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As Blogbud Laurie asks, the ever-important question is how can something this homely turn into a cardinal?

Can’t leave you with *that* image burned into your brain…here’s a slightly better one:

While the Sooper Dooper Uber Moon of a few days ago was yeah-fine-ok-cool-whatever and all that, when the moon is 100% full it is an almost perfect circle, leaving not a whole lot to get interesting with (and if anyone can *really* tell it was 14% larger than normal…uh huh). The day just before or just after a full moon are what I like. That bare-end or beginning of a terminator on the very outer edges brings the lunar highlands into relief, complete with the shadows of mountain ranges and craters. If you try your darndest and really *really* work to get that focus as sharp and precise as you can, you get some fantastic results. 400 mm zoom, 1/1250 sec, F 7.1

I think I nailed this one, as much as one can nail a good, clear, crisp moon in the humidity that envelops Birmingham, Alabama in May.

Little bit of a cropped-in detail shot of those lunar highlands.

Make a good poster, eh??

I know I haven’t been much for the traditional Milblogging of late.  I have been negligent in that and apologize.  This one, though, deserves everything we can give it.  In the midst of the Air Force kowtow’ing to Wiccan worshipers, the Navy naming ships after political hacks and the Army cancelling concerts because they don’t want to offend anyone, United States Marine Corps continues to show it is the class act it has always been for over 200 years.

From RBB and our buddy Weasel Zippers, the story of 12-year-old Cody Green who won his third bout with cancer, but was losing to an infection brought on by the chemotherapy and the Marines who adopted him for awhile;

Cody had leukemia since he was 22 months old, but beat the disease three times. Although he was cancer-free, the chemotherapy lowered his immune system and Saturday afternoon, he died from a fungus that attacked his brain. Members of the Marines decided to step in and do something.

“They decided Cody, with the strength and honor and courage he showed through the whole thing, he should be a Marine,” said Cody’s father David Snowberger.

Cody was given Marine navigator wings and was made an honorary member of the United States Marine Corps. For one Marine, that wasn’t enough, so he did even more.

“The night before Cody passed, he stood guard at Cody’s door at the hospital all night long for eight hours straight,” said Snowberger.

Absolutely fantastic.  God speed, Cody.  Thank you for your strength…and for your service…you are an inspiration.

Every once in a while, when you get up with the early birds and you have a photography plan in your head, you can sometimes capture just about exactly whet you envisioned.

Being in Huntsville, the Saturn V rocket that is mounted at the Space Center offers buku opportunities for pictures, but finding a unique one is always the challenge.

This morning, I had hoped the sun rise to the east would stay clear of clouds.  I had scoped out an overpass a bit west of the beast, and as the sun was bringing its morning colors to bear, I snapped off a bunch of image.  It had started to rain where I was, parked on that overpass, 4-way blinkers going, morning commute traffic (such as it is in Huntsville at 0554) zipping by, me shooting hand-held through the passanger window, this is about the best of the bunch.  I kind of like it.

Swung by the Space and Rocket Center yesterday afternoon here in Huntsville for a few pics. That Saturn V they have there, erected up in its natural repose, is absolutely spectacular. That beast, along with the Space Shuttle, are the two most complex machines ever built by man. Awesome.

Good pic of the Command Service Module atop the beast.  The small rocket exhausts on the sides are the reaction control jets – they help maneuver the thing in space to do the turning and rotating that needed to be done for positioning of the craft – for instance to set it broadside to the sun and rotating at a specific rate so one side doesn’t always get baked in the sun’s heat and one side always freeze…called going into “bar-b-que mode” when they would set that.

UPDATED with 2 new images.

Sorry for being MIA these past few weeks.

My sojourn to Dulles to get pictures of the space shuttle flight test bed Enterprise as she wings her way to an ignominious and inglorious future as a tourist attraction on that floating money-making shakedown called the USS Intrepid (no disrespect intended…my Dad flew Banshees off Intrepid back in the 50s – its just her current incarnation as a $$$-grubbing tourist trap that bugs me) did not result in anything spectacular or interesting. These are about the best I got of the beast.

Like I said, pretty vanilla.  Not much one can do with pics of a space shuttle that someone somewhere else hasn’t already gotten, unless you have *really* good inside connection and can get something unique and spectacular…which I, of course, do not have.

Still, was kind of neat seeing the thing in person.

Couple of Dulles pics from that morning that are not half bad, too:

Sunrise at Dulles

Dulles Int’l Airport, 6:42 am, 27 Apr, 2012, image in HDR

Them durned mind-controlling Chemtrailer Gub’mint officiousness pencil-necked geeks are at it again!

Actually, it is J-75, a high-altitude jet route going from DC to points south.  Hot exhaust + cold air = contrails.  Doesn’t sound as much fun as Chemtrails, though!

Captured this shot a few days ago of the full moon and a Sycamore tree in a neighbors yard.

UPDATE:  Y’all probably already know this, but the aircraft was a 2-seat D version of the Hornet, not the F-variant.  It was from VFA-106, the Super Hornet RAG at Oceana.

“Catastrophic engine system failure right after takeoff, which is always the most critical phase of flying, leaves very, very few options,” said aviation safety expert and decorated pilot J.F. Joseph. “You literally run out of altitude, air speed and ideas all at the same time,” he said.

5 people were taken to the hospital, including the two aircrew, but no fatalities.  Good stuff!

As the man said above, the event occurred immediately after takeoff, so the guys ran out of options real quick.

Fox News update is here

Well done, lads!  Making that decision to give the airplane back to the taxpayers is a decision made months before you have to actually make it, and it sounds like you did that to a tee.

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Never a pretty sight.

Both aircrew ejected safely, with non life-threatening injuries and were taken to Va Bch General hospital, the closest facility.

Ejection seat in a back yard.  Yep, I’d say this was residential!

Initial reports are that there are no fatalities on the ground.  Double-fingers toes and eyes crossed that that stays the same.

Not much more is known.  This kind of reminds me of an A-4 that crashed in a residential area of Pensacola when I was down there.  The Marine pilot stayed with the thing almost to the roof tops because, as he told us in a brief later, “The airplane was still doing some airplane things and I felt like I could aim it to a safe place to where I could eject” – which is exactly what he did.

I’ll update things as the day goes on.

When we’d come back to the base into the break, we’d fly our downwind leg right over Lynnhaven Mall.

I snapped that pic as we were turning from downwind onto base.

We used to *always* say, and this was 25 years ago, that someone, someday, sometime, was going to have an engine failure as soon as they hit the break and would plow right into that mall.  The Mayfair Mews Apartments near Birdneck road are not the mall, but the same sentiments apply.

Riff’ing a bit from the F-14 landing checklist, Mr. Blue Heron prepares for an OK-3…or perhaps it is a VSTOL landing, sans wire.