h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just curious as to what you do at Johnson Space Center? I get the distinct impression with your references to 'nerds' that its something of perhaps a technical nature.
I work on industrial instrumentation on blast furnaces in the uk in my spare time between keeping the wife and kids happy..

I have had a background interest in space related things for a while so I thought I'd drop you a line and say hello, as you're in the business..

I don't remember referencing nerds but I am one of many around here.

I scan the astronaut film and archive the files. All of the film magazines are spliced together (like motion picture film) and I use several custom scanners to capture the images. The film they shot with their Hasselblad medium format cameras become 60 megabyte tif files. I personally scanned many of the images on that are now on this website: http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/
(Although many are now being directly downloaded from digital cameras aboard the ISS).

Sounds like a top job. Cheers for the link, I found a nice shot of our area.

pieshifter

Well, it would be if we were still flying shuttle missions. The only thing keeping my job going is scanning the early missions. And to be honest the actual work can get mind numbingly boring. When you've seen 10,000 images of the Earth from space you feel like you've seen them all. (A typical shuttle mission would have between 2,000 and 6,000 images each.)