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Space Shot

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As we enjoy our first weekend shivering through the frozen month of March, 2011, I thought it would be appropriate to visit a old friend who is considerably colder than we are, but apparently unfazed – the Cassini spacecraft, continuing to orbit Saturn.

I check every now and then to see the latest shots from the Cassini camera. If you like the sight of lumpy moons and massive, sharp, razor thin rings set against the perfect blackness of space, there’s lots to love at the Cassini site. And then there’s this:

Cassini is looking past the southern edge of the moon Rhea to see the moon Dione, which appears to be rolling along the outer rings.

Photographers know you sometimes have to wait for things to line up before you can take that perfect shot. The Cassini orbiter was launched in October of 1997, so it took more than 13 years of patience to wait for the elements in this image to compose themselves just so. That’s a lot of time to spend with the flash charged up and your finger on the button!

Forget Watson winning at Jeopardy! Patience is the area where machines will put us to shame!

What have you had to wait for?

69 thoughts on “Space Shot”

  1. Morning all. I’m thinking that depending on where your brain is, even the smallest amount of time can be waiting. I’m waiting desperately for the teenager to get her licence. Since she got her permit 6 months back, it really hasn’t been that terrible, but the anticipation is making the wait seem interminable!

    Patience isn’t my strongest suit, so many things have seemed like waits to me. I applied 3 times before I got my current job, adoption paperwork seemed to take forever, the drive to St. Louis when my dad died went on and on and on.

    Compared to Cassini’s 13 years, I guess I’m just a novice waiter!

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    1. Sherrilee-planning on getting to the bakery around 10am-I am bringing knitting as I have a hat that MUST be in the mail on Monday morning!

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  2. I once waited for the sun to come up at exactly the right spot over L. Superior. Took a few mornings for it to be right and each morning I got there early to be ready before it was. The right day was 1/1/ ca. 1972 so they were cold waits.

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  3. i don’t seem to wait as much as i did when i was young. nowadays, the time flies so quickly i am always surprised to know that winter is almost over, that the woods will be filled with green, and even sooner, we’ll have baby goats bouncing around. it was 5 months ago almost that we bred the Girls and i thought “i have a nice, long time to … ..(insert plans)” and BOOM! someone stole 5 months.
    Clyde – i admire your sitzfleisch
    (Dale – i learned that astronomy term from Karlis Kaufmanis at the U)

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    2. I am so with you BiB. The phrase “I can hardly wait . . . ” is just a memory in my voacabulary. I don’t need it any more because of how time flies by. I once read an explanation that works for me. When you are young each block of time is a huge percentage of your elasped life. So, a month is a full 1/12th of my granddaughter’s life, but it’s a mere 1/744th of my life, and a pretty insignificant drop in the bucket. I am usually more eager to postpone things than the other way around. I enjoyed last year when I could say I was 61-derful, I would have liked to stay there for a while longer but as of today, I’m just 62, maybe 62-tiful, but I really liked being a onederful. I have a target for retirement and although it does seem kind of far off, (12/2015), when I look back 5 years and realize what a short time ago it seems, I know that it won’t be long at all.

      If I recall correctly, it was spring at this time last year. Everything came early in 2010 climatalogically speaking, and it was great, but unusual. Spring is coming. It has eventually made it every year and I just won’t believe this one is going to be the exception. It has been a very long, cold, dark winter though, and spring can’t come soon enough for me.

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      6. I’m 52, so I like to borrow a line from the writer Lorrie Moore and say after all this time I finally have a full deck.

        Lorrie Moore is 53 now, so now she says she’s into her joker years. I’ll be there soon

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  4. Rise and Shine Baboons:

    It has always seemed to me that I’ve had to wait for everything. The longest wait was to leave home as a young adult–I did not want to be there. It was too painful. Then after I left, I had to learn how to actually live life without problems. That took some time.

    There was the baby waiting game–I could not wait for him to get here. Then on the other end (his young adulthood) he kept boomeranging back home. More waiting. He finally learned what he needed to learn and out the door he went.

