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

from your P/S

Bing tiddly wibble twoh. Bibbly fingle turwilitzer frondle. Buhkeye sarny trezipter niglits dur wonny sopping froh. Sahn warblits conparnle dahlly, pin wintle sibbling farlits. Wuzizits fingle doh simble sarn thoo bibble nit fon pomble sarnits. Figgy pibble wot sahn parble ee ploble farnitz, zimpell farny wonits. Pibbly wintle fondle fit sarnbel tiddly warnits, stinfinkle foobly weepole polly beeweefibly ponny poddles! See if I Don't!

---------

from mine

A great man once said:- wing long yammbo phutt grouble yonk narg narg fishle sog yik yik slurge gedge. He was drunk at the time...

were they in the same tavern ?

Hah! Could be, could be...

I couldn't think of any other way for an ice breaker as suchBaron

a personal question ? if I may ? are you still employed at the space centre ?

time for kip

be safe, be well ok

Yep... still at JSC. The current contract is up for rebid right now, but since I'm currently working on one project (Shuttle 5 inch film shot with a Linhof camera. I own a Linhof view camera and I'd love to find some images somewhere of what this camera looked like. It shot 4x5 frames on 100' rolls of film.) and I have another project lined up after that with the folks at ASU who funded my previous project (5 inch Apollo film), so I'm fairly confident I'll be here for a couple of years at least.

Damn, that was a long, complicated sentence. Feel free to go back and read it again; it should make sense.

so are you like a film recorder of the various projects that go off there ?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=linhof+view+camera&biw=1536&bih=754&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0CC8Q7AlqFQoTCISg8_6v88YCFWQj2wodfgsMfA

is it like these ? must be worth a few bob (2cents>

Yeah. I do roll film scanning from the original flight film.

This is my camera.

http://www.lightmountainphotography.com/tech%20pages/camera%20page%20tech.htm

It's only worth a few hundred dollars anymore. I'd like to get a good digital back for it, but they're outrageously expensive.

tight fisted JSC, making you pay for your own cameras etc, that ain't fair
have they given you "space" for a studio ? plus! do you have a team or are you solo ?

hope you don't mind me being nosey

Sorry if I confused you. That's my personal camera. I just scan / digitize film for NASA. I use a very expensive scanner, a >$300,000 Leica. Here's a page describing my last project and it has a partial picture of the scanner I use.

http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/ABOUT_SCANS/index.html

Fascinating stuff!

great stuffthis isn't a job you've gotit's a paid hobby
as long as you get some recognition for your work

To be quite honest, it's a rather monotonous job. I really don't look at the images very closely, and even when I do, after a few tens of thousands of Earth Observation (Earth Obs) images, they tend to blur and get quite dull. Unless I recognize some landmark shape, like the ever popular view of Northern Africa and the Middle East, it all rather becomes generic. Snow, desert, forest, ocean, clouds, clouds, and more clouds. Mostly I'm just paying attention to the frame edges, to make sure I'm not cutting off some of the image; making sure the frame number on the image matches the file name I assign to it; watching for large dust and hairs; and checking focus (but that isn't even an issue with this scanner).

I take pride in my work, but if I wasn't able to intermittently distract myself with stuff like h2g2, the mind numbing boredom would have chased me into quiting and finding a better job long ago. It's not challenging at all.

But I'll do it while I can. If I don't do it, they might replace me with someone who won't take the care I do. I'd hate to see these images half-assed. But the way the budgets have been going, I can't help but suspect it's only a matter of time until my projects get dropped or they hire some kid right out of college or use interns to replace me.

I understandespecially the word "monotonous" for years I've had an empty wallet, so life's been monotonous in the things I could do/go etc

the drawback of agedon't look at the skills, look for someone cheaper