As many of my friends and family know, I had managed to get tickets to the launch of STS-134 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors’ Center and planned on attending the launch. I headed to Florida, met up with Lorie an acquaintance from on-line that was using my second ticket and went to the space center. And there began a genuine space experience (at least according to some of the people I know that work at NASA) which involved hours of tedious waiting, hopefully to be followed by an extremely interesting few seconds that make it all worth it. Of course, I was not that lucky and the launch was scrubbed about 2 hours before launch due to a problem with one of the APUs. I still had fun and got to explore the visitors’ center.

The crowd and Kennedy Space Center reflect in one spectator's glasses.

I looked forward to my trip to New Zealand for many, many, many reasons. One of those reasons was that rural areas of the south island are some of the least light polluted in the world thanks to the low population density and fact that it is an island in the middle of a vast ocean. I wanted to take star trail photos. And since I was going to be there for almost a month, I would be there for a new moon, which is the idea condition.

The weather, however, had different plans. Still, I did get a few nights of clear skies.

The first of my clear nights occurred while I was in Hamner. Lewis pass is about an hour back towards the west coast so I headed there to take some star photos.

There has been a bunch of hype about the “super moon” in the last few days. Of course, most of the speculation about the moon’s affect on earthly events is non-sense. About the only thing that is actually true is that the moon appears about 14% larger than when it is at the other extreme, and larger than it does at just about any other time. Since everyone made a big deal about this lots of people, myself included, went out and took pictures of the moon over the last couple of days as it moved through full. Of course, any full moon would have done just as well.

This is the moon 2 days prior to the full moon when we had nice clear skies.