A busy L-14 morning...

So far this morning, I've translated 1500 words of an outside job and then I remembered that it would probably be a Good Thing™ to invoice people for recent work (as in: being here in Kazakhstan). TurboCASH can probably be coaxed to spit out the requisite documents, but right now, I'm invoicing "by hand" and it's turning out to be not all that much slower than any other method I've tried thus far (only more prone to error, as I found out a few minutes ago).

As it turns out, I've exceeded my nut for the month, which simply recycles the meter and allows the suspense to build for August.

A phone call last night to Delta got me a really weird and exhorbitant price for a round trip ticket for my sister-in-law; a subsequent search online at the Delta site offered me a coach ticket for about one-thid the price quoted over the phone, or about €1000, which is probably what we'll go for unless she can sniff out something more economical in Moscow.

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It's probably old news to experienced digital camera users, but it occurred to me the other day that selecting the highest resolution mode yields photos that suffer the least in terms of detail when you crop them. On my Nikon Coolpix, the highest resolution is 3072 pixels horizontally, as opposed to the 1024 pixels I've been routinely using. I'm not sure how much longer it takes to save a high-resolution image, and while the high-resolution images do drastically cut down the number of shots that'll fit on an SD card, at that setting, the 2-GB card I've got in the unit can still store 500+ shots.

On the other hand, you can still get some pretty good detail at lower resolutions using "closeup" mode. Here's a cropped image of a resting dragonfly I spent time photographing while waiting for a van.



Anyway, back to work!

Cheers...

An interesting turn of the phrase...

I was called downstairs to Hall 101 to take care of a detail that was not related to the suite of electrical tests that were going on for much of the day, to make sure that the "stack" consisting of the satellite, the adapter system, and the Russian-built upper stage are ready for tomorrow's "encapsulation" operation. It was a pretty impressive sight.

The satellite had been stripped of the protective panels that covered the folded solar arrays, so it gleamed in the glare of the hall's sodium lights. Technicians were carefully removing hoisting hardware from the top of the satellite while a group of specialists ran through the electrical checklist.

Tomorrow morning, the stack will be tilted into the horizontal position, the bottom half of the payload fairing will be moved under it, and then the upper half will be hoisted in the air and carefully lowered onto the bottom half. The result, after a bunch of closeout work, will be a satellite that is "encapsulated" inside the fairing, which will protect the satellite from the atmosphere for the rest of its time on the planet, both at the processing facility, during the rollout to the pad, at the pad, and during the all-important ascent phase of flight).

The start of my assigned work coincides with the start of the tipping operation. I might go in early.

Cheers...