Spy Museum

Housed in a former motel is the National Cryptology Museum.  It's right next door to the National Security Agency (NSA) which used to be so cloaked in secret that even folks that worked there wouldn't admit to it.  Now it's such a large employer and a huge campus it's well known what it is but not known really what they do there.

Vantage House, where I live, had a trip there with a docent led tour.

Staff from NSA have to be reminded not to be "loose lips".

Once the docent explained what a cipher was he took as to the Enigma exhibit for a history lesson on how the Nazi cipher was deciphered.

It was good to hear how women were such an integral part in the code breaking.  Once the algorithm was figured out, these huge machines called, bombes, could break the coded messages.

A fascinating trip and one we'll likely take again since there was much we didn't touch on in the 2 hours we were there.  Like the Navajo code talkers.

Happy 100th

Today my dad if he was still living would have been 100 years old.  

At their 50th anniversary celebration in 1990 he expressed the wish to live to 100.

This was likely an engagement photo since they were married in September of that year.

He died 11 years shy of that target.

Mom made it almost to 95 before she joined him.

In searching for photos for this post I discovered that most of my photos of my dad are hard copies in albums or framed like one of him with me at a lakeside that sits here at my desk. 

I think I'll keep them saved that way.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Sharing Grandchildren Photos Plus

Sorry, no frontal views of my three granddaughters, but they are so cute even from the back or in shadow.

We had a wonderful family vacation in WV in August.

Here's Dan helping 4 year old A to get a drink of spring water.

A loves insects.  She's trying to get a huge beetle to crawl up on her stick.

L is almost 2.

In the water her teeth chattered.

A took swimming lessons this summer.

A & L are sisters.

The youngest, I, at 1 year loved the water.

As a plus here are my siblings in order from right to left.  I'm #4.

We gathered at the end of our week vacation at my older sister's retirement community in PA. There is 19 years difference between the oldest and youngest of us. We reside in PA, MD, VA and the brother next to me in AZ.

More from Goddard

The Visitor Center at the Goddard Space Flight Center is filled with displays.

While we waited for our bus to be searched for bombs by the four legged bomb sniffer we could wander around the exhibits.

No bombs were found so we boarded the bus to go visit a very, very large clean room.

But not clean as in someone had taken a mop and bucket or vacuum cleaner to it, but clean as in no outside particles.  It's official name is much longer.

It was in this clean room that the mirrors for the James Webb Space Telescope were assembled.

The mirrors have left and of course kept clean but multiple wrappings we were told.  They are now in California where they are joined with the rest of the telescope in preparation for launch by the French Space Agency sometime in the future.

The clean room is being used for other preparations now. You can see how well wrapped staff working there have to be.

The panels below are the filters - several stories high.

Our docent with a model of the telescope.  Unlike the Hubble Telescope which orbits the Earth and was reachable so it could be fixed,  this telescope will orbit the sun.  It will be sending back pictures from very deep space, in a sense looking back in time 13 billion years.  Fascinating stuff.  Go to the website above to learn more.