You Can Grab And Fold This Drone Without Hurting Yourself

April 12th 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space

On this day in 1961, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space. Gagarin, a fighter pilot, was the successful candidate for the mission, being selected by Russian space programme director Sergei Korolev. Russia already had a lead in the Space Race, having launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, which was the first satellite in space. On April 12th 1961, Gagarin left Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft, famously declaring ‘Poyekhali!’ (which means ‘Let’s go!’ in Russian). He spent 108 minutes completing an orbit of the planet. Upon re-entering the atmosphere, Gagarin executed a successful ejection and landed by parachute in rural Russia, to the consternation of locals. Yuri Gagarin became famous worldwide and a Russian hero, being awarded the nation’s highest honour - Hero of the Soviet Union. Gagarin died in 1968 when the training plane he was piloting crashed; his ashes were buried in the walls of the Kremlin.

“Don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!” - Gagarin to some stunned farmers when he landed

What Is The Zone System: A Practical Guide

If you want us to put it in the simplest words possible, the Zone System is a helps us get the right exposure in all our photos, every time, without fail, even in the strangest light settings, and without a trusty matrix meter. It is a magical system conceived of by none other than Ansel Adams himself, along with photographer Fred Archer in the late 1930s. As the father of landscape describes himself, the Zone System is “not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principles of sensitometry, worked out by Fred Archer and myself at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, around 1939-40.” These masters of photography created the Zone System to help us expose in tricky lighting situations where the dynamic range is out of whack, or the lighting is fooling your light meter into creating exposures that are too bright or too dark.

The Zone System was originally developed for black and white sheet film, which was the only type used in those days. Sheet film was individually developed on standard exposure papers, but today we have color roll film that can be mass developed on papers with varying exposures. The Zone system is as much applicable to these “modern” methods as they were to the film it was created for, and can even help digital photographers get perfect exposures. And guess what? Digital photographers, the Zone System can work for you too!

Why do you Need the Zone System

Technically you probably don’t. However, for those of you who are exposure perfectionists, the Zone System is extremely effective in measuring different tones and the dynamic range of a frame that you are about to shoot. It helps you make the perfect exposure with just a spot meter to work with. This gives you immense control over what you’re shooting. You don’t just make guesses at what the right exposure might be, or waste film bracketing “just in case”. Thus, you can easily figure out when you require extra lighting, and what kind and amount of lighting that might be, or whether there is need for a fill flash to get the right brightness. It can also help you figure out if you need graduated neutral density filters.

The zone system is highly beneficial in capturing accurate images when the camera is unable to set the exposure to an accurate reading, so that you get to decide what your image will turn out like, and you know exactly how it will look before you make the exposure. 

How does the Zone System Work?

A camera’s metering system measures accurate exposure readings by focusing on the middle grey tones, which is 18% grey. This grey is the average of black and white. So, when you are shooting in a bright area, your camera will try to dim the light by bringing it down to the average and making the image underexposed in the process. Similarly, when you are shooting in a dark area, your camera will try to increase the brightness of the image, making it over-exposed. Understanding this mechanism is crucial to understanding how the zone system can be used.

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Cassini prepares for final orbital “Grand Finale” at Saturn.

Erik Wernquist, the same filmmaker who created 2014’s “Wanderers” and a stunning New Horizons promotional film in 2015, has created a new video highlighting NASA’s Cassini mission’s final days at Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft will begin its final series of orbits to cap a 13-year groundbreaking science mission known as the Grand Finale. For the first time ever in Cassini’s time at Saturn, the spacecraft will fly in between the planet’s rings and atmosphere. No spacecraft has ever before flown in this region of any of the solar system’s ringed planets. After 23 orbits, Cassini will dive into Saturn’s upper atmosphere September 15 where it will be destroyed. In 2008, mission managers explored a range of End of Mission scenarios that would protect Saturn’s moon’s from Earthly contaminants before ultimately deciding on atmospheric reentry. Cassini began her End of Mission manoeuvres on November 26, 2016, when it began the first of 20 ring-grazing orbits. A close flyby of Titan April 22 will alter the spacecraft’s trajectory to begin the first of 23 orbits in the Grand Finale, which will begin April 26.

