STS-130, Poised
I hope by the time you see this post, Space Shuttle Endeavour will have carried the STS-130 crew into orbit; at time of writing, it’s about 90 minutes to launch and low clouds are giving a no-go status, which hopefully will clear in the next hour. These pictures are from Saturday, and I love the sunrise photo (top) — granted, a sunset would be more appropriate at this point….
I started to feel bad for all the shuttle-picspam I post around each launch, but you know, there’s only five left including this one, and the Space Shuttle is the iconic spacecraft of my youth and… my life. So I don’t care. I’m posting beautiful shuttle pics. Next year I’ll probably not stop. :P
Show and Tell
Posted by Danielle in Children's Items on February 5, 2010
So I saw this rereleased 1965 Astronaut Barbie over at Out of the Cradle last month. She’s pretty chic, very Sixties. Nice hair.
But I have to show you MY Astronaut Barbie because, well, I think she’s just SO MUCH BETTER:
Astronaut Barbie -- We girls can do anything! (1985)
Oh yