Close

From the Vaults

Musical ramblings from the manager

FTV: Mission Control

       The 1995 movie adaptation of Jim Lovell’s book Lost Moon spawned a catch phrase that took on a life of its own.  In Apollo 13, Tom Hanks (who portrayed Lovell) repeated the famous, “Houston, we have a problem” after the explosion on board their Moon bound spacecraft was first called in by his fellow […]

Read More

AstroCal – November 2024

       November will be an interesting month to watch the planets dance across the sky, especially Jupiter and Venus.  On November 4, Jupiter will rise in the east just before Venus sets in the west.  Both will be bright (magnitude -2.8 and -3.9 respectively) so they won’t be hard to see even though they will […]

Read More

FTV: Lake Superior II (revisited)

      Although there is no prohibition on revisiting past topics in these FTV chronicles, every once in a while a story comes up that is too good to leave in the past.  With the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald only a year away, I felt compelled to revisit this historical event.  In […]

Read More

FTV: Subscription Blues

       I mourn the loss of brick and motar bookstores.  Book World in downtown Houghton was my favorite because when we would stop by to browse, I always managed to find the newest issue of Classic Rock Magazine or Mojo to keep me in touch with the music scene.  When the entire Book World franchise […]

Read More

AstroCal – October 2024

       Comets do not always behave as advertised.  Sometimes they are not as spectacular as predicted and sometimes they perform beyond what is expected.  I will let our friends at Sky Calendar cover what may happen on the cometary front this month:  “There’s a chance that Comet C/2023 A3 may surge in brightness around October […]

Read More

FTV: The Six

       Here are five names that are included in the above title:  Rhea Seddon, Shannon Lucid, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, and Judy Resnik.  If you have an idea who these women are, then you are probably a space junky like me.  If none of these names rings a bell, then the sixth name will probably […]

Read More