What's Red with you?

Today, I am sharing our RED Planet photo! Just a fun image from our explorations of Space Center Houston this past weekend.

The Space Center is located fairly close to Galveston and I would certainly recommended it to anyone who is a history / Space buff who has 6-8 hours to kill.

The Space Center itself, isn't much to speak of. There is a small kids area, which has more Ipods than working hands learning activities. Although I admit the docking your ship activities and driving a mars rover was fun. The highlight and what you are really paying for is the opportunity to take a tram to the Johnson space center for the tours there.

It took us 2 and 1/2 hours to do 1 of the two tours due to how they worked the lines. Two trams were filled before we got to board ours, even though we were only the second group to the front of the line. Not sure how that worked, but they took people directly out of the warm building before loading the people who were waiting out in the 50 degree weather. Needless to say we skipped the other tour because we only had 2 hours left before they closed and we didn't think we would see much of note for our troubles.

The tour itself was interesting and we got to see the life size mock up of the International Space Station where the astronauts train,  and some of the equipment they are working with including some cool robots and vehicles.

This is an image of the "spider" which is just something I think should be in a Si-Fi movie. It was a little disappointing that they didn't have any way of getting close to much of it. Everything we saw was from a catwalk covered in class and about three stories high. I was pretty lucky to have a 1.8 lens with me and could manage some images without a flash. There were several on our tour that didn't get a single good image because the items were too far away, and the glass reflected the flash that there cameras  "auto" fired because of the lack of light. Situations like this really teach you to be aware of your cameras other functions and how to work the situation to your advantage!

VERTETIP: Learn your Flash commands! Just because your camera thinks you need flash doesn't mean you should use it! It's never the best option for museum images or other situations where you are shooting through glass!