Every day I go to work I am reminded of how lucky I am to be a part of the human exploration of space. Some days more then most.  The crew of the SM4 servicing mission to Hubble came to the Institute today and after conferring with the astronomers, gave the staff a little talk in the main auditorium.  It’s the forth time I’ve had the experience of listening to them firsthand and it always leaves me ecstatic.  How many times in a lifetime do you get to be a part of something like this?  I am so lucky, so fortunate. 

Never in my wildest dreams when I was a little space cadet did I ever think seriously I’d ever get to be a part of the space effort.  Never.  I grew up with little expectations beyond maybe having a series of jobs shuffling boxes from one end of a warehouse to another.  There was no money for college…some in mom’s side of the family never thought I’d amount to anything at all.  I remember one jerk in high school who told me without a doubt I’d end up a truck driver like my dad.  As if there’s anything wrong with being a truck driver…but he was from the well-to-do side of the tracks.  Never mind that I have a house of my own now, a nice car, and an income better then my wildest dreams.  The other day at one of our happy hours, my D.C. friends got started talking about the Hubble images, and one mentioned that the Deep Field was God for him.  I know the feeling.  To think that now I’m part of a team that gathers light from near the beginning of time and brings it to the world for people to see is just amazing.  I’m playing a small, very small, part in writing a few new lines in the book of human knowledge.  Seriously, what more could I ask of life?

Well…a boyfriend of course…but I guess you can’t have it all…

I brought my best 35mm film cameras and lenses to work today, and when the time for the assembly came I was dressed up in full photographer drag: two Canon F1 bodies hanging around my neck and one of my new gadget bags…a nice Tamrac shaped a bit like a teardrop so it hangs better around your body then the old bulky one I used to carry around in high school.  I had my best big glass lenses with me: the 50mm f1.2, the 24mm f.14, the 80mm f1.8 and the 135mm f2.  I could take better available light shots with those inside the auditorium then with the 17-70mm f5.6 zoom on my EOS 30D.  I hate using flash, especially in a crowd.  It distracts people, and calls attention to yourself.  I want to be invisible when I’m taking pictures.  But good available light lenses for the EOS cameras are too damn expensive, and when a digital image detector starts getting noisy, which they will if you have to kick up the sensitivity to take pictures in low light situations, it’s really, really ugly.  I tried that when Senator Mikulski came to the Institute after the SM4 mission was given the final go-ahead, and the digital noise in the resulting images was just awful.  So this time I came with the film cameras, which, yes, are a bit more clumsy to use then the EOS and its quick auto focusing zoom.  But I grew up on those cameras and fixed focal length lenses, and I’m used to working with them now, second nature.

Some staff had brought their kids into work to see the astronauts and their questions were just delightful.  One kid asked what happens when they’re suited up for a space walk and they have to go to the bathroom.  Another asked how they deal with getting itchy.  The astronauts  loved taking their questions, and they treated all of them seriously.  When I was that age I think I would have just been awed into silence.

After the assembly we all gathered outside the front of the Institute for the traditional group photo with the astronauts.  I wandered around the front of the crowd taking pictures while everyone was getting ready, and Matt Mountain, the director of the Institute, must have briefly mistaken me for the official photographer in my camera drag because he asked me where I wanted the astronauts to be.  Embarrassed, I told him I was just a staff member.  I was far from the only one there with cameras of course, but I guess I still have this air about me when I’m busy with my cameras looking for shots.  And I admit that sometimes I make use of that when I want to get a shot.  Once upon a time I did it professionally, and thought that one day it would be my living.  I can still get myself into that mindset with very little effort.

Later as the crowd was gathering back inside I managed to get a few more casual shots of the astronauts mingling with the staff and their kids, below the big model of Hubble in the main lobby.  I was switching lenses between the cameras and my clumsy middle aged fingers fumbled my good 135mm f2 lens and dropped it hard on the tile floor.  I was sure I’d be picking up pieces of lens glass, but there was only a small dent on the filter ring after all.  So I guess I won’t be mounting any filters on that lens now, but thankfully the glass and the mechanism were undamaged.  Those old Canon FD lenses, like the cameras themselves, were made to take a beating that the new stuff never could.  Had that been one of the EOS lenses it would surely have been ruined.

I don’t know yet if they’ll do it this time too, but on previous servicing missions the staff was allowed to sign a small poster the astronauts would take into space.  So my signature has been into space a couple times.  Not quite anything like actually having an instrument I made go up, or for that matter myself.  But I can say at the end of my life that a piece of me has been in space.  But more then that, I can say I’ve been part of a team that’s written a few new lines into the book of human knowledge.  I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d have this chance in life, to be a part of space.  When I was a kid, I sat with my little Kodak Brownie Fiesta camera in front of the TV set while Neil Armstrong made the first human footprint on the moon, and snapped off a couple shots.  I’d experimented a few weeks before with different films and lighting, so I knew what would work.  Remember back then home VCRs were still years in the future.  I didn’t quite get the framing right…the Brownie wasn’t exactly an SLR after all…but it was good enough…

When they offered me the job at Space Telescope some years ago, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  I still feel that way.