Looking Forward To A Long Weekend ::

I don't know if I've ever posted here that I'm a staff photographer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and, beginning tomorrow and continuing through Saturday, we'll be shooting one of our largest and most important events of the year, the annual Exploration Rover Challenge races with high school and college competitors from all over the world. Here's a photo from last years race:

4 of us will shoot somewhere between 6k and 8k photographs over the 2 day event ending on Saturday evening around 7pm and we will all be utterly exhausted.

We will barely have a week of rest before the next event, the Student Launch Initiative, occurs in a huge cornfield north of Huntsville, Alabama. This is a one day event with high school and college teams launching rockets with the goal of reaching 1 mile in height with a rocket carrying a payload and gathering different telemetry information.

This is my favorite event of the year and pictured above is last year's team from Vanderbilt University from Nashville, Tennessee.

Both events will be streamed live on UStream and the links can be found on the NASA web site for each event.