Cassini launched from Earth on October 15, 1997, and entered Saturn orbit June 30, 2004. Six months later, on January 14, 2005, the European-built Huygens probe attached to the spacecraft landed on Titan, becoming the first probe to land in the outer solar system. 

Originally scheduled for a four-year mission ending in 2008, Cassini received two mission extensions in 2008 and 2010, with the latter ending in 2017. With the spacecraft’s fuel reserves low, the Cassini team decided to end the mission. P/C: JPL/Erik Wernquist

Amédée Guillemin, Les comètes (1875)

Panasonic Lumix CM1

Today, we present to you another addition to the hybrid crowd: recently announced during the Photokina show in Germany, Lumix DMC-CM1 by Panasonic is an Android smartphone and a connected camera packed inside one versatile and futuristic-looking device that should soon find its way to mass production lines.

“Comets are like cats; they have tails, and they do precisely what they want.”

David H. Levy (discoverer of Sheomaker-Levy 9 comet, the one which impacted on Jupiter)

Know Your “Space” Rocks:

An asteroid is a large chunk of rock left over from collisions or the early solar system. Most are located between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Belt.

A comet is a rock covered in ice, methane and other compounds. Their orbits take them much further out of the solar system.

A meteor is what we call a flash of light in the atmosphere when debris burns up.

This debris itself is known as a meteoroid. Most are so small they are vapourised in the atmosphere.

If any of this meteoroid makes it to Earth, it is called a meteorite.

Meteors, meteoroids and meteorites normally originate from asteroids and comets.

For example, if Earth passes through the tail of a comet, much of the debris burns up in the atmosphere, forming a meteor shower.

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Սպիրու Կոստաքեի Հարեթ Spiru C. Haret

Romanian Armenian mathematician, astronomer and politician. He made a fundamental contribution to the n-body problem in celestial mechanics by proving that using a third degree approximation for the disturbing forces implies instability of the major axes of the orbits, and by introducing the concept of secular perturbations in relation to this. (Proved that planetary motion is not absolutely stable)  As a politician, during his three terms as Minister of Education, Haret ran deep reforms, building the modern Romanian education system. He was made a full member of the Romanian Academy in 1892. He also founded the Astronomical observatory in Bucharest, The crater Haret on the Moon is named after him. The Spiru Haret University, a private university in Bucharest, Romania, bears the name of a scientist and reformer of the Romanian education.

Born 15 February 1851 in Iaşi, Moldavia to an Armenian family, He showed talent for mathematics at a very young age, publishing two textbooks, one in algebra and one in trigonometry when he was still in high school. Whilst in his second year studying physics and mathematics the in the University of Bucharest, he became a teacher of mathematics in Nifon Seminary.

After graduation, Haret won a scholarship competition organized by Titu Maiorescu and went to Paris in order to study mathematics at the Sorbonne. There he earned a mathematics diploma in 1875 and a physics diploma in 1876. Two years later he earned his Ph.D. by defending his thesis, Sur l’invariabilité des grandes axes des orbites planétaires (On the invariability of the major axis of planetary orbits), in front of examiners led by Victor Puiseux. In this work he proved a result fundamental for the n-body problem in astronomy, the thesis being published in Vol. XVIII of the Annales de l'Observatoire de Paris. Haret was the first Romanian to obtain a Ph.D. degree in Paris, (though he was of full Armenian descent)

After his return to Romania in 1878, Haret abandoned scientific research and dedicated the rest of his life to improving Romanian education, which was heavily underdeveloped at the time, both as professor and as politician. He only published an article on the secular acceleration of the Moon in 1880 and one on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (1912). And in In 1910 he published Social mechanics, which used mathematics to explain social behaviour (somehow anticipating the fictional “psychohistory” branch of mathematics developed by Hari Seldon, the fictional character of Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation, published 40 years later).

He was appointed professor of rational mechanics at the Science Faculty in Bucharest. The next year Haret became a correspondent member of the Romanian Academy. He kept the professorship at the Science Faculty until his retirement in 1910.  As Minister of Education he ran a complete reform, basically building the modern Romanian education system