This is astronaut Don Pettit. Don's got a whole bunch of cameras on board the International Space Station, or at least he did on missions Expeditions 30 and Expedition 31 to the ISS. Don took a whole bunch of awesome photos that were turned into one cool time lapse video, but given a crazy Tron-like [...]
Read More Christoph Malin, Don Pettit, International Space Station, ISS, orbit, photography, space, star trails, Tron, vimeo
My friend Jules posted this I think yesterday — a bunch of images from Don Pettit, flight engineer aboard the International Space Station. Not regular ol' images of life in space or anything, nay. These are long exposure shots of stars, et al, taken from the station itself. This is about the coolest thing I've [...]
Read More ISS< International Space Station, Julie Johnston, long exposure, space, star trails, Stellar
STORY TIME! Try to guess where in the world Lumen Sandiego is, and learn about some RE-DONK-U-LOUS-LY cool lighting art at the same time! Some years ago, I travelled to an "Art Island," which hosts work by some very spectacular artists, including Claude Monet, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Tadao Ando, Yves Klein, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and most importantly [...]
Read More adventure, art history, game, james, learning, light, movement, quiz, space, story, turrell, world, worldwideSo back on the 7th of December 1972 , Appollo 17 was about 28,000 miles away from the surface of the Earth, and they decided HEY! Let's tweet this cool photo of the Earth that nobody but us can see! (Of course I kid, everybody knows that MySpace was the *only* Social Media place back [...]
Read More astronauts, Blue Marble, earth, NASA, NOAA, spaceOk, there is something very interesting taking place with NASA this month. On September 23, NASA decided to approve three projects that are being called "Technology Demonstration Projects." A space-based optical communication system (which is what I find the most exhilarating), a deep space atomic clock, and a big ol' space sail. From the NASA Office [...]
Read More Laser, NASA, research, spaceSo, something exciting happened in the world of Astronomy and Astrophysics this last week – two groups of scientists and astronomers at CalTech discovered a mass supply of water in the form of water vapor, living at the center of a quasar called APM 08279+5255, about 12 billion light years away. That is a lot of [...]
Read More APM 08279+5255, astronomy, Astrophysics, CalTech, discoveries, electromagnetic spectrum, luminous body, quasar, quasars, space, sun, visible lightCrazy! Observers and astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting around a faraway star recently with a mass eight times that of Jupiter. Really? COOL! Is this where the Coneheads live??? Obviously, the little circled one in the mid-upper-left of the picture is the planet that is possibly a planet. Orbiting around that big bright star [...]
Read More 1RXS J160929.1-210524, extrasolar, planet, solar system, spaceI always enjoy running across NASA-related news. What many people don't know about NASA is that a whole bunch of their business is related to light – light from stars and light reflected off of planets (and moons) can tell us how far away something is located. "Something," in this case, could be a star [...]
Read More Kepler, life on other planets, NASA, photometer, Satellite, spaceThe Hubble telescope (I'm sorry, "Space Observatory") recently got a big upgrade – in addition to a new camera, it got two repairs that made the observatory capable of all kinds of new awesomeness. From the press release at NASA: "We couldn't be more thrilled with the quality of the images from the new Wide [...]
Read More beautiful, Hubble, Hubble Telescope, images, NASA, spaceThat's right, kids – astronauts pee too! Except they have to pee in some sort of space-porta-potty that probably doesn't smell as bad as the ones at outdoor music festivals. Yuck. What you see above is the plume of a huge water and urine dump from shuttle Discovery this last week. The shuttle, while docked [...]
Read More astronauts, Discovery, International Space Station, pee, shuttle, space, urine, water dump