Charting the Unknown: An Observationalist’s Log

Like a great celestial swan, Voyager 1 is flying  —  swiftly, boldly, albeit a little stiffly in places.  NASA/JPL-Caltech It moves through interstellar space with enormous momentum, far beyond the planets that once defined its mission, carrying instruments that continue to report from a region no man‑made craft has ever reached. Yet every action it takes is constrained by a finite and steadily diminishing supply of energy, each signal carefully weighed against what it costs to send. There is a quiet elegance in that balance. Voyager does not insist on doing everything it once did. It does not pursue peak capability when conditions no longer allow it. Instead, it adapts -- releasing some functions so that others can continue, prioritizing what matters most over what is merely possible. In engineering, we have a name for systems that behave this way. We call it graceful degradation . On April 17, 2026, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a carefully prep...

In honor of Israel's 78th Independence day celebration which took place this week, here's my annual picture of the national bird - the Hoopoe ( Upupa epops דוכיפת) - celebrating as Israelis do, by having a big meal in a park!  Granted, the Hoopoe has not lit a fire to have a braii or barbecue as is traditional, but it's doing the best it can.  As part of the 2008 celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary, president Shimon Peres announced the results of a national poll where the Hoopoe was voted "National Bird". How long ago that seems! 

The muted light of early dawn required a 1/4-second exposure to reveal the birds and their reflections. As an added benefit, the longer exposure lent the birds in flight a haunting, ghostlike presence.

During the anniversary week of Apollo 13, I find myself thinking less about the explosion of the oxygen tank in the spacecraft and more about what still worked - before and after. Few moments in history illustrate the value of reliable systems more clearly than that flight. Watching the Artemis II mission last week, I was struck by some parallels - and differences - between it and Apollo 13. Artemis II’s Integrity landed back on Earth on the 11th of April, the same day Apollo 13’s Odyssey was launched. Externally, the two capsules appear similar, albeit Integrity is larger and carries a crew of four instead of three. Internally, however, over half a century of technological progress separates them. Nowhere is this more evident than in the computing power available to the astronauts. While computers are ubiquitous today, in the 1960s, they were in their infancy and the Moon landings were not only a triumph of human effort, ingenuity, and dedication, but also a triumph of one of huma...

Setting the stage Between 1968 and 1972 NASA sent nine Apollo missions to the Moon. Reaching the Moon was an effort that required a decade of work by 400,000 people, billions of dollars and an incalculable amount of moving parts. Of the nine missions to the Moon, eight were spectacular successes and one was a spectacular near-disaster. Apollo 13 launched on April 11th, 1970 and was meant to be the first of the Apollo missions to be dedicated to exploring the Moon, after Apollo 11 made the first landing and 12 had improved on it by making a pinpoint landing. On April 13th, a little over 2 days after launch, one of the two large oxygen tanks in the Service Module component of the spacecraft exploded, crippling the spacecraft on the way to the Moon. Over the next days, NASA’s engineers worked feverishly together with the astronauts to overcome the seemingly insurmountable problems and brought them back to Earth - safe and sound.      ...

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit .”      -- Historian Will Durant, simplifying part of Aristotle’s philosophy. As I write these words, the crew of Artemis II has returned safely and successfully to Earth, after being the first humans to have reached the vicinity of the Moon in over 50 years. It is also the 56th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13, a mission known not only for the catastrophic events on the way to the Moon, but even more so for the Herculean efforts made to eventually return the astronauts successfully back home.    Artemis II landing, April 11th 2026 (NASA) NASA’s foray to the Moon in the 60s and early 70s is the story of a long journey made step-by-step. The simple one-man Mercury spacecraft paved the way to the two-man Gemini craft which was a stepping stone to the twin Apollo space capsule and Moon lander. Between May of 1961 and April of 1970, NASA launched twenty five manned missions, a ca...

Earthset from Artemis II, 2026 (NASA)   I’ve been neglecting my online writing for quite some time now. The reasons have been personal, professional, even political, but I think it’s time to be inspired by humanity’s return to the Moon on Artemis II and return to writing. But I want my writing to be a bit more varied than it’s been and I think I want a bit more flexibility than my previous blog had. Starting fresh with my own domain gives me space to explore a broader mix of interests and to do so on my own terms. So here we are, at the threshold between the spectacularly successful Artemis II mission and the anniversary of the legendary Apollo 13. One represents ambitious progress; the other, hard‑earned lessons under pressure. There’s a lot to learn from both. Going forward I want to keep up a cadence of writing. I think the easiest way to do that is to harvest and refresh my existing material from flyingbarron.medium.com while interspersing new material. Until now, I’ve mostly s...

I've been posting weekly pictures of birds for a few years now, but this is the first one I'm posting to my site.