Moon camera?

I don't really have a post for the weekend, since I've spent it at home with mis padres, but I did remember something:

The STADAN book says how the camera was mounted on the moon lander!!

"During the first nine minutes of the broadcast, NASA alternated between TV from Goldstone and Honeysuckle, searching for the best one. Neither was very good as they both came from 26-meter antennas (as opposed to the 64-meter dish at Parkes). Because of this, they could only accommodate blurry images using what was called ‘slow-scan television’—a picture transmission method used mainly by amateur radio operators to transmit and receive black and white pictures. There was one more thing. Not only was the TV picture grainy and blurry, it was upside-down! 

This was because as Armstrong began his 2.4-meter (8-foot) descent down the ladder, he pulled a D-ring which dropped open the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) containing the television camera. Due to the way the camera had to be mounted, however, when the MESA dropped opened, it was upside-down....

In a little known vignette of history, the way the camera was mounted in the MESA and the way the compartment dropped opened caused the camera to be slightly tilted with respect to the true horizontal-axis of the LM. What this meant was that an even more harrowing appearance was added to Armstrong’s already dramatic climb down the ladder. In reality, although the incline of the ladder was indeed quite precipitous at 65º, it was not as steep as seen on TV, which gave the illusion like it was almost vertical."

Tsiao, 176-178.

In other words: There was a conveniently located outdoor sort of pocket in the lunar lander, mounted a little off true, that made for some hella dramatic camera angles.  Somebody with access to a 1:1 replica or, even better, an actual lunar module could probably wander around until they got a good look at the ladder to find that D-ring, because it's probably pretty big for Armstrong to have been able to pull it. Those gloves were fairly dextrous, but they were still pretty thick and I doubt he would have been physically capable of grabbing anything too terribly delicate as he was climbing out of an already slightly awkward space craft.

Continuing Historical Research

I found another photo of NASA Rosman, paper linked

I am continuing to research the history of Rosman, because they haven't needed to know it terribly in-depth.

So far, I have learned some interesting tidbits that I can confirm, as well as a fair few I cannot.

• The 12.2 meter (40 foot) telescope does not appear in papers concerning Rosman from the NASA days. Which puts a dent in my hypothesis that, being smaller, it was installed first. I'm starting to wonder if that whole part of the site was put in during the Department of Defence days--you can kind of guess by the nicknames for the surrounding areas, or by the random tech they found laying around. The 40 foot was, until recently, covered by a dome so that spy satellites couldn't tell where it was pointing. It's been somewhat out of commission since the dome's removal and only came back online a few weeks ago. 
• There might have been a 35 foot dish. It might have been partially underground, which could partially explain the conspiracy theories about vast underground complexes. But the dish was during the DoD days, if it existed, and I haven't started trying to research those...if they've even been declassified. 
• Our 85 foot dishes were tested extensively, but the facility was only really brought online for NASA when both dishes were completed--references to the construction efforts and calibration efforts appear before 1963-1964 or so, but we are not used in a research paper with regards to satellite tracking until after construction was completed. 
• I have found a declassified, heavily censored document on what the DoD did here! Does it actually say anything? No. No, it doesn't. Thank you for declassifying this helpful information, DoD. Thanks. At least I can confirm you stopped whatever [REDACTED] on 31 March 1995. </sarcasm>
• The Department of Defence search engine (for their website) is Bing. They have declassified how many nuclear weapons they've had for the last fifty years, but not what happened here. Thanks, DoD. Thanks.
• I also located this document, which is a request for information and presumably all communication associated with that request, confirming that to say what happened at Rosman would directly and adversely impact national security. In other words, whatever the DoD did (apart from adding on to this building, which I appreciate), they still aren't telling. Or weren't, as of 9 years ago. Somehow, I doubt the situation has changed appreciably. 
• I probably won't be able to confirm anything from the Department of Defence days for the history I am compiling. Awesome. I stand by my earlier assumption, that Rosman continued doing what it was designed to do: It tracked satellites, just not ours, and required a higher security clearance. 

But the DoD did kindly provide a picture dated 1977. Which, I notice, was before they took over the site. So here's what the site looked like just after Apollo-Soyuz, in its NASA heyday. (Real smooth, fellas.) 

I guess you can tell it's us.

What We Saw (Among Other Things)

Two photos of Saturn from last night, combined in Photoshop

It was supposed to rain last night, but it didn't. Which was nice. It was humid enough that you might not have known it wasn't raining... but c'est la vie. The guys messaged around 10:30 to say they were going observing, and we headed up to the telescope to find 'em. We got a great look at Jupiter, which didn't photograph very well at all--you could see the bands, at least four, maybe more. The planet's reflected light washed them out, my cellphone camera wasn't quite sensitive enough. To see the three moons in the picture below, I still had to combine two photos in Photoshop.

There was a fourth moon visible as well, to the right, but the camera didn't catch it.

We got a really incredible look at the moon, which was also hard to photograph because the moon is nearly full... and it washed out about half the sky. It was so bright, that when the moon was in the eyepiece with a filter to block some of the light, you could tell because it lit up the person trying to look through the telescope like a flashlight. We did not, by the way, need flashlights; I'm surprised there wasn't enough ambient light for my camera to take pictures normally. Looking through the telescope totally thrashed your night vision and left several people who looked blinking frantically while trying to climb down the rolling stairs that we had to push up next to the eyepiece. 

Too bright to focus without ow ow ow my eyes

You'd almost think we were Apollo astronauts looking out our windows...

As for other things... because I am here to do a job, not just to look at pretty things...

I'm working my way more thoroughly through the STDN book. I learned already today, for instance, that the footage of Neil Armstrong getting out of the LEM was received by a telescope just like 26E and/or 26W. (The two are actually different, even though they're the same size--manufactured by different companies.) Not the footage of Buzz Aldrin: That was received by Honeysuckle Creek Observatory's larger 64 metre telescope, which was what the facility preferred to use due to its larger size and better ability to receive the TV signal. I think they switched to it about 8 minutes in. What can we do with this information?

Well, Honeysuckle Creek isn't there anymore. They shut it down and moved the telescopes after Apollo. What I'm coming to appreciate about PARI is that we're fairly unique out of the old tracking sites. Most were dismantled, moved, shut down, demolished, given back to their respective governments, etc. As far as I can tell, apart from Goldstone in California (which was part of the deep sky network) and one of the (many) Australian stations, we're almost unique in that we're still here.

(They switched to Honeysuckle Creek's 26m as Neil reaches the bottom of the ladder--although it's possible that this is all Honeysuckle in this recording--and away to the larger telescope at a different facility about 8, 9 minutes in--there's a slight jump in the footage and the contrast appears to improve.) 

I also found this tidbit: 

"As launch vehicles became steadily more reliable in the early 1960s and satellites were being launched into higher inclination orbits (the tilt of a satellite’s orbit measured with respect to the Equator), their ground tracks went well outside the ±35° latitude window that Minitrack had been designed to support." (Tsiao 34) 

We are one of the first facilities built above the ±35º latitude window to supplement the original Minitrack satellite tracking system. This quote illustrates why we were important.

 "The Minitrack approach gave way to far better equipped 12-meter (40-foot) and 26-meter (85-foot) dishes. The large 26-meter parabolic dish antennas, in particular, were designed to support the Nimbus meteorological satellite program with its flood of high data rate telemetry cloud cover photographs. In addition to receiving downlinked telemetry, these antennas could transmit satellite commands from a single disc-on-rod uplink antenna mounted on the side of the dish connected to a high power amplifier at the base of the antenna. At the same time, a somewhat scaled down, 12-meter version of the same antenna type was installed at a number of stations to circumvent the cost of the larger dishes." (Tsiao 36)

Well hello. What telescopes are we operating right now? Well, we as a facility--the 26-meters aren't powered on right now, but my roommate is currently operating the 12-meter dish. (They're determined to get the tracking as precise as possible.)  I can't say for sure PARI dealt with the Nimbus program without having another look-round the museum or doing more research, though.

