Astronauts are back and safe. I can stand down. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been on edge these past ten days. Gary didn’t help this morning when he shared the heat shield worries.

Anyway, good work NASA, you waited until April this time.

Excellent work on the animated graphics in particular.

Early on while the solar panels adjusted, the panels in the graphic sloooowly adjusted as well. Nice work.

Evidently the toilet was never fixed, so points off for that. Then again, Buzz Aldrin famously never pooped during his week on Apollo 11.

As for myself, I am as exhausted as if I had personally willed it to space and back.

So this is the previous …

This is the progress …

And this is the goal.

They have begun to release the images of the far side of the moon.

No one at NASA is talking about the alleged green tint.

Disappointed Photoshop users everywhere immediately took the ohotos and cranked up the color saturation. I won’t show you an doctored example.

However, I did zoom in on the Earthrise photo …

… and I saw this one tiny crater that seems to have a slight green tinge in the bottom front.

If you zoom in on this even more let me know if you see it.

Okay, this is Sunday evening, and I have a comment for the astronaut giving notes on the far side of the moon.

You mentioned two key things.

1. The shadow where the moon split from sunlight to shadow, “the Terminator,” was extraordinary. You said It made obvious how craggy and dramatic the far side of the lunar surface was. Mountains and valleys and cliffs. Good to know.
2. THERE ARE GREEN PATCHES ON THE MOON.

Evidently some parts OF THE MOON are brown, and some are tinged green. So stop rhapsodizing about the Terminator. Tell me more about the green. Lime green or olive green? Green like baby poop? Green like a spring lawn? Green like the Martian flag?

I do not think your priorities were aligned correctly. Hope you took a lot of photos.

It is a shame that the president has chosen the same day and time for his public speech on the current war in Iran. Is he competing with the moon for attention?

I bet the astronauts are pretty excited. It really is a shame the toilet has been working only on and off. I would find that a huge inconvenience if I knew millions of people would have eyes on me.

I find this quote odd: “They also may be the first humans to see some parts of the moon’s far side with the unaided eye.” May be? Really? That statement came from NASA. I mean, all the Apollo 13 astronauts and all the command module pilots all saw some parts of the far side surface with their eyes, right? I suppose they were too close to see the poles. This group will be further away. Or maybe there have been secret Soviet missions and there’s some skeletal cosmonaut corpse down there.

[SPOILERS GALORE!] [NYT CROSSWORD SPOILERS! ENDING OF JANE EYRE SPOILERS!]

The New York Times crossword had a clue sometime this past week, something like “Literary heroine’s name that describes her appearance and the end of the book.”

Other letters left no choice other than Jane Eyre.

“Huh. Okay, Jane, Plain Jane, kind of a stretch but … the end of the book? Eyre? Air? Because she hears his voice in the air?” And then, “Oooohhhh, ‘heir’. That’s amazing.”

Was it deliberate? Opinions are mixed. But at least it must be a subliminal pun.

When I think of Capcom (the Capsule Communicator, the guy who communicates with the space capsule), I think of this hard-smoking coffee-drinking guy, Gene Kranz.

I can’t tell you how nice it was to watch the burn that pointed the Artemis astronauts to the moon, and to notice that the majority of the people on the screen were women.

I loved watching the expressions on these ladies faces during the process.

It’s nice to see an honest celebration instead of the mad flag-waving scene after Apollo 11 landed.

And I know this is petty but it’s also nice that the man in the top right looks a little left out.

So this is the previous …

This is the progress …

And this is the goal.

Hmm. I think that the best case is that it ends up no worse than before. Haven’t messed with the flowers yet. The wall needs glazes so it isn’t so mottled. And I’m using titanium white. Is there an extra luminous white out there? I have zinc white too.

I know we’ve put people into low earth orbit for years, but it’s not the same as going to the moon.

Two things happened in the last few hours:

Someone at work referred to a work deadline as T minus 2 hours away and I snapped at her.

Someone on the NASA channel mentioned that one of the engines was repurposed from the shuttle missions and I snapped at the television.

However, everything is nominal now, 45 minutes in anyway.

I do like that NASA has upped its deep space animation game in the last five decades.