In Part 1 of Mission Control, we introduced Christopher Columbus Kraft, the man who guided the birth of ‘Mission Control’ for the United States space program.  Kraft and his group invented the position that became commonly known as ‘Flight’.  This call sign has been used for the director who rules over NASA’s ground control […]

AstroCal – December 2024        Although the shortest daylight of this year falls on the Winter Solstice – December 21, it will only take a few weeks before the daylight hours begin to slowly lengthen again.  I won’t go into my usual complaint about ‘how nice it would be to stay on Daylight Saving Time […]

       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 […]

       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 […]

      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 […]