The Astronaut and the Humbled Photographer

I love all things space.  Space travel, history, ships, rockets, trivia, telescopes, moons, pulsars, the list is almost endless.  The Right Stuff is the first move I remember seeing in the theater, well maybe Empire Strikes Back, but they're both about space travel.  I'm a whiz at space trivia, or at least space history trivia, the science can get a bit tricky.  I have old school mission patches, including from my favorite astronaut, Cooper.  Yes, I have a favorite astronaut.  Check him out, he was the definition of one cool customer.  I follow the NASA missions with intense interest and mourned when Spirit got bogged down for good on Mars.  I find it all so incredibly fascinating and wonderful.  Last October we went to the Academy of Sciences building in the Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco.  Each Thursday night the museum puts on an a party, they dim the lights, serve drinks, and even have a DJ.  Which is a bit odd walking around a modern science museum with the thumping base beat pulsing in the background.  Sometimes they have a theme, and bring in special people and displays in honor of that theme.  So last April they celebrated Yuri's night, the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic space flight with a slew of different events and speakers.  Buzz Aldrin was abound as were other NASA astronauts. They showed an amazingly cool planetarium show, basically about how very small we are, and how very big the universe truly is.  Trust me, it's big out there.  I have to say now, I've never met an astronaut, and for me it's definitely a 'star struck' kind of thing.  Place any A-list actor in front of me and I could almost care less, but an astronaut, well that's a different ball game.  After a few hours of wandering, and taking in the humbling planetarium show I finally met my first astronaut.  I was a little star struck.  But, as we got to talking he mentioned he did photography as a hobby, and I immediately thought okay now not only do we have something in common, I have a little edge up.  I blabber on about this shoot and that, images I got in far off places and he patiently listens and then chimes in with this.  He was on the first shuttle flight after the Columbia accident and one of his jobs was to spacewalk underneath the shuttle and check for heat shield damage, where he tells me he has a little extra time and so decides to bust out his cameras, yes plural, he likes to shoot what's called stereoscopic images, essentially 3D, and photograph the distant horizon line of the earth.  Trumped.  Astronauts, they just do everything a bit cooler.