Sadly, it looks like the recent budget cuts that President Obama announced during his State of the Union address have hit NASA where it hurts: the Ares spaceship program, set to replace the aging Space Shuttles in the next few years, appears to have been entirely cancelled.  In addition, planned future missions to the moon have been at least postponed if not entirely written off as well.  It is a shame that our nation, once at the forefront of space exploration, must once again take a backward step in the face of limited financial resources.

Few people will forget the major Mars Orbiter failure at NASA in 1999. Similarly few people will forget the massive server failure and data loss that has plagued T-Mobile and device maker/content provider Danger over the past several days.  Update: Microsoft has informed customers that most, if not all, data has been recovered.

Reports surfaced over the weekend that T-Mobile Sidekick users were unable to access data. The Sidekick is a media-centric, youth oriented phone developed by Danger, a company recently acquired by Microsoft. Danger was one of the first proponents of cloud based storage for contacts, text messages, and other files; as a result, this content is stored on Danger servers, and not directly on the device. Under normal circumstances, this solution works quite well: A failure on the phone or an interruption in network activity won’t cause data to be lost. However, this recent failure demonstrated a major flaw that other cloud based devices don’t have: the data was stored solely in the cloud, and not on the device! Having one copy of any data is never smart, and as both the cloud server’s data and backups were destroyed, it ended up being disastrous.

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We recently had the opportunity to visit and take a tour of the Mount Palomar Observatory, located in the Palomar Mountain range in San Diego County, California.

The sheer size of the structure doesn’t hit you until you are right up under it.  The massive 137 by 135 foot dome stands out in sharp contrast with the plant life on the mountain.  Asphalt roads leave the dome in several directions, and split off to several other domes on the several hundred acre property.

The 200+ inch Hale Telescope held the title of the world’s largest for years, and remains one of the leading tools used by astronomers today.  The cost of running the facility tops $10,000 per night, and with the telescope in operation over 300 days of the year, the cost of running it is no small sum.  The majority of funding comes from Caltech as well as other institutions in the United States and abroad.  The Hale telescope was built with a grant of about $6 million from the Rockefeller foundation in the 1940s.

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Gimp is another example of a terrific open source program.  For myself and many users, Gimp offers an easier-to-use experience than Photoshop for less complex things.  Making a starfield is one of them, with the main principles being the creation of “noise” or static and colorization of certain regions.

Start by downloading and installing Gimp, for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.  In addition, obtain the planet-render plugin from here and paste it into the “plugins” folder in the application directory.  This is not necessary, but it enables for stylish planets to be added to the starfield when you’re done.  In ubuntu, you can install this plugin automatically by installing the gimp-plugin-registry package.

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