cesarharada.com/blog

About Me

Cesar Harada (28) is an French-Japanese inventor and entrepreneur.
Cesar invented a ground-breaking sailing technology, a boat that changes shape, “Protei”. Originally developed to clean up the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Protei is an Open Hardware project now developed by an international community of scientists, engineers and designers for many other applications such as nuclear radiation sensing off Japan, plastic sensing in the Pacific garbage patch, red tide studies in Mexico and much more.
Cesar is also the general coordinator of the future International Ocean Station. Former Project leader at MIT, Cesar teaches Masters in Design & Environment at Goldsmiths University in London. Cesar graduated in 2009 from the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Arts in London, his collaborative project Open_Sailing received the Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the [NEXT IDEA].

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Pontchartrain

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The Moon became Mars

Very very early this morning (2AM), I witnessed the 2010 total eclipse happening the day of winter solstice (Dec 21) from Pontchartrain Lake in New Orleans.

This is a picture I took with my little camera. It was spectacular. The moon turned dark red.
The moon became mars.
It will be the first total lunar eclipse to occur on the day of the Northern Winter Solstice (Southern Summer Solstice) since 1638, and only the second in the Common Era.

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What this images shows is : the Earth is between the Sun and the Moon, perfectly aligned. The Moon is turning red in the shadow (umbra) of the Earth. 

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This is where the eclipse was visible from. On the NASA site you can find out when the next eclipses will happen for a few coming millennia. 

Filed under  //  2010   Astrology   Eclipse   Lake   Louisiana   Moon   NOLA   New Orleans   Pontchartrain   Solstice   Wikipedia   Winter   Youtube  
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Protei-002

 

By Open_Sailing + randomwalks
Cesar Harada + Sey Min
Thanks to 
LA Bucket Brigade : http://labucketbrigade.org/
Suzette Toledano Becker : http://suzettebecker.com/
with the support of V2_ : http://v2.nl/
Based on the T37 of Tippecanoe Boats : http://modelsailboat.com

 

Protei is an unmanned articulated sailboat designed to pull heavy loads upwind, in particular oil absorbent boom as a "long tail", to clean up oil spill in remote areas or in bad weather. Protei is needed to replace human labor exposed to toxic pollutant and in hurricane time. 
Protei-002 is an articulated robot, the test went OK. I had to trim the sail smaller, add weight at the ballast, make the electronic access higher to allow more lateral tilt. The fact that the electronic is not well protected is a big problem : as soon as there is too much wind, the boat tilts a lot and fills with water, so I was not able to conduct extensive testing, quickly I had shortcuts on the machine. For those who didn't see, Protei-001 was a super cool front-steering robotic sail-boat. Time is running out, instead of working more on Protei-002, I'm building Protei-003, inflatable, bigger, stronger, faster, more powerful, coming soon !

Filed under  //  Electronics   Gulf   NOLA   Oil Spill   Pontchartrain   Protei   RC   Robot  
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