I have been thinking about Armstrong a lot, too, Nancy. I was irritated that the Washington Post had him under the fold when they announced his death. Some stupid political picture was above the fold. Idiots. It certainly isn't the same paper as it was when Katherine Graham was alive!

I have guesses for the three old-fashioned instruments. Sailors of the stars, indeed.

Cynthia

lol!! Have to wonder in the PC world how politicians trump real-life heroes!! I do political fund-raising for the neo-Cons up here - yuck. I had a woman yesterday here telling me she wished Romney would run up here - gaaaacckkk. Sorry, but our righties are bad enough, trying to wipe out the gains of a generation!! Sorry for the political rant.

Nancy.

Nancy, afraid this old gal hasn't kept up with her reading lately so once again I'm clueless.

Annette

I'm know this one as read a newspaper article containing the info yesterday as I was catching up on the week's papers.
Amazing what they could do with those primitive computers and what little I can figure out with my more powerful ones.

I've been listening to your Beach Boys album while surfing the net. Thanks for the link, Nancy.

Glad you enjoyed Bobbie - I was rockin' around the house to it last night!!

I feared this would be too easy - so much in the news about it this week. Absolutely amazing. This is was the Nav system looked like:

{{gwi:612404}}

I`ll wait for TM and Annette to see if they chime in.

Nancy.

Annette - I missed your post. Sorry - your husband would know these tools!!

Nancy.

Chime!

I haven't read this stuff and will have to guess a little on these. A regular magnetic compass wouldn't do them any good, but maybe a gyrocompass would, though I don't know that it would be considered old-fashioned. Maybe. They were used in WWII, I think.

There is a device for finding one's position on earth, especially at sea, that probably could be used in space too, if the right tables were made. It's kind of a sexy piece of equipment.

If you were using the sexy device, you would need an accurate timepiece of some kind.

That's all I have so far. Am I warm at all?

TM

Sexy, indeed!! You know, that they wouldn't have charts from their position was my first thought!! They used three stars: Menkent (Aldrin said, Menkent, no one in their right mind would use Menkent); Nunki (at least, Collins was pretty sure it was Nunki...); and Atria, for good measure. Can you do the math, TM??

Nancy.

I was thinking sextant! Also thinking of one that I never was good at using. Guess I let those lessons just slide by me. We loved seeing them use them in the Apollo 13 movie! My third guess seems odd, but I know earlier flights had one. Can't remember why though, although it sort of goes with the sextant since I can picture early explorers on ships using them.

Love this quote:

Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
Wernher von Braun

Nancy.

Can I do the math? Was that a hint? Could they have taken along a device that I taught hundreds of kids to use, but by the mid-seventies was teaching no one how to use? I'm probably off base here, because it likely wouldn't have been considered an old-fashioned device in 1969. Would it even be considered an instrument? Hmmm. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the question.

A slang term for the thing I'm thinking of sounds a lot like lipstick.

TM

Okay, my guesses: sextant, telescope, slide rule.

Cynthia

Oooops I forgot to get back last night, I came up with sextant and telescope, am I too late.

Annette

Occasionally, I wonder what would happen if there were worldwide power outages. Kids today wouldn't know how to start solving those math problems, TM. I am sorry we don't still teach the slide rule. Of course, I never quite got it, so I would do no better! Chuck could handle it, though. He still has his old one.

Annette, I never got back last night either, but I figure that Nancy, being the generous sort, will still give us stars if we are right...won't you Nancy? ;)

Cynthia

TM, you lost me at lipstick!! lol.

Yes, they had a sextant, telescope, slide-rule, and star charts. They don't teach slide-rule anymore(thank you Jesus!!) so I considered it a technology whose time has passed by.

Collins can see, though not well. They plot Menkent, and a star called Nunki - at least Collins is pretty sure it's Nunki - and Atria for good measure. But Collins has the last word: "God, I'll tell you, the visibility through that telescope is a big disappointment."

Space travel is aided by powerful computers today, with laser guidance systems, with hardware and software no one even imagined in Armstrong's day. NASA would never dream of giving astronauts a second-rate optical instrument to find their way.

But using paper maps of the stars and the moon, carrying slide rules to do calculations, Apollo-11 made it to the moon safely, 389,645 km from Earth, and back.

When Apollo-11 reached the moon, the men had spent three days in a tiny cabin. It was dirty; urine leaked out of the disposal system and dried, leaving little brown particles in the landing module. Collins describes the spacecraft as "raunchy."

For three days, Armstrong had been in charge of reaching the moon, a moving target. He and his crew hit their planned orbit within a fraction of a mile.

But landing was hairy. The computer started issuing warnings on the descent (they turned out to be unimportant, but still scary), and the computer was directing the Eagle lander toward a crater with steep sides and big boulders.

They flew back to orbit and Armstrong almost uttered another quote for the history books.

As they left the moon's surface, Armstrong's voice is recorded as saying: "The Eagle is ..." But Aldrin interrupted: "Be advised of the pitchover." And it was back to the technical language of flying, though Armstrong did have time to wonder why he was sitting on three 3,500-pound rockets and couldn't hear them.

So, there you go!! You do wonder what we will do, collectively, in the future with no slide-rules, no Morse Code, little in the way of basic math skills. Could we go to the Moon, the Stars, thus equipped?? But I digress. For stars: TM, Cynthia, Annette and Bobbie - everybody!!

Thanks for playing. Till next week!! Nancy.

Yep, I still have my old one too, Cynthia. I used to spend close to a week teaching chemistry kids how to use them, and I didn't cry when scientific calculators came on the scene. The first scientific calculator I ever tried had to be plugged in and cost $1200. When they got down to $70, I bought one and never looked back. Well, maybe a little. Three hundred years of slide rules, then poof, they are history.

TM

I still have my cheap slide rule which I never really learned to use well. The only time I used it was in my high school math class when we were taught that unit. Didn't use it during my college studies for my math major and chemistry minor. Also was before calculators were widely available. We used paper and pencil and brain power. I remember whincing when we had to pay $50+ for my son's scientific calculator.

Navigating by the star maps and telescopes, hardly sounds like space travel as we envision it today, more like one of those thrown back in time episodes of Star Trek.

Thanks for the stars, Nancy.

Have a terrific week everyone. I am thinking about introducing slide rules to our fourth graders. Unfortunately, I won't be able to demonstrate how to use them....

;)
Cynthia

I went through my patches last night and I have that one. Got it at the Kennedy Space Center.