It strikes me as possible, although I can't prove this without documentation similar to what we found for 26W for the 12 meter, that the 12 meter was installed as a supplement to 26E while 26W--or even as 26E-- was being built, such that the facility could be fully utilised as quickly as possible. I don't know how urgent the situation was, and probably couldn't without pawing through some very official archives which we don't have and that may or may not have existed since the 1980s. It does seem possible that we were involved with Explorer 35, a satellite that orbited the moon; the book mentions GRARR accuracy shortly after mentioning that Rosman was constructed as a GRARR facility--see my earlier post for a diagram of GRARR and more information on how it worked.

Actually, scratch that: I can confirm that Rosman tracked and received data from Explorer 35. How? NASA put the paper online.

Cue triumphant trumpets. 

Can I use this information? Only if I can make Explorer 35 really really cool.

So far, this is only cool to...well...me. 

Can I make this cool? If I make it cool, can I fit it into the story of Rosman Tracking Facility/Rosman Research Station/PARI? I just don't know. But I'll keep it in mind as something I can confirm we did, confirm was useful, and confirm provided real, scientific data--of...some kind. Some kind that is a bit difficult to understand. But we do get guests who appreciate specific examples of what happened and who don't want to read through our rather wordy displays, which I can hardly fault. 

Explorer 35 was really freaking weird looking

I got to thinking what I could do for some kind of STADAN exhibit--because that would be good, either as part of the timeline I've been wondering about, or as its own separate historical note, maybe on the other side of the "TALK TO SPACE!" thing I've been wondering about. Imagine, if you will, a nice, sturdy globe. Fairly large, maybe a foot and a half in diameter, it's mounted on a pedestal such that it sits just above the waist level for the average adult. The axis is tilted so that the equator is easily visible and the globe is also mounted so that it can be spun freely--adding the all important interactive element. Various sites around the globe are marked in brightly coloured, labeled dots that easily stand out on the map: Rosman, Gilmore Creek, Tanarive, Carnarvon, Madrid, Canary Islands, Honeysuckle Creek, Guayas, Hawaii. There is a nearby--no more than six inches away--placard that explains what these labels are: The former STADAN sites. The one labeled Rosman is marked with a star, which the placard includes in its key and claims, "YOU ARE HERE!" 

Then I got distracted on a graphic design tangent, because I was stuck sitting at the front desk (while the woman who's normally there was in a meeting) and looking for something productive to do... ahem. 

I want to do a gouache or oil rendering of this in full colour, but pencil gets the idea across.

I'm imagining a nice graphic, quite large, eye-catching. Extremely eye-catching, well rendered, so that when the graphic is part of the exhibit the satellite appears nearly as large as life--don't worry, it's a small satellite, not like the ATS-6 one we actually have.  The design also has that empty space that could be filled with a label, and nothing is going to be removed from the image if part of the satellite's bottom right solar panel isn't visible--due to, for example, some kind of display. Possibly of our three model satellites...

Explorer 35 with technicians for scale

The exhibit could also actually incorporate video--we have about six video screens that currently add literally nothing to the museum. I don't know why we have them, actually. A laptop sized wall-mounted screen, positioned nicely, could display a NASA graphic of satellite orbits or something. 

Like this! only hopefully less jumpy. I'll have to try and find something. I know it exists...somewhere.

So far, by the way, my idea of making our long line of windows into a timeline with history of the facility has been popular with everyone I've mentioned it to. I'm getting myself into a bit of a mess, since the history of this place with the kind of specifics some guests seem to want isn't exactly consolidated anywhere... but, whatever. It's interesting mess.


There is...actually....one thing that's a bit of a problem. Guests come up to us and ask if we know what kind of top secret things went on here.

I think they want juicy information about aliens... SETI... the stuff you see in scifi films, or Contact, or War Games. I don't even know. As far as I can tell, even in the Department of Defence days, Rosman did more or less the same darn thing it had always done--only, the people running the facility had much higher security clearances and tracked far more elusive satellites for somewhat more nefarious purposes.

Sean suggested throwing up a "Lore of PARI" display. Since this would save everyone a lot of bother, that's probably worth considering...and because it would give the conspiracy theory nuts an absolute field day. 

