The last two days were pretty hectic and tiring here. After my short appearance in Wednesday evening's 10 pm TV news, I had another TV-crew visiting me yesterday afternoon, for a longer item in NOVA, a well-watched program on Dutch national television providing in depth backgrounds to some news topics of the day.
It was a good interview, and a much longer item than Wednesday's short tv-news item, with several minutes of me being interviewed at my home. The questions asked were good, focussing on the "why?" of this whole thing and the extend as to what "we" (as active satellite observers) know about these classified satellites. The broadcast can be seen here:
Link (video): NOVA item on USA 193, 21 Feb 2008 (in Dutch)
There was a studio guest too: the resident space related Dutch TV expert Piet Smolders. Amongst others he raised the possibility of nuclear fuel being on board (something I had avoided), and mistakenly says this is the first time the US shoots down a satellite (they did it earlier in September 1985, targetting the Solwind satellite).
In the above screenshot (with thanks to Jacob Kuiper), note the book "comets" which was placed there on request of the camera-man for visual appeal. Also, the NASA "Certificate of Appreciation" (related to my participation in the 1998 Leonid multi-instrument airborne science mission) normally hangs on another part of my wall, but was placed there on a similar request... :-)
Earlier that day, at about 7:15 am in the morning, I was called out of my sleep by the Dutch NOS radio news for a comment to the news of the successful ASAT attack in the 8 am radio news. I was still quite groggy, as I had been up at 4 am to watch the lunar eclipse!
A local radio station called too that afternoon, but by that time I was so tired (and had an agreement with the people from NOVA not to comment elsewhere before the broadcast) that I declined.
All the media attention to the USA 193 story caused another prominent peak in my webstats for this site again the past days:
Among the more interesting visitors was for example this one:
Oh: and the total Lunar Eclipse? For a short while around the start of totality (4 am local time), the moon managed to show up through hazy cloud cover. I managed to shoot a few pictures under apalling conditions, the best of which is these:
But I have been lucky to have seen and photographed anything at all, most Dutch and Belgian observers missed it completely due to the weather.
Hoi Marco, leuk om te zien dat het bijhouden van een blog kan leiden tot een optreden in Nova ;-)
ReplyDeleteMaar buiten dat, ga zo door! Het kan geen kwaad om een beetje zichtbaar te houden wat er allemaal gebeurt.
Al eens gedacht aan een 'donatiefunctie' op je website? Alles kleine beetjes helpen en ik denk dat er genoeg mensen zijn die graag zien dat je door gaat met wat je doet.