posted 10-29-2008 03:22 PM               

Limited to 100 seats in the auditorium, we had to have reserved seats only. We had about 50 from our club, a group from the Seattle Astronomical Society, and a handful of carefully picked space geek friends (hi Jake!). Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, and Charles' fiance Lisa attended also.

It was a very successful event, which we had been working on for a few months (we need to give most credit to Anita for her hard work on planning this!).

We had a reception for about 25 people before the lecture with food coffee and goodies. We had about 45 minutes to chat with Dr. Simonyi and our friends - about space stuff, what else?

The lecture was about 2 hours long and Dr. Simonyi gave a great presentation. Very informal, kind of like a vacation slideshow of his training and flight to the ISS. He had a lot of pictures from his training which was really fun to see.

We wanted to give him a gift as a thank you for coming, so we had the idea of giving him a few of my ISS photos I took from my backyard. I created a special photo of my best images and had it framed (thanks for framing Maia, I would have screwed that up good!). I gave him the photo and it was great to see how excited he was about that. Friends told me that I should have seen the look on his face when I pulled it out.

Great evening and very successful.

Here are a couple photos -

Dr. Simoyi, Dr. Dunbar, and Lisa (Dr. Simonyi's finace)

Explaining the details of the photo.

Here is the photo I made up for him. I left the Expedition 15 patch blank since there were so many that came and went.

posted 10-30-2008 12:07 PM               

Charles delivered a wonderful overview of his preparation and flight to the ISS. He did indeed "light up" when he saw the image of the ISS that Tom had taken with his 15" telescope from his backyard near Seattle(!)

posted 10-30-2008 12:15 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Jake:
Charles delivered a wonderful overview of his preparation and flight to the ISS. He did indeed "light up" when he saw the image of the ISS that Tom had taken with his 15" telescope from his backyard near Seattle(!)

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I've seen Charles give a previous talk during Yuri's night at the Museum of Flight, this time he went into a lot more detail about the training. That was really fun to hear.

Robert, feel free to use the photos for the "Sightings" page if you like.