Listening to the Apollo Murders audiobook by Col. Chris Hadfield

I’m listening to The Apollo Murders…Love it, they’ve landed on the moon and I’m learning lots. And remembering. Sometimes the Russian pronunciation isn’t as clear as it could be but that’s probably the muddled interpretation of the audiobook reader. I find myself repeating phrases. But the Russian-English accents are great. As is Nixon’s accent. Reader does a bang up job, but needs to go to a Russian language school, his Russian is mushy—horasho!

Col. Chris Hadfield is a good, solid writer. No waste, no fluff. Good reportage. Solid science. For example, I never thought of moondust as sharp. No erosion. Of course! why didn’t I think of that? And he knows some cool obscure words, like “rills” and knows how to handle a metaphor, so, as a writer, I am over the moon! 

Since I’ve met Chris, I can also hear his voice behind the words. And it’s a kick to see glimpses of his autobiography in the storyline, bits of which Ive read, or heard him read. Mitchell cranked up Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. LOL.

Audiobooks is a fairly new thing for me, during the early days of the pandemic, I had the attention span of a newt. I couldn’t concentrate long enough read a sentence little in a paragraph. I couldn’t retain anything as my mind was a sieve, more like blotter paper. But I found I could listen to audiobooks, which I formerly hated being read to. Go figure.

I’m bummed that I didn’t have the dough to buy Chris’s biography when he read at Book Passage in Corte Madera. But I had some astronaut freeze-dried ice cream which he kindly autographed. Someone took photos, but you know how it goes, I’m always the one behind the camera…so whenever anyone attempts to take a photo of me, it’s always out of focus. Like with Amy Tan, and Mary Robinson, the President of Ireland, FFS! Oh, and Chris speaks Irish too! Le do thoil.

I’ve seen one of the Apollo 11 test capsules on the USS Hornet in Alameda, CA. And once when I was teaching an Elderhostel class, one of my students was a NASA engineer. He brought me a moonrock collected from the moon’s surface, to hold. It was a piece of basalt—with sharp edges.

GEALACH

GEALACH
                         —Tá an ghealach lán anocht.
               To Canice Reilly-Santos 1937-5.12.2012


I dreamed someone handed me a bowl of scorpions.
Then the news came, the report wasn't good.
They said my aunt lit up like myriad moons
in the MRI chamber, her body riddled with light.
Super moon of the year, Scorpio moon.
Beltaine's bone fire announcing the birth of summer.
Someone says it's also the Buddha moon.
They say he was born, achieved enlightenment,
and died all during the full May moon.
My aunt's days are numbered in weeks, maybe months.
She is watching the approach of her own death.
For some reason I am remembering
the names of the moon in Irish.
An ghealach, the bright shining one.

5/6/12



(Alas, she got only two weeks notice. She died on Saturday. It was mercifully quick.)

Cinco de Mayo supermoon

Cinco de Mayo supermoon over Oakland ©Maureen Hurley 2012 

The Cinco de Mayo supermoon rose in the sky like a vast blind eye and seemed to dance and bobble in an indigo velvet sky as I drove down Highway 24 to the curve of 580. I didn't have my big Nikon camera, and the new point and shoot Canon only took blurred white dots. 

Between three point and shoot cameras I was only able to get four shots that show the face of the moon—all with my otherwise useless big camera pretending to be a DSLR camera, using night shot and 15X zoom—I took it all the way out and used the interpolated magnification too. A truck side mirror was m tripod.

The other cameras—even the Nikon P60—were a wash. I'd previously taken great eclipse shots with it. Most digital cameras don't handle low light well, extreme pixellation, or rather, artifacts, is the main problem. They overcompensate for the darkness of the night sky and overexpose the image so you get a pixellated halo. You'd be better off setting the camera on a night shot and covering the flash with your hand.

This is full frame, unretouched. It's soft, but the moon kept moving! The hard part is gauging (or tricking) the pseudo-ASA and shutter speed on cameras that have almost no manual aperature functions.

I should have shot it at moonrise, on the horizon, when it was at its biggest magnification, but I was stuck inside at work. I also should've taken a photo against a backdrop, a tree, or cityscape, but my lower back hurt so much I could barely stand. So a few quick shots was all I could withstand. That, or nothing.

Besides, we get a supermoon once a year. But it was noticeably brighter. Maybe I'll attempt a shot tonight as it wanes. But I still don't get off work 'til 9 PM. Argh. Sucks.

The digital age has left most of us in the tyranny of autofocus camera programming. They have their place, don't get me wrong. But we've forgotten photography basics—how to bracket our photos. Forget about the holy trinity of photography: the F-stop, shutter speed and film speed. 

Then there's the other tyranny of digital cameras that do have manual overide capacity—the hefty price tag. I expected the price to come down ages ago. Yet the good DSLR cameras are still prohibitively expensive—a decade later. Will I ever be able to afford a DSLR?

What would Ansel Adams do?

Shoot the moon with what ya got.

REBOUND MOON

Maybe it's not you

but the moon on the rebound.
Rebound moon, swaddled
in gossamer derangements
of white on white
against an indigo night.

5/8/09