An Anniversary Trip
Jul. 21st, 2019 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerInstead of being stuck with my own contemplations and taking in perhaps too many online comments, on seeing the regional science centre was holding a special day of events to mark the anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon I decided to head into the big city. It wasn’t until I’d got there and parked at a shopping mall with a transit hub at one end (to get to which now entails going outside and around where Sears used to be) that I realised I’d left my fare card behind, but fortunately I was able to buy a round-trip ticket card from a machine. Traffic was heavy around the science centre (itself fifty years old), so I felt content taking a bus there.
While exhibits at the science centre turn over slowly enough that most of what I saw was familiar from my most recent trips there, I spent most of my time going to talks. Bob Thirsk, a Canadian astronaut who’d gone into orbit on the space shuttle and a long-duration flight on the space station, made a presentation by himself and then participated in a nation-wide hookup with David Saint-Jacques, an astronaut who’d just returned from the space station. I then tried an “IMAX version” of the recent Apollo 11 documentary, although on a curved screen some of the up-and-down lines of some shots looked kind of skewed. A screening of a shorter documentary about a Canadian engineer who’d bounced back from the end of the Avro Arrow project to work on lunar module design was a bit easier to take in. After that, I had to catch a bus back to my car and get on the road again. It was a full day, but a solid enough way to mark time’s passing.
While exhibits at the science centre turn over slowly enough that most of what I saw was familiar from my most recent trips there, I spent most of my time going to talks. Bob Thirsk, a Canadian astronaut who’d gone into orbit on the space shuttle and a long-duration flight on the space station, made a presentation by himself and then participated in a nation-wide hookup with David Saint-Jacques, an astronaut who’d just returned from the space station. I then tried an “IMAX version” of the recent Apollo 11 documentary, although on a curved screen some of the up-and-down lines of some shots looked kind of skewed. A screening of a shorter documentary about a Canadian engineer who’d bounced back from the end of the Avro Arrow project to work on lunar module design was a bit easier to take in. After that, I had to catch a bus back to my car and get on the road again. It was a full day, but a solid enough way to mark time’s passing.