Something of a special feature here, original photography scanned from the breathtakingly beautiful ‘To The Moon’ (Time-Life 1969) an audio and visual chronology that documents NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and (of course) Apollo projects. ‘To The Moon’ includes 6 doubled sided 12″ Vinyl’s full of famous radio transmissions and interviews, plus an accompanying 190 page slip case book, and that’s the focus of this post. Many thanks to Craig for the temporary loan!
Spotted this breathtaking selection of abstract space photography earlier today and thought it’d make a good meander to the flow of the blog…
This post then is something of an expanded retweet which I first saw linked via We Are Build’s Twitter feed http://twitter.com/BuildsBlog. The full article comes via Wired Magazine and that’s where you can see a complete set of 12 images. Here’s my thoughts and notes on the selected imagery…
All 5 photographs have been taken this year by NASA’s enduring Cassini probe which started it’s long mission to Saturn and it’s many moons back in 1997. Cassini–Huygens was developed as a twin NASA/ESA venture, with NASA constructing the Orbiter and the Europeans building the Huygens Probe (lander) which touched down on the surface of Titan (Saturn’s largest moon) on January 14th, 2005 transmitting data (via Cassini) back to earth for 90 minutes. Whilst not without some glitches both probes have been a phenomenal success making many significant discoveries such as confirming the existence of liquid hydrocarbon lakes, cryovolcanoes and mysterious “spokes” in Saturn’s rings, plus with plans to potentially run Cassini through to 2017 there is of course scope for learning so much more…
Top Image: The Icy moon of Tethys in silent transit around the enourmous gas giant. Tethys is just one of sixty two discovered buying atorvastatin online Moons in orbit of Saturn.
2nd Image: The moons of Rhea (large in frame) and Epimetheus, despite the deceiving appearance these moons are in fact 250,000 miles apart. Rhea with a diameter of of 946 miles is Saturn’s second largest moon whilst at just 70miles across Epimetheus ranks 16th largest.
3rd Image: The dark side of Saturn cast’s a long heavy shadow across it’s rings – stunning! – the aforementioned moon of Thetys can be seen top right whilst Enceladus spins away bottom right.
4th Image: Perpetual storms on Saturn can feature wind speeds in access of 1000 mph and can be interspersed with violent cracks of lighting, amazingly Cassini managed to capture this phenomenon on film, check it out. Though unimaginably fast Saturn’s wind speeds are in fact trumped by those of far flung Neptune which can clock over 1300mph!
Bottom: Dione (Saturns 15th largest moon) is dwarfed by the looming Titan. Titan appears yellow in colour and is the only moon known too have a dense atmosphere, consisting of 98.4% Nitrogen with Methane making up the remainder… possibly not a holiday spot then.
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As I mentioned do check the full post at Wired for another 7 images, or indeed try the NASA source.
Sci-Fi-O-Rama reader and fellow blogger Parker Mason got in touch this week with a link to his recently created, mammoth-sized Flickr Gallery “Nasa 1172”. Literally translated that’s 1172 incredible images of Nasa’s manned and robotic endeavors in the exploration of space. As you can imagine with over 1000 shot’s there’s plenty of variety, I’ve concentrated on picking a small selection of video graphics and diagrammatic Illustrations. Some notes then on the chosen images:
Top: Not exactly sure which Probe/Satellite this is – If you know please post a comment.
2nd Top: I’m guessing this captioned Illustration shows how a comet’s tail starts to form on approach toward the inner solar system.
3rd Top: A diagram showing the voyage of “Ulysses” a joint NASA/ESA probe launched back in 1990.
Bottom 3: These Images I believe are all stills from a 80’s NASA Computer animation showing the trajectory and approach of Voyager 2 to Uranus in 1986. I can’t seem to find the complete clip on youtube, which is a shame because I remember the animation looks really cool as the craft spins over on flyby – anyway here’s a sample of similar footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r46QdcnAYeU.
See the full gallery at: http://is.gd/cU4RE also check Parker @ Nineteen Ninety Never http://199x.org/ and http://twitter.com/parkernow
Ok so something of a different post – real world – a 21st century frontier town glowing in Antarctic twilight.
This photograph is of Antarctica’s largest settlement & it’s logistical hub, the US administered “McMurdo Station” at it’s peak home to over 1,200 residents…
I picked this image for a couple of reasons, firstly because anything to do with the icy wastes of Antarctica fascinates me! and secondly because it looks very much like a recently “terraformed” world in the mould of a certain James Cameron film….
Also of note, that is an active volcano in the background; the 3,794 meters high Mount Erebus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus here’s another excellent shot that gives a real sense of it’s mass http://bit.ly/5hC69I the nearby neighboring New Zealand research station “Scott Base” (seen on right) is approx 3 miles from McMurdo…
Read more about McMurdo at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station Photo is via the National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov
A further selection of the work of Mark Weaver, the master of found collage & montage…
Top image ‘Avenge’, 2nd image ‘Transmission’, 3rd image ‘Memory’, Bottom Image ‘1963’. All art is via Mark’s Flickr Photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/markweaver/. Well worth following!
