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Have a Blast at the NASA Stennis Space Center this Season Running out of places to go or things to do with family and friends this season? Then take the short drive to NASA Stennis Space Center in Hancock County Mississippi. Stennis Space Center is where Apollo Saturn V engines that took Americans to the moon in the 1960s were tested. Today, every space shuttle main engine is test-fired and proven flight-worthy at Stennis. Visitors to StenniSphere, the visitor center at Stennis Space Center, board shuttles for a 25-minute narrated tour of America ?s largest rocket engine test complex. There, they can get an up-close view of the massive test stands, and often experience the shake, rattle and roar of a rocket engine as it is being tested. The museum at StenniSphere has 14,000 square feet of exciting displays and exhibits from NASA, the Naval Meteorology, and Oceanography Command and other agencies. Hands-on activities are fun and educational for both children and adults, ranging from a mock test control center to a real space shuttle main engine. Also at StenniSphere is the 1960s cafe, the RocKeTeria, where visitors may dine for lunch. Souvenirs or gifts may be purchased at the Space Odyssey Gift Shop. StenniSphere offers free tours to the public from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and charter tours may be scheduled Monday through Saturday, with the exception of Christmas Day and New Year ?s Day when StenniSphere is closed. Tours originate from the Launch Pad tour stop at the Hancock County Welcome Center at Interstate 10, just 45 miles east of New Orleans, and 32 miles west of Gulfport and Mississippi State Highway 49. (Visitors 18 and older must present a valid identification with photograph, such as a driver ?s license or passport.) For more information, please call 1-800/237-1821 or 1-228/688-2370 or visit www1.ssc.nasa.gov/public/visitors. The Steamboat Iron Mountain by Bill Pitts The Mississippi River, America ?s watery highway, has seen more than its share of riverboat accidents, what with the many ways a ship could meet its end. An overworked boiler might explode, showering the flammable wooden boat, its cargo, crew, and passengers with burning coal, white hot shards of metal, and scalding steam. A snag might rip out the bottom of the hull, sending a boat plunging to the muddy bottom of the powerful, roiling river. And then there is the constantly changing channel of the river itself, ready to throw up a new sandbar to catch a careless river pilot unawares with a shallow stretch of water, or a new bypass where there once had been solid land. The Mississippi River has many such stories of steamboat tragedies but there is one in particular that has no clear cut explanation as to what really happened, although some may claim otherwise. In March of 1882, the stern-wheeler Iron Mountain was moving barrels of molasses and four barges laden with cotton up river ?by some accounts down river. She docked at the river city of Vicksburg, Mississippi to take on supplies before continuing on ?an uneventful trip so far ?one of many. One hundred and eighty-one feet long, thirty-five feet wide, and about ninety feet tall from her shallow-draft keel to the top of her twin smoke stacks, the Iron Mountain was not a small steamboat by any stretch of the imagination. And she had been only ten years on the river, having been completed in 1872 on the Ohio River at Pittsburgh. Constructed for Gray ?s Iron Line, she was the first steamer on the inland waterways of the Western Rivers (as the Mississippi and her tributaries were called then) to have boilers made entirely from steel. Prior to this, all steam ships ? boilers were made from cast iron. There were five of them, and each boiler measured forty inches in diameter and were twenty-six feet long, with a pressure output of one hundred and seventy pounds per square inch of live steam. There are several versions as to what happened on that voyage. Fifty-five passengers and crew were onboard, and two hours out of Vicksburg another steamer, the Iroquois Chief, came close to meeting her own end when she almost collided with the four barges that the Iron Mountain had been towing. They were drifting with the current, clearly a hazard to other ships, clearly an indication that some accident had befallen the Iron Mountain for her barges to be running loose on the river this way. Some say she struck an obstruction in the river and sank quickly, taking all on board down with her. Others claim that the lines holding the barges had been deliberately cut, a sure sign of a problem. Yet another account has her starting to sink, and passengers and crew seeking safety on the barges she was towing. In some stories, the vessel disappeared completely, swallowed up by the mighty river. Other reports of minor pieces of wreckage having turned up on the Louisiana side of the river are common. River pirates also come into play ?it is speculated that they boarded the steamer and killed everyone aboard. A current theory blames the boat ?s disappearance on a ?time slip, ? a rent in the fabric of space-time. Sounds more like a rent in the fabric of logic! Almost one hundred years later in 1977, the Army Corps of Engineers published a booklet entitled ?Historic Names and Places on the Lower Mississippi River. ? The Iron Mountain accident is included and the fact that this occurrence generated several of the above mentioned legends is discussed. According to the booklet, the steamer did run upon a snag and passengers and crew made it to safety as the boat started to sink. When a group of the boat ?s officers went to check on the wreck the following day, they could not find it. The Iron Mountain had indeed vanished! But