mars

Viking (review)

Posted on by Patrick
Still from the movie Viking: four "astronauts" stand in a desert meant to stand in for Mars

Tonight I showed / watched the movie Viking at the Evans.

Five astro­nauts have been sent to Mars. Mean­while, back on Earth, the Viking Soci­ety gath­ers five oth­er people—their psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­files matched as close­ly as pos­si­ble with the Mar­t­ian astronauts—to try and head off any pos­si­ble prob­lems on the Red Planet.

But they’re only human, so nat­u­ral­ly things go a bit wrong. Some take things a bit too seri­ous­ly; oth­ers, not near­ly seri­ous­ly enough.

I thought the movie was pret­ty good. It was quite fun­ny until sud­den­ly it was­n’t fun­ny at all any­more. I was amused at the acronym for the ana­log NASA (ASEA, the Amer­i­can Space Explo­ration Agency; peo­ple in the movie def­i­nite­ly were asea). I think the fact that most of the music remind­ed me of the sound­track to the short film “They’re Made Out Of Meat” added to my amusement.

Once the turn from com­e­dy to tragedy[1]Maybe “tragedy” is too strong a word; dra­ma? hap­pened, I was still locked in to the sto­ry. The scene near the end in the phone booth felt pret­ty raw to me.

Smile and say “astro­naut”.

Foot­notes

Foot­notes
↑1 Maybe “tragedy” is too strong a word; drama?

Mars photobombing the full moon

Posted on by Patrick
The full moon seen through the branches of a tree

The moon tonight is very full and very bright, and there’s a tiny lit­tle speck of light juu­u­u­u­ust about touch­ing it. I checked and it turns out it’s Mars.

(I real­ize I kind of gave it away in the title. So it goes.)

The full moon. An inset shows the very small, slightly reddish dot that is Mars.
That tiny red­dish dot in the 4×original size inset? That’s a planet.

[Edit] I just real­ized it’s also the 50th anniver­sary today of the launch of Apol­lo 17, the last crewed mis­sion to the moon. Here’s to the con­tin­ued suc­cess of the Artemis project and the return of humans to the lunar surface.