The Plan and WE FOUND A COOL THING

So I was actually able to meet with my mentor. Which is good. And I have a more concrete list of tasks to branch out from, which is better. For the remainder of the week and until further notice (hah) I am to:

1. Fine tune the assignment from last week, to be specifically titled "Framing the PARI Museum Visitor Experience". My takeaway, which should resonate with those unfortunate enough to be veterans of the IB, is to make it an IB-esque 1-2 page reflection.
2. Research a mysterious concept called "Design Thinking" and determine its major components. (Expect a blog post.) It is apparently more than just graphic design. If anyone has heard of this before, let me know. If not, well, you will (hopefully) be able to learn what the heck that is soon. 
3. Draft/Outline a powerpoint presentation on the book I was researching a while back, the "Read you loud and clear!" The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network book (pdf linked again), about 20 minutes long, to present to the staff about the in-depth history of this place. Since I'm going to want diagrams, this also will involve snagging my graphics tablet when I get home this weekend. 
4. Continue drafting questions for museums, to be emailed in PDF attachment to a contact at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC--specifically, the VP of Exhibits and Planning. Hold off on emailing everyone else and their cousins until after that meeting, hopefully fairly early next week. (Mom, I'll keep you posted.)

A photograph from the aforementioned history book. Is this even us? We aren't sure. They could've mislabeled it...

Now, where to begin...

First, I did a sketch of the view from the gallery windows and made some notes on how that could potentially be useful as a timeline of Rosman/PARI, with a few key notes. The new website for the facility, which is still under development (but looks really nifty!) has a timeline after Don Cline (our founder) established PARI as a nonprofit, but the before sections are iffy. And people seem to be curious! So I'd like to aggregate what artefacts we have into some kind of timeline/history display within 5 feet of the wall, to take advantage of the full view of 26E the window affords.

Next,

What the heck is "Design Thinking"?

Design Thinking is a method for creating an end product for a very specific purpose. I get the impression that it can be used for museums, furniture, small objects, computer programs, anything intended to serve a large volume of people with related non-identical purposes. 

The steps listed in a Stanford pamphlet (they know what they're doing, right? They're Stanford!) are as follows: 

Empathise→Define→Ideate→Prototype→Test 

I can infer that, not listed, are the steps "Refine" and "Fabricate", on either side of the ultimate step. I can also infer that, given sufficient funding and time, the stages from Ideate→Test could be looped indefinitely, or until the exhibit is practically perfect. (If that's possible.) 

Phase One: Empathise

(I'm using the british spellings because my keyboard is just set that way and I don't bother to change it. Well, I set it to Russian yesterday because I was trying to translate a page on Apollo-Soyuz. Did you know that it's a bleeding nightmare to try to translate russian when your russian is limited to a partial knowledge of the cyrillic alphabet and about five words?) 

The principle here is to understand people and their needs within the context of one's design challenge. Or, "What do people want in terms of engagement with your product?" Basically, Phase One is just a fancy and formal way of putting the stuff I've already been doing. It's a need that's pretty easy to recognise, just in terms of sanity. Do people come to PARI for our rocks, space junk, history, what? In a very practical sense, why am I here? Why did they bother to bring somebody on board to do all this design analysis? 

The pamphlet goes on to tell people how to empathise with others, which alarms me somewhat. I guess it's useful in terms of making sure you can recognise empathising and stick a label on it, but it also makes me wonder what kind of psychopaths they're catering to. 

Phase Two: Define

The purpose here is to consolidate the information gathered in Phase One. Officially, Phase Two is defined as the creation of a meaningful and actionable problem statement--which sounds like a load of tripe to me. In a nutshell, one uses the data one has gathered about visitors to create a composite user/visitor/guest to design for.

Phase Three: Ideate

Brainstorm ideas for the design question established in Phase Two. Thoroughly brainstorm, not throwing anything out until later, saving even the most bizarre or unexpected solutions to the problem. The time to evaluate is after you rack your brains and can't come up with a single thing you haven't already considered, at which point select the best ideas for

Phase Four: Prototype 

Mock up, preferably in full scale or half scale, several of the best ideas from Phase Three. Use cheap materials for quick-and-dirty construction, such as foam board, cardboard, found objects, scotch or painters tape, and laser printed labels. Don't do anything nice at this stage, and only mock up for the things you want to test later--such as scale, visual impact, usability, or a lighting reference. Make it nice enough for visitor feedback, but don't blow your budget here; save that for after

Phase Five: Test

Solicit feedback on the prototype from users and professionals alike for input on usability and design impact, that kind of thing. However, do not give users a "tour" of your design solution; the point of this whole endeavour was something inherently usable with easy-to-understand features that a user with a range of motivations can understand and get something out of. Refine the prototype and repeat as necessary. It may also be helpful to build multiple prototypes and have your testers compare different iterations to each other, so that the most successful designs can be selected for in the final product.

BUT I MENTIONED WE FOUND A COOL THING

A mysterious stand of mysterious plans

Dan, the intern who was working on a paper about his software development, needed a break today. So we headed over to a pile of blueprints and maps and plans in the corner, initially with the mission of figuring out what's going on in that first picture I printed. We didn't solve that mystery, and I'm still only guessing that it's during the construction of one of the two 85' (26 meter) telescopes...probably 26E, since it was built first and the other telescope is pretty obviously not a 26 meter, but possibly 26W and 26E is out of frame of the picture. It's all a bit of a mystery, really. It's also possible the photo was mislabeled. I'm not ruling that out.

BUT ON TO THE COOL THING WE FOUND

We found, as expected, blueprints and maps and plans. We also found some information that looked like schematics and analysis for the 85' telescopes, at which point we called over Colleen, who's the intern working on the 12 meter telescope--it looked like some of the stuff we know she's been working with, and she was able to identify the pictures. But we also found some unidentifiable hand drawn circuit diagrams. (Any electrical engineers, computer engineers, or people familiar with circuit diagrams in general, if you want to come up, we can show you. Your input would be appreciated, since this is kind of a fun little mystery.)  We also-also found some plans from the building of 26 West, the second of the two 26 meter telescopes constructed in 1964:

Some very official bits and bobs from the telescope mount, somewhat yellowed
I think this looks like flying saucer plans at first glance. I know it isn't.
I did take enough engineering to identify what this is in a general sense.

In another drawer, we found plans from 1986-1988. Which is significant and somewhat surprising because Rosman wasn't a NASA facility after 1981. (It was before then--I have an artefact from 1980 that's a NASA calendar, made for Rosman, sitting on my desk right now, if you want proof.) We found Department of Defence Renovation Plans for the main building. 

We looked through them, established that the gold-carpet tiles were installed by NASA as part of the original facility--also identified by its blue brick exterior--and the grey carpet tiles are from the 1988 renovation, and also established something else cool: The renovation wasn't actually completed, there were plans for another expansion to this building. Presumably they lost funding and/or the Cold War ended and rendered this whole thing a bit obsolete. We then went down to the basement, where I remembered some more plans and found the blueprints on much bigger paper, some with the architect's seal visible--a Charlotte firm, for the Charlotteans reading, just FYI. 

WE FOUND DoD ARTEFACTS!! I mean, we found DoD artefacts cool enough that I am going to find a way to put some of this stuff on display. The coolest looking bits, that is. With signage so people know what they're looking at and why we spend about an hour looking at them and figuring out just what the DoD did. (that looks funny.) 

I also noticed the 1980 NASA calendar that was in the folder of, "We have this folder of stuff you might like, intern!" had a map of all the different tracking facilities still active in 1980. So it might be nice to scan that and make a nice copy for the timeline exhibit I'm ruminating on, since the original is in pretty wretched shape--water damage and yellowed and so on. 

We are ROS.
At this point, many of the Australian facilities had been decommissioned.
Alas.

More Museum Lists, Design Ideas

SO I've been looking up more museums, mostly keeping to within the three hour radius established by Atlanta, Charlotte, Oak Ridge, and Bristol VA (to cover the four states within "range", although Bristol is more of a formality--Virginia is basically just too far). I've found a few, of varying location and subject matter, some of which look more useful than others.

This is a major attraction. Can we do that? We have way more awesome space rocks.

Previously mentioned: Discovery Place, The Schiele Museum, the Colburn Earth Science Center, the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the Fernbank Museum. New on this list:

• The Catawba Science Center, Hickory NC. Listed because, according to its website, it actually has some space science exhibits and interactives! I know. Wow. 
• Mineral and Lapidary Museum, Hendersonville NC. Listed because they managed to make their meteorite (singular) a major attraction and I want to know how the heck they did it. (Photo from their website posted earlier.) They also have an exhibit on fluorescent minerals and some stuff on fossils and geodes. If they're any good, they would be an awesome resource. (I've linked to their website.)
• Museum of North Carolina Minerals, Spruce Pine NC. It's a smallish museum, but I remember enjoying it as a kid. I think they had some interactives. They're relatively nearby, worth considering. 
• Tennessee Museum of Aviation, Pigeon Forge TN. Actually slightly north of Pigeon Forge--we're not talking the usual Gatlinburg area levels of kitsch...Probably. It's a little hard to tell from their website. I'm fairly tentatively putting this one in, but they seem to have some kind of neat stuff? it might be redundant, though, given the closer-to-home
• Carolinas Aviation Museum, Charlotte NC. Which is mediocre at best, but they're new. They might have somebody on their staff who has recently done or is doing the same general stuff I am, and might therefore be able to offer advice. They're also on an old Military/aviation site and it might be interesting to see if they have any ideas or suggestions for working the history of the site into the museum itself. 

Begin Phase 2: Museum Pestering

Or: I ramble a lot and compare museum sizes to dinosaurs.

My mentor is in Greensboro today, which means I'm left to my own devices to come up with a daily activity that fits the weekly schedule I'm supposed to follow. I'm running out of books or lectures that seem remotely helpful, barring recommendations from aforementioned mentor, and my schedule reads that this week, I am supposed to

1. Identify appropriate museums/exhibit models to benchmark.
2. Begin the process of investigating select museums, which includes preparing a travel schedule, contacting appropriate people, and creating some kind of questionnaire to assist in some kind of in-person investigation. 

I can only assume that the first point refers to setting some kind of standard for "Exhibit Effectiveness".

The problem arises when one considers that PARI has no competitors in Space Science in North Carolina. There are other museums that have effective interactive exhibits--that's about all Charlotte's Discovery Place seems to have these days--and effective rock exhibits, such as in the Schiele Museum (heck, they have an annual rock and fossil festival). There are other science museums within a day's travel of PARI, such as the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge (three hour drive, annoying but totally doable). Heck, there's anything in Atlanta--comparable distance if you get there around 10 or so, which is when one would arrive if they left before 8am. I don't know what kind of a museum the Fernbank is, mostly fossils, but it might also be useful. Heck...the Atlanta aquarium might have somebody with useful advice, although the scale is something like comparing an anole to a spinosaurus.

If you haven't seen an anole for a while, they're about the same size and mass as an EXPO white board marker.

Adventures in Asheville and Brevard

I haven't been at PARI for most of the last two days. I say most: I was here last night after about 8 and most of the morning. I'm at PARI now. I don't really intend to leave again today unless somebody has a really great suggestion, I get a sudden desire to cook something I don't have the ingredients for (read: most things excepting pasta, chicken, grilled cheese, or tomato soup), or I fancy hiking off campus. The last isn't terribly likely: I haven't really explored most of the stuff on campus.

But yesterday I was gone from 7am-8pm. For a good reason, I wasn't just skipping work because I'm sick of museology books! The particularly bad corporate-ese book aside, the books are mostly good, informative, and I like interacting with visitors and seeing what the other interns are up to. No, I had orientation at UNCA.

That's right: It's official, I'm official, they aren't going to throw me out without creating a heck of a lot of work for themselves. (I think that caveat was only in my acceptance letter on the off chance that they had some kind of obscene number of applications and had to cut people somewhere.) I have a student ID, t-shirt, car magnet, and I saw my dorm and met some of my potential building-mates. Woo!

I blurred out my student ID. And not a *great* photo of me. Ah well. C'est la vie.

The dorm looks fine. It's close to the dining hall, there are only 19 other people (including the RA), everyone in a single-sex suite of 4 has their own room, there's a little kitchenette and the washer and dryer do not demand a steady diet of quarters. (The last totally blew everyone's mind.) However, it's a good thing I'm average height. (5'4" or so. It's the average height of an american woman. I'm not short, you're all tall. So there.) Why? Because the dorm was designed to be eco-friendly, which means it retains heat well in the winter. What does that mean? Low ceilings. I can comfortably reach up and touch the ceiling from standing without jumping or high heels or anything. They said a basketball player was once assigned there by mistake and he promptly swapped rooms with somebody in a different dorm.

