Hi all,
Here's a summary of my experience the other week on NASA's low-gravity
KC-135 aircraft, where I took my TOPE 1 photo.
First of all, a big thanks to Tom Scales for lending me his 16/3.5 fisheye.
A while ago, when, in typical zuikoholic fashion, I suggested that people
send me their fisheyes (either 8 or 16 - I wasn't picky) for testing on the
KC-135, Tom offered to send me his about 2 minutes after I sent the email!
However, the lens was already on loan to another list member, so I'd also
like to thank Dave Bulger for sending the lens on to me to use. The lens
worked extremely well, and was a lot of fun to use. Also, the Winder 2 I
used was purchased from Tom shortly before our flight, and worked very well
too.
Ok, now a little background. I've flown on the KC-135 seven times over the
past four years, starting as a graduate student here at Washington State
University. I got my PhD this past summer, and have stayed here the past
year as a postdoc. Our experiment involves looking at fluids in low gravity.
Specifically, we are looking at what happens to a small cylindrical column
of liquid held between supports. If the column is extended too long, it will
break due to surface tension. This is the same process that causes the
liquid stream produced by turning your bathroom faucet on a little bit to
break up into drops. Anyway, we're looking at controlling this instability
with either ultrasonic or electric fields.
In our typical flight week, we arrive on Sunday night, spend Monday
assembling our experiment and loading it on the plane, and then fly Tuesday
through Friday. In each flight, we usually fly 40 parabolic maneuvers, each
of which gives about 20-30 seconds of near zero gravity. Each zero g portion
is followed by 40-50 seconds of near twice normal gravity. This transition
is what usually causes people to get sick. Our experiment is very sensitive
to small amounts of gravity, so to reduce this, we put part of our experiment
into a separate rack that is free-floated in the plane during the low
gravity portion. By doing this we can get zero gravity that is about as good
as what is experienced on the Space Shuttle, but for only 10 or less seconds
at a time. It always looks quite impressive to me to see a rack that weighs
about 200 pounds on the ground floating in midair :)
Now, on to our most recent week. We were originally scheduled to fly with
other research teams, but since everyone cancelled except us, they cancelled
the flight. Instead, we flew along with the undergraduate student research
teams during their flight. The student program is largely for public
relations purposes, which of course makes it no less important, and consists
of 4 students on each team. The teams fly two days, with one pair flying one
day, and the other flying the next. This means that each day, the plane is
full of first-time fliers, which can make things quite interesting!
To (finally) get to the photographic content, I had a very limited time in
which to try to take pictures. Our experiment requires a lot of user
operation, which means I don't get much time to goof around. Fortunately,
because of the students on board, we didn't float our experiment during the
first parabola in order to watch the students, so I got one parabola of zero
gravity each day to play around. That's when I took the TOPE 1 picture. For
3 of the 4 days, I took the 16/3.5 fisheye along, and that gave the best
results. I also took my 21/3.5 along for one flight, and got some pictures
similar to my TOPE 1 entry, but with the top of my head cut off :) For the
rest of the flight, I had the camera mounted on our rack so that it was aimed
at the free-float rack and the people operating it, and got some decent
pictures of them.
Because it was noticed that a large percentage of students got sick between
parabolas 30 and 40, student flights are limited to 30 parabolas (which I
didn't mind at all on the first day either!) On Friday, which is the day I
got my TOPE 1 picture, we lost 5 students :) One poor girl got sick on the
first or second parabola, and went downhill from there. I don't think she
had a lot of fun :( At the end of each flight, we did one parabola
simulating lunar gravity and one parabola simulating Martian gravity, also
because of the students :) Since our experiment doesn't work in these levels
of gravity, we got two other parabolas to goof off and do one-finger pushups
and somersaults :)
I guess I've probably rambled on enough now... I am currently in the
process of scanning in some more pictures. I'll let everyone know when I get
them on the web.
One final bit of info. I had time to go to the Camera Co-Op in Houston, and
they had what appeared to me to be a nice user OM3 for $450, which seemed a
decent price to me. I had to resist blowing my film scanner money on it :)
So, if anyone in Houston is interested, it might still be there.
Thanks for reading this far,
Mark Marr-Lyon
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