not for any arcane or mysterious reasons ?the boat had simply floated downriver. This loss was reported and the officers and crew found themselves positions on other steamboats. A couple of months later, the Iron Mountain was located. Apparently, as a result of the 1882 flood, the wreck of the Iron Mountain had been carried through a break in a levee on the Louisiana side of the river near present-day Omega Landing and deposited in the middle of a field by the receding flood waters! This explanation certainly clears up the mystery of the disappearance of the Iron Mountain. But it also brings another one to mind . . . how is it possible that, for several months, no one spotted a one hundred and eighty foot long Mississippi River steam boat sitting in the middle of a flat field?! Murals in the Post Office ?Forest Loggers ? in Forest by Sylvia Krebs During the Great Depression of the 1930s, putting Americans back to work was a major goal of Franklin D. Roosevelt ?s New Deal. Government agencies provided jobs, not only for manual laborers but for artists as well. Eudora Welty ?s photographs of Mississippi are one example of New Deal art. The murals painted on walls of post offices and other public buildings around the state are another. Forest, Mississippi is home to one of the Depression-era murals commissioned by the U.S. Treasury Department ?s Section of Fine Arts. The painting depicts four black men cutting trees. Julian Binford, who was trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris, was the artist. In April 1940, when Binford came to Forest to take measurements for his work, the Scott County Times noted that the painting would have ?a general theme of forest products, this being an important industry in this section for many years. ? At the age of thirty-one, Julian Binford had already established himself as a promising young artist. His abstract and imaginative paintings had been displayed in one-man showings in Paris, and he had similar success when he returned home. Binford and his wife, a French countess, made their new home in Virginia, living in a cabin without electricity or running water. This simple life-style influenced Binford ?s painting. His work became more realistic as he relied on his neighbors and their environment for inspiration. Thirteen months after his first visit to Forest, Binford returned to supervise the hanging of the mural. On May 1, 1941, the Scott County Times devoted only a few more lines to the artist and his work. ?The woods scene was designed to illustrate both the name of Forest and the lumber industry of the surrounding county. ? No mention was made of the black workers in the painting, a subject for which Binford would soon become famous. Given the time, it was inevitable that the subject of race would enter into both the artist ?s creation and the viewers ? perceptions of the murals. Binford reported to the Section of Fine Arts that local lumber company officials were pleased with his work.... Whatever the citizens of Forest might have thought about their new public art, it received high marks from other sources. When it was displayed temporarily in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer praised it enthusiastically. An even warmer endorsement came from an editor of the Progressive Farmer, who called it the best painting he had ever seen in a public building. The Forest mural was the only one that Binford did for the Fine Arts Section, but his work received attention in Time, Newsweek, and Life during 1942. The November issue of Life reproduced his most famous mural, a 12 foot x 12 foot painting of the Jordan River done for the Shiloh Baptist Church, a black congregation near his Virginia home. At Binford ?s suggestion, the congregation paid him in produce ?two pick-up truck loads of chickens, corn, potatoes, and beets. A realistic style and local subject matter characterized most of the paintings done by Binford and the other Depression-era muralists. Today, after a recent refurbishing, the Forest mural remains an excellent example of both his work and that of the Fine Arts Section artists as a group. I recently watched a show called Naked Science on the National Geographic channel. This particular episode was called Death of the Sun ?it explored the origin and future of the star at the center of our solar system. Some of the imagery was astonishing, so I ?d like to share three websites with you that show our Sun in a light that some of you may not have seen before. All addresses current as of post time. www.nineplanets.org/sol.html I like the name of this site! It ignores the fact that a few misguided individuals have chosen to demote Pluto to the status of a dwarf planet. But that ?s not why we ?re here. This website offers basic information about our star. www.thesurfaceofthesun.com The science is beyond me, but this site claims that there is a ?rocky, calcium ferrite transitional layer ? 3,000 miles or 4,800 km below the visible photosphere of our sun! Our sun has a surface? Then, there ?s ?solar moss, ? two million degrees Fahrenheit gas seen above the sun ?s photosphere. http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/eclipse.html During the 1980s, I experienced a partial solar eclipse here in Jackson. It was amazing ?on a hot sunny day, when the moon ?s shadow swept over us, it was like walking into an air-conditioned room! This is a NASA website that catalogues and maps eclipses around the world. By the way, the next total solar eclipse to cross the continental United States is about ten years off ?on August 21, 2017. And for those of you with the longevity, Mississippi will experience a total solar eclipse on August 12, 2045. I ?ll be there ?at the Rainwater Observatory in French Camp for this one!