    I used to be really impatient. I have had to learn patience, which I have concluded is truly a virtue. There is no better teacher than my garden.

    Waiting for the first ripe tomato is the greatest pleasure of all.

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      1. It is particularly frustrating when there are several little fang marks or a bite where you can’t see it. Then you turn it around… For this reason we fenced our garden. The rabbits were particularly aggressive.

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  5. Good morning to all,

    After graduating from school, I spent many years trying to find a good job. I did find some work that was rewarding, but it didn’t last. The wait to find a good long term job is over. I’m retired and done with applying for jobs. I have even stopped doing part time work as a substitute teacher. Now I am spending all of my time finishing up with some volunteer work and getting ready to move to Minneapolis.

    We have been waiting for many years to move from Clarks Grove to the Twin Cities. It is a long drive from here to the cities to see our children, and to make use of the many opportunties for entertainment and good eating that aren’t available in Southern Minnesota. In the winter it seems that about half the time the roads are either in no condition for making the trip from here to the Cities or are close to being that way.

    We now own a house in the Twin Cities which we plan to move to before long. I am in favor of rural development and have been very involved with the farming side of rural life. However, for me it will be better to retire to the Cities and support change in agriculture from an urban location.

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    1. Well, that is exciting for all of us Twin Citians. I love living here! Where will you be located? You will have front yard full of Baboons you know.

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      1. The house is in the Nokomis area on 41st Ave. near 50th St. We will be moving there in about a year and 1/2, so we will not be there real soon. I will look forward to seeing Baboons in my front yard.

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  6. I had long wait to be a mother, but once that boy was one board, it was zippity bang! Emergency c-section 5 weeks early and I don’t think I have had the leisure of “waiting” since-there is always one more thing on the multi-tasking list that could be done “while you’re waiting”, which makes it seems not at all like waiting.

    Knitting is really good for that. I always try to have some knitting and a book wherever I go, “in case I have to wait”-it is a witness to how little waiting I get to do that the socks I wanted to done with by the end of January still don’t have their heels turned.

    Speaking of goats, biB, Spring Break is almost here (week of the 20th) what are the ETAs at your maternity ward?

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    1. Alba’s kids will be on the ground by then (as we goat people like to say 🙂 and Lassi and Kona are due on April 3 and 5. Goat Ladies meet on March 20th in Moose Lake. more barn cleaning today; Lassi and Kona are in their new, clean kidding pens. Alba’s “spot” needs to be thoroughly cleaned, limed, re-bedded and get some straw for the kids to climb on. the kidding kit is at the ready.

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    2. MiG, I understand completely. The pregnancy goes by way too fast, and then you have to stand by patiently for the little imp to gain enough weight to come home. Then you have to wait to see if they have any developmental or physical issues as a result of arriving too early. Then you have to wait for them to grow up. The waiting never ends!

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      2. Gotta admit that having a kid has caused me to realize that I might miss things that are happening now if I wait for the next thing, so I appreciate what is happening today and try not to wait (too much) for the next thing…though I was very grateful when Daughter and I could both sleep through the night and then when I was no longer the food source and when she was independently mobile and then had words to express herself…

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      3. and soon she will be able to crash her own car, deal with her own bills and become involved in her own dysfunctional family. life goes by so fast…

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      4. Anna – I agree. The other thing that I realized early on was that for every milestone that I’m looking forward to, it means that whatever is preceding that milestone will never come again. Like diapers. Who would have thought that I might miss diapers. But as soon as she was potty-trained, that quiet, intimate time of diaper-changing was gone forever. (And the other issue of having to know where every bathroom was within a 2-mile radius of everywhere you went, since once she announced she had to go, she had to go RIGHT THEN!)

        Please don’t tell her I talked about potty training on the blog!

