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“Mr. Sulu, remind me to never piss you off…”
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Keep books dangerous
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This is a cool website that lets you calculate your age had you lived on any of the...
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson-Message to the future (by bantaawanlagundong)
Best speech about space exploration ever.
NASA on Tumblr, http://n-a-s-a.tumblr.com/
This is simply stunning.
I always feel incredibly humbled looking at things like this.
Absolutely breathtaking.
This is so cool!
Pale Blue Dot - Animation (by Ehdubya)
By Adam Winnik, based on an excerpt from ”Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space” by Carl Sagan.
(via Google)
Google celebrates the 31st Anniversary of the first use of the Canadarm in space.
A New View of The Pencil Nebula
The Pencil Nebula is pictured in a new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
This peculiar cloud of glowing gas is part of a huge ring of wreckage left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11 000 years ago. This detailed view was produced by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope.
Despite the tranquil and apparently unchanging beauty of a starry night, the Universe is far from being a quiet place. Stars are being born and dying in an endless cycle, and sometimes the death of a star can create a vista of unequalled beauty as material is blasted out into space to form strange structures in the sky.
This new image from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the Pencil Nebula against a rich starry background. This oddly shaped cloud, which is also known as NGC 2736, is a small part of a supernova remnant in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sails). These glowing filaments were created by the violent death of a star that took place about 11 000 years ago. The brightest part resembles a pencil; hence the name, but the whole structure looks rather more like a traditional witch’s broom.
In 1960, U.S. Air Force pilot Joseph Kittinger flew thirty kilometers straight up into the sky using a pressurized, high-altitude balloon. This very nearly made him the first man in space.
Mr. Kittinger free-fell for over twenty kilometers - at which point he was moving so fast that he broke the sound barrier.
He had all but left the earth’s atmosphere; the sky around him was pitch black; he could see the outlines of entire continents; and the haiku-like abstraction of his available reference points – earth, balloon, space – made it impossible to tell if he was really falling.
Does this sound like fiction? Luckily, there’s a film.
man, this is cool.
That would be an unbelievably awesome thing to do. And here’s me, afraid of heights.
(via quantumscoot)
In an interesting reply to a post I made about who’s faces I see as playing the roles of Shani and Pania in Black Mask & Pale Rider, I felt it a good idea to post this up here as well, because it’ll give my followers the opportunity to read what I’ve posted in the original format.
Lease Bertram
lease_bertram@yahoo.ca askedHUGE Andrea Menard fan, too! How can I connect with more of your writing? Links?
All of the links to my writing should be in the above menu of this blog, however, here’s the published material, here’s the original Black Mask & Pale Rider series in pdf download, here’s Canyons of Steel in it’s original posted format, and here is Rocket Fox and the Barrow’s Revenge.
Around a black hole 12 billion light years away, there’s an almost unimaginable vapor cloud of water—enough to supply an entire planet’s worth of water for every person on earth, 20,000 times over.
Two Steps From Hell - Gravitation (by Zagoreni02A)
Soundtracks from space.
After posting the series of photos from the Hubble telescope and the WISE Mission, and reading a quote that ratsinthekitchen had reblogged about an Egyptian university student who had invent a new propulsion device, it got me thinking about how close we are to the cusp of space exploration, yet so incredibly far away.
When a woman or a person of colour (or even a woman of colour) manages to create an incredible achievement it seems that society attempts to downplay that achievement. I should correct myself, not all of society, but the ruling class of society, which happens to be straight, white, cis gendered men. It’s a commonly held stereotype that women, and people of colour, could not possibly invent anything which could advance our technology.
Two small things to debunk that argument. Well, one to debunk and one to chastise for stating something so asinine.
First, women and people of colour have been inventing things for centuries which have helped advance out technology and make our society what it is today. The first computer programmer was a woman. Some of the most successful architects came from the Middle East, creating structures which influenced European design for centuries. Some of the most intelligent and successful rulers were women and people of colour. These were people that recognized a problem, took it upon themselves to solve said problem, and got shit done in the process.
The second point is more a description, or rather a feeling of what we in our society do when we deny the achievements of women and people of colour. As I said before, for decades now we have been on the edge of making a huge leap into space exploration, but we always seem to get distracted by something here on Earth. Our terrestrial troubles aside, let’s look at that quote again that ratsinthekitchen reblogged. An Egyptian student has an idea to help better engine performance in spacecraft. My hope is that NASA pays close attention to this. But if they don’t, will they have just denied the achievement of a person of colour? I believe they would have and that they would be less for denying that. Less, because it is a step in the direction of space exploration that will be ignored.
What if a woman were to create faster than light travel? Or even a woman of colour develop the technology to terraform so we can colonize the Moon, or Mars. If we ignore those achievements, if we bypass them then we are less as a society for it. We aren’t stepping forward into the great unknown, we’re drifting further and further away from it.
…is now done.
Now I have to go organize a folder with nothing but space pictures because I found I’ve been saving image files all over my computer all willy nilly.
And, I apologize for the sudden influx of close to 30 images on this Saturday morning, but I saw them at one of my news sites and had to share.
This exposed image shows the path of the star Alpha Camelopardalis speeding through the sky. The big red arc is a bow shock, which NASA notes is similar to the wake in front of the bow of a ship in water.