The dining hall is fine. It was crowded, because that's where they shuttled everyone attending orientation at noon, and that's why I ended up in the indian food line. Not because of any special fondness for indian food--I mean, it's pretty good, and I certainly don't object to a nice curry--but because that was the first line I came to. While it may seem slightly bizarre to find a nice chicken curry with naan and basmati rice in western North Carolina, it wasn't bad and I won't mind eating there during the year; I'm required to purchase a meal plan since I'll be living on campus, and I'm inclined towards the 2 meals/day 7 days/week one, so I don't have to worry about cooking unless I want to eat at a dining hall for breakfast, or whatever. (14 meals/week, unused meals roll over to the next week, they do not roll over between semesters or at the end of the year. Parents, if you have questions, let me know so I can go climb up on the ridge and call you, or I'll see you next weekend. I have more information in my sack-o-orientation papers.) 

There's a taekwondo group. I mentioned I used to do taekwondo and they got all excited. Could be fun. There's also a hiking group, and on campus activities are free. 

HOWEVER. 

I set off yesterday morning figuring I'd program my directions in when I got to Brevard, because when I've driven through before, they have 5 bars cell service and LTE data for T-mobile. I have every time I've been there before or since, after all. 

Imagine my chagrin: I got there and had 5 bars of service...but no data of any kind. I didn't have data for the whole trip, even in Asheville. Which was fine going Brevard-->UNCA. There are signposts galore, it's an easy drive. You take NC Hwy 280 out of town (it's the main road, Broad Street, and the road you turn onto once you get off the winding road that will eventually lead up to PARI), drive until you reach the Asheville Airport, and follow the signs until you get there. It's not bad at all. Takes a little over an hour, but not much over, depending on traffic. Brevard has enough of a population to brew a slight rush hour, kind of like Tuscaloosa. 

Coming *back*...

Let's put it this way.

I now own a compass from OP Taylor's Toy Emporium in Brevard.

I bought this today.

Yesterday, I bought a lovely road map of North Carolina... 

Because it's also really easy to end up on the wrong interstate out of Asheville. I-40 and I-26 both go through--well, it's I-240 when it loops around Asheville, but you get the idea--and they're right near each other. I should have taken I-26 East (it mostly goes south, really) until I found the airport.

I ended up on I-40. I only really started to figure out something was wrong when my ears started to pop: Asheville and Brevard sit at approximately the same elevation. PARI's higher, my ears typically pop twice driving up or down to the observatory. So that's how I ended up sitting outside a Stuckey's  about half an hour down I-40 in The Middle Of Freaking Nowhere with my map, trying to figure out if I should take I-26 east or west--I got lucky. Also I still have no clue how to get on to the western variation from Asheville, I didn't see that exit at all. Surely it exists, but I cannot conclusively prove this fact. 

So a slightly-more-than-one-hour drive took over two hours...because I'm an idiot who didn't plot the route on a map *before* I ended up in some obscure Stuckey's gas station and Dairy Queen. 

Be afraid when coming back from Asheville to Brevard. It's not hard either, but you need to drive along following signs very carefully to 26 until you find the 26 E exit from what I can only assume was 240. You then get off at the Brevard/Airport/NC 280 exit  and drive until you escape Buncombe county, Henderson county, and reach Transylvania county. At that point, keep driving until you hit an obvious town: Brevard. If you're going to Pari, drive through Brevard (still on Broad Street/280) until you pass the boiled peanuts stand. Turn right at the next vegetable stand (there's also a kayaking place/tap room at the turn, sometimes a food truck) and keep going until you see a big sign that says "PARI" and has a left arrow. If you manage to still get lost after that sign, there's probably no hope for you. You still do have to drive after the big sign, but only until you see the Pari driveway. Can't miss it. 

