Video

The Soul Nebula in Cassiopeia

The first clear, moonless night of the fall season, 2024.

Rho Ofiuchi - Antares cloud complex

Photographed from 23 degrees south in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia.

 How the observatory was built

The building process compressed to two minutes.

Fine grinding with a fixed-post grinding machine

Portland cement polishing tool

The pitch lap is cast as individual squares on the cement tool. Although this method is very time consuming, it avoids the risk of thermal shock to the cellular mirror blank.

Cassegrainian primary mirror

Mirror blank made of Schott borosilicate, cast in an engineered cellular design by Dream Cellular.

Diameter = 62 cm

Thickness = 7.7 cm

Mass = 17 kg

Lunar landing sites 1

A selection of landing sites of manned and robotic missons from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The video is made from a mosaic of seventeen photos, each of which were stacked from more than one hundred frames. The resulting image is 5200 x 6500 pixels. Processing and stacking carried out in AviStack2.

Lunar landing sites 2

Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins gave this video a like on my Instagram page in 2019. It shows a selection of landing sites of manned and robotic missons from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The video is made from a mosaic of seventeen photos, each of which were stacked from more than one hundred frames. The resulting image is 5200 x 6500 pixels. Processing and stacking carried out in AviStack2.

ASA DDM160, truss tube and 4m ScopeDome

Two minutes of video for those who like to see minimalistic equatorial mounts and observatory domes rotating here and there.

4,6 billion years in six minutes

A few highlights of Earth's 4.6 billion year history. At a scale of 10 centimeters = 1 million years, the entire 4.6 billion year timeline is 460 meters long. All of human history since the advent of agriculture, written language and civilization, is only the last 0.6 millimeter (= 6 thousand years). Amazingly, out of 460 meters, it is this last 0.6 millimeter we Homo sapiens call "history".

Photo and editing: Neil Weisbrod and John Hall

Pegasus

Inspired by  Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), I began to make this short film in 1975. Without a doubt, the most serious error I committed as a director was allowing chewing gum on board in the moon shuttle. Why couldn't a sixteen year old understand that this does not contribute anything of value?