Virtuallinda (in silver) and Alex with the co-creator of Yuri's Night (rocking the gold Princess Leia gold bikini). Alex saw Linda across the room... they met... talked all night...their worlds collided (social media + heliophysics) & they created The Sun Today (www.thesuntoday.org)... wedding date May 27, 2012...honeymoon broadcasting & tweeting the Transit of Venus on Mauna Kea, Hawaii on June 5, 2012...then off to meet Jim Lovell (Apollo 13) on the next trip. THANK YOU YURI'S NIGHT!

Meeting a German astronaut I hadn't heard of before, at the venue of the
first-ever Yuri's Night in Bonn, Germany, this year: at the headquarters
of the German space agency where a Space Movie Night was held. A view into
a scale model of the German-built ISS Columbus module - see
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3281106701434&set=a.3281105661408.2130...
for the full installation ...

The Aerial Showgirls defying gravity

2006  Yuri's Night   "I see Earth, it is so beautiful!" (Yuri Gagarin April 12, 1961)

Most interesting is at Yuri's Night 2010 had kinds of people at a NASA facility you typically don't see at a US federal facility. Yuri's Night at NASA Ames Research Center had various artists, dancers, engineers, scientists interacting with music and displays of space technologies. Here I am in my cosmonaut flight suit. Some of the patches include USSR version of Apollo Soyuz flight in 1975, Shuttle Mir docking in 1995 (patch designed by Robert McCall), USSR patch from fictional movie "2010" of joint mission to Jupiter on the spacecraft Alexei Leonov. More photos at http://mfwright.com/yurigagarin/yurigagarin.html

Yuri's Night 2011 at Caffe Frascati, www.caffefrascati.com (Cafe Trieste rebranded) in San Jose, CA, was organized by Roger Springall. This party was one of selected sites to premeire the video "First Orbit." After the film, Leonid Segal, a Russian WWII vet, gave a brief speech about Yuri’s flight. In photo holding Gagarin posterboard is Roger Springall, Leonid Segal, Ida Segal, and me (Michael Wright) in my "cosmonaut flight suit."

I had a couple ballroom dancers (from Russia and Ukraine) pose with my Yuri Gagarin posterboard at a local dance studio. Posterboard features various photos of Yuri, images from early Soviet publications and others from later times.