When I got back, it was evening at PARI: The monthly evening educational session and star party held on the second friday of every month. If my helpful directions didn't give you the hint, you're invited to the July session. Come see us!! We like visitors. Well, we like any excuse to head up the hill and get out the telescopes and look at stuff. You can look too! We looked at Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, the moon, the ring nebula, and some globular clusters. I sketched Saturn and Mars for you:

Mark swears he saw the polar cap. I said I didn't remember it.
Drawn from my memory of several nights ago. 

Image inverted and tinted to look more like what we saw in the telescope

If I'm going to do much more of this sketching, I need a more powerful red flashlight, tho... you use red so that you don't bleach out your night vision. It's important to have that night vision so you can see the fainter stars you can use to star hop to something like M82 or the ring nebula. They're not that hard to see, but you do need to have night adjusted eyes. 

Today, I decided to explore Brevard. It's close, and they make exploring downtown really easy. There's public parking on the streets if you can parallel park, most of it with no meter. You're welcome to leave your car there all day. There are also several lots off the street if, like me, you never learned how to parallel park because the state of North Carolina no longer requires it to get a driver's license. For what it's worth, I can do a great 2-point road turn. Heck, with my car, I barely need to, but I can. So that's the important part. (Hah.) They put a helpful map online, and direct one-way streets so you can't get lost finding the public parking unless you try.

I like Brevard.

For multiple reasons. It's a nice town, decent size, pretty location, friendly people, and an appreciation for the arts. There are multiple easy-to-access grocery stores, banks, a public library, and a post office. Fairly standard stuff, most of it off Broad Street/NC 280. 

The shops, some on Broad street, some on side streets or Main street, are delightful. I wandered into a spice and tea shop that rivals any I've seen--including that one in Asheville, Mom knows the one I mean. Actually, I think it might be better in terms of tea selection. The back of the store is dominated by black teas on one side, herbal on the other, sold by the ounce or in sampler packs. I'm pretty conservative in my tea-preferences. I prefer green tea, breakfast tea (Irish if you have it) or Darjeeling. I'm not partial to adding fruity bits or whatever. There were several teas even I would have liked to try (had I not forgotten my tea strainer at home, a grievous oversight for sure): some kind of Frisian/germanic black tea, similar to but not quite a breakfast tea, some kind of fancy russian blend, a mint-gunpowder green tea that seemed rather nice, and a few others as well as the aforementioned breakfast teas, green teas, and darjeeling. I mostly took note of these for a certain tea-crazed younger sibling. One of the sampler packs contained a few you'd like, kid. I'm not saying it's your birthday present, but... 

There's also the most astounding toy store I've ever seen--where I found my new compass. In addition to the compass, it had two floors and many rooms of toys varying from a stuffed dodo to Hello-Kitty to Barbie to LEGO to locally made chess boards and matryoshka dolls. Not to mention the model trains, cars, dinosaur section, Fisher Price section, dress-up room, board game section, Star Wars stuff, classic books, a series of "Adventurer's Pocket Gear" along the lines of the compass, kites, marbles...

Scraw?

It's possible I'm still actually 8. I wandered around in there for way too long. It's also possible I simply couldn't find the door again. It kind of blended in to the wall... 

I had lunch at a soda shop counter that's been open for business since 1942. The drug store it was part of has since converted into an outdoor shop/gift store, but they apparently still serve the same recipes, have the same neon signage, and probably the same juke box (with those little records). I highly recommend Rocky's Soda Shop.

I didn't get any ice cream. I should've. 

It's across the street from a gem mining/rock shop/froyo venue. Which is an odd combination, but they had a nice (albeit small) selection of rocks and were wise enough to put the chocolate and cherry froyo in the same machine. Maybe I'll get some next time. It's certainly hot enough, but I didn't want anything melting all over me while I walked around.

The soda shop is also down the street from several diners and next to a bakery. Down the street from the spice shop is a record store that my dad and I visited the first time we came up to PARI. Wayward Sibling needs to visit there as well if she ever manages to get back from Spain. 

At any rate, good couple of days when I wasn't lost, explored a lot, had a generally good time. Back to the regularly scheduled museology on Monday, where hopefully I won't have any more books and can get started on my next task: figuring out which museums I can visit to pump for information, what information I still need, what questions I should be asking (out of all the ones I've written and/or listed), and how I should ask them. Fun! Hopefully. Or at least different.