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  7. Waiting… hm. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve always been waiting. Waiting for that one true path I’m supposed to be on. Or for that one true love who just never showed up. I’ve come to realize that life is happening, has been happening, I’ve been on the path all along and that it would be more positive to accept the road I’m on rather than to wait for the “right” circumstance to come along. It may not be the yellow brick road but it’s my journey and suddenly I have nothing to wait for. The journey is now. Each step and each moment become my own. Each stone in the road an opportunity or a challenge; each new face along the way could be a new friend. It’s what I choose to do today, now, that matters and that is okay.

    But it’s really a cool thing to wait for a sunrise over Lake Superior. I’ve done that too and it is SO WORTH the wait!

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    3. Ever have one of those moments KiW, when you realize that you are fully in the moment, fully aware of where you are in your journey and your surroundings and everything seems connected and just right – even if it’s only for a minute or two? Those moments are fabulous.

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      1. I felt that way in labor with both my children. I KNEW I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I was not in control of what was happening, and I felt truly in tune with it at the same time.

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  8. I’m waiting for spring.

    This morning, so early it was more dark than light, I heard cardinals bubbling with joy as they greeted the new day. If they have that kind of faith, I can do the same. Spring will come. It will.

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    1. Me too. There are already faint signs of spring with a little very early migration by some kinds of birds.

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  9. I have waited so long for most stuff I have learned out of necessity how to make the most of it. Meeting people in bookstores libraries or art spots, savoring those times when my kids are going through those ages ( they are all always going through some phase or another) watching to make sure I don’t miss opportunity b while I’m focused on opportune a life is a wait. Moon schmoon its just the wait if the moment. Enjoy baboonery, hey Jim we don’t need to have you th fir the party. We can start without you what’s the address?

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  10. Waiting for julekage to rise is a pleasant way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and as an added bonus, the house smells like cardamom while you wait. Waiting for paint to dry on a set forces you to sit back and assess what needs to happen next (if anything). Waiting for my ship to come in might have caused me to miss it as I might have been looking for the wrong ship…

    I’m not too good at waiting. I fill the waiting with other things and appreciating what is happening now. Think that might be the part of me that never got done being five – I can get so wrapped up in today that I forget that I might need to plan for next week.

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    1. Waiting, living in the moment, and planning are kind of a balancing act as far as I can tell. Planning is probably the hardest one for me. I think the trick is to not get too carried away with any of these. This is easier to say than to do.
      That reminds me of a song that had a lyric “you can have a living if you let yourself be”.

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      3. “Happiness runs in a circular motion
        Life is but a tiny boat upon the sea
        Everybody is a part of everything anyway
        You can have it all if you let yourself be.”

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  11. Afternoon…
    For some time now I’ve been waiting for my ship to come in…
    Seems there’s always something to wait for… a trip, a check, a certain date, a wedding or a baby.
    The neat thing about our daughter; with her special needs all the normal childhood phases take longer… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t know any other 15 yr old girls that still like to play dolls with Dad.

    But that’s the thing about ‘Time’… although I do know a guy who built a clock that can be controlled with a wired remote so you can make fifteen minutes go by in whatever length of time you choose. (Well, I suppose the “fifteen minutes” still goes by… it’s complicated…)

    And I’ve been waiting for tomorrow for then I get to head out of town for a theater convention all of next week. My contributions may be random… (more random?)

    And then I’ll be waiting to come home to my family again…

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  12. When I was a kid it was really hard to wait for Christmas to come. At the time, I thought of Christmas as Christmas Day, when you open the presents.

    Now I think of Christmas as the period of time between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. There’s no waiting, because you’re in it. Sort of a Zen Christmas.

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  13. I just spent the weekend with Husband and my 85 year old mother, both are moving more slowly then they used to for different reasons. Then, because we (the Royal We) were doing her taxes, we kept having to rely on Mom’s memory to find necessary documents… I began to feel like I’d been put on pause.

    I finally realized I could just try to move at the pace they were going, instead of rushing them. For the first time I realized that most of the time I am moving as fast as I possibly can, for no other reason than habit. What am I racing for (or to)? I’m going to make a concerted effort to move a little slower.

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    1. I am trying to adjust to my wife’s slower pace–I who jump now, rush everywhere, have no patience.

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