astronomyguyty wrote:

Hello my name is Tyrone K. "Ty" I'm 16 years old & I live in Ky. I love
astronomy... I think it's the most intesting subect in the world. I also
like photography & skateboarding. My dad is in Iraq & I'm so PROUD of
him. Both my parents are in the Us Army. But my dad is the one over
there right now.


Please give him my best wishes for a speedy and safe return.

When I was little, like 5 for my birthday as a present
I was given a telescope.


When I was in my early teens, and my older brother was at a firebase
outside of Hue, Vietnam*, he sent us a catalog of things that you could
purchase at knockdown cost if you had a family member serving in the
U.S. military; I got hold of a magnificent 4" diameter refractor
telescope for $100.00 this way, and had an absolute ball looking at the
sky with it (I should have kept it- this would cost you around $600 to
$700 dollars now).

science I keep talking about the planets & space
so much to who ever would listen... well as I said I'm 16 now & I
ABSLOUTLY LOVE astronomy. SO ok here come my question......
I went on NASA.gov & I found out there are some great missions coming
up but I want to know do you guys know if any of them will be broadcast
on television? I don't remember if any of the other missions lately
have been bradcast & that worried me. I would really think it would be
cool to see some of the newest mission broadcast.



Okay: Let's work out a strategy for making that occur, as your dad would
probably say.
1.) Check to see if your local cable channel carries NASA TV; ours did
despite the small size of our town (15,000), but that may be due to the
fact that Rick Hieb, the Shuttle astronaut, is a native of Jamestown,
North Dakota.
2.) If that's not the case, then it's time to a tactical shift to a
defensible fall-back position... go over to NASA's main website listing:
http://www.unitedspacealliance.com/live/nasatv.htm
....if you've got the computer bandwidth to handle it, or alternatively
to the main NASA website listing for all of their various resources:
http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html?skipIntro=1 to find info and
downloads on all of the various missions and projects they've got going.
Most of the unmanned missions have their own homepages, such as the Mars
Rovers:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
....and the Cassini Saturn mission: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm
Two websites I most heartily recommend are the amazing NASA J-Track 3D:
http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/jtr.../JTrack3d.html
Which offers a zoomable and rotatable real-time view of the major
satellites and rocket boosters and where they are in relation to your
hometown so you can watch them cross the sky after sunset or before
sunrise... expand this to full size on your computer screen, and you'll
have something pretty close to the main display screen at Space Command,
with the ability to pivot to any point on the Earth's surface, and the
ability to zoom from out beyond the communications satellites at over
22,000 miles up over the equator to those just skimming the atmosphere,
and Mark Wade's magnificent "Encyclopedia Astronautic" website- which
can take weeks to go through, and has pretty much everything about
everything regarding the history of space exploration:
http://www.astronautix.com/index.html
Hope this helps.

Pat

*101st Airborne Division, and came home safe and uninjured.