helpful guitar resources, but it was his collection of free chord/lyric sheets for some 450 songs (some with tabs) that attracted me. There are at least three special things about this collection:

1. It's done by a guy who can really play, so the chords are pretty accurate, and sometimes even transposed to more playable key/capo combinations
   
2. He has students of all ages, so he covers Wilco and Death Cab as well as Neil Young and the Beatles
3. He provides ad-free Word files in addition to web-formatted (HTML) pages!

This is saving me hours of time in addition to getting me to start playing some songs recorded after 1980 - thanks Rob!

Rob also has a blog which is quite cool, and to make sure you have no trouble determining what it's about, it's called A Guitar Teacher's Lesson Notebook. None of this namby-pamby "music of the spheres" business (is it music? is it astronomy? it's both! it's other stuff too!). He's got great playing and equipment tips, funny stories, inspirational ramblings, videos, photos, etc. (and almost as many guitar effects boxes as my producer Roger - almost).

If you play guitar (or are even thinking about playing guitar), check out Rob's site and blog. His stuff almost makes me wish I lived in Seattle so I could sign up for lessons with him - except he's got a five year waiting list, so I guess I'll stay in New England for now.

Space (and Me) at Boston Children's Museum

July is here and I'm realizing that the educational outreach events I've signed up for are coming up fast. I've got three events at the Boston Children's Museum in July (9, 16, and 30). Several other Solar System Ambassadors are also doing "walk up" events to supplement a temporary exhibit called "Living in Space" (May 24-September 8 in the Global Gallery). This is a traveling exhibit inspired by the International Space Station and intended to show children what it would be like to live, work, and play in space. The hands-on exhibit was created by the Children's Museum of Memphis. I'm looking forward to seeing this myself!

My supplemental "walk up" presentation will include demonstrating shuttle launches, moon landings, and solar system tours with Orbiter, and I will also have 3D glasses and posters of 3D Mars images from JPL. See the BCM calendar for the schedule for other Solar System Ambassadors' presentations.

Carnival of Space #109

You probably already know this since it went up on June 29, but this week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Jennifer Oullette at Discovery Space's Twisted Physics.

F-22 Rapture

Yes, I know it's the F-22 Raptor, but after witnessing a jaw-dropping flight demonstration by this airplane at the Rhode Island air show yesterday, "rapture" seems like the right word. I've been to many air shows and I've seen most everything that flies, but the maneuverability of the F-22 is just astounding. It's like gravity is not quite a law, more of an inconvenience for this airplane, though of course it's all done with aerodynamic forces just like any other airplane (but with a lot of computer assistance). It can fly so slow that it almost seems to stop in the air and hover, then execute a turn or a loop in very little distance. It can even "fly backwards" (sort of) - I posted a video on Flickr of the F-22 doing a tail slide maneuver, climbing straight up, stopping, and sliding down backwards for a considerable distance before flipping forward and back into regular flight.


The F-22 was definitely the star of the Rhode Island National Guard Air Show 2009 that I attended with my brother yesterday at Quonset State Airport in North Kingstown (sorry, Blue Angels, though you were amazing as always). I had never seen anything like it. But the rest of the show was great too. We had blue skies the entire day (after a solid week of rain) and this made the aerial performances all the more enjoyable. There were several excellent civilian aerobatics performers including the great Sean Tucker, a nice flight demonstration by a pair of vintage P-51 Mustangs, as well as virtouso demo team performances by the Canadian Snowbirds and the US Navy Blue Angels. A Mustang and an F-16 also joined the F-22 for a "Heritage Flight" close formation fly-by which was very cool (shown here - more pictures on my Flickr site).

I got to hang out for a while inside a V-22 Osprey (mainly for the shade and the seat), but unfortunately it didn't fly for the show, which would have been nice to see (this is the Marines' tilt-rotor transport, a hybrid airplane/helicopter). And of course there's that great air show food! All in all a fine day of kid-flashback aviation excitement. And beer.

Voices in My Head

Listening to headphones is such a common experience, but sometimes it still seems really weird. Sound normally comes from somewhere in the external environment, and your two ears help you to figure out the direction and to some extent the distance of a sound source. But with headphones feeding stereo music directly into your ears, you experience a "virtual soundscape" in which sounds seem to come from various directions and distances, but which really come from two small sound sources close to (or even in) each ear. Of course you can also experience this with stereo speakers (or better yet, with surround sound speakers), but it's more natural since the "sound field" actually surrounds you. With headphones, it's really more like the sounds are somehow in your head. I really like the experience, but sometimes it does seem weird.

I'm hearing this very strongly right now with my iPod Touch, using a new Motorola S9 wireless (Bluetooth) headset. This was made possible by the recently released 3.0 version of the iPhone/iPod Touch software that added Bluetooth support among other cool things (especially copy/paste). The fact that there are no wires and that the ear buds fit so snugly in my ears really seems to enhance this "voices in my head" experience. No psychosis or non-native chemicals required.

Since I'm working on arranging and recording vocals for a few of my new songs, I've been listening for inspiration to some of the masters of background vocals, especially the Beatles and the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys' 1972 album Carl and the Passions - So Tough is not usually considered one of their best, but for background vocals, it is simply amazing, especially if you listen through headphones. It's so much more than angelic harmonies (though there are plenty of those). There are many layers and textures, but the voices are still very distinct in the mix.

With help from Roger Lavallee on arrangements and production, I've gotten some pretty good background vocal blends and effects on some of my own recordings (not that I would compare myself to the Beach Boys). One example that's on MySpace Music is my song "Just Dancing." We were definitely thinking of the Beach Boys on the chorus for that track.

Carnival of Space #108

Remember me? With no posts since June 17, I think I'm officially A Very Bad Blogger. I spent last week in Munich for a trade show. It was very busy, although admittedly some of that busy time was evenings spent with friends and colleagues in beer gardens. Then I had to catch up on all the office work that piles up when you spend a week at a trade show and in beer gardens in Munich (even with a Blackberry). And today I had a vacation day for a recording session. A cool new song is almost done. I've been spending a lot of time practicing guitar, working on arrangements, singing, etc. It's nice to be immersed in music again after a few years of relative inactivity.

So space blogging is light for me these days - but not for these folks. Check out the latest Carnival of Space at Starts With A Bang.

The Mercury Big Picture

Another great space-related feature on the Big Picture the other day: Mercury and the MESSENGER spacecraft. The MESSENGER view above shows the area around Sveinsdottir crater (the odd elliptical feature near the center). MESSENGER will enter Mercury orbit in March 2011 after one more flyby of the planet.