Star Destroyer and the Salt Vampire Finally I’m back to the Star Destroyer and I poured up a Salt Vampire. It’s taking it’s time setting up in the 45 degree back shop so I moved it into the office section of our studio where it’s warmer, hoping to dry it out well enough to paint it in 2 days or less. But it’s cold here and we’ve had rain nearly everyday for 2 weeks now. Good! We need it, not water restrictions. Today I will do the final paint job, airbrushing and weather on the hull. With any luck I’ll finish today. Certainly by tomorrow!
I am often asked, “Why freeflight when we have such tech as radio control?”. Tom Hallman has always answered that question for many of us with his beautiful videos that will inspire anyone with the passion for flight. Every time we fly there is a part of us up there with those wings and our hearts soar in the heavens.
My last post on Christmas day and a fitting one. Years ago my mom and dad gave me this exact train. Engine number 2065. I’ll never know what happened to it all these years later but recently my friend Scott gave me this. He thought it might be long gone as it sat in a box for over 50 years. But I took it apart and the tender and got it working again. What memories this brought back from a Christmas over 60 years ago. Can’t wait to get it on the larger track I have.
Mary got her Christmas present. She asked me this year to make her a present. So I did. This is what I was unable to share with you the last 3 weeks. It’s all scratch built except the trees. Lighthouse light blinks. First time I ever made water. It was wondeerful to do a different subject.Video and story to follow.
This is huge in so many ways I can’t begin to list them all. Webb will give us eyes to the cosmos as we have never had before. Thank you to everyone that gave of themselves the hard work and dedication to make this dream come true.
It was a great launch and the telescope is on it’s way to history among the stars.
You can follow the progress and deployments of this amazing telescope here on NASA:
I thank all of you for the support and love you have shown on this blog for all that we have done at SNG Studio. It is you that have kept our doors open and our hearts inspired to create beautiful things everyday. All of us together contribute greatly to a better world through our creativity. We need to remember this. Afterall creativity is a form of passion and love in of itself. So many of you have this creativity as you are one of Earth’s most important contributors to life, you are the artists and the people that love art.
And speaking of Earth and its importance I’d like to ask you all to do something for our planet and its people. Especially the young minds on this planet that hold our future. Read to your loved ones this essay by a very great man . Read it at the dinner table on Christmas day. It’s short and it would mean the world to me.
“The Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan.
If it were in my power, every person on the planet would read this.
Earth as seen from the Voyager spacecraft from 3.7 billion miles.
Please don’t start it unless you intend to read it all, and read it carefully. In the incredible words of Carl Sagan:
“We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there — on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light . . .
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994
Merry Christmas to you all on this Christmas Eve. And Peace on Earth. It’s not a concept. It’s the future.
The Art of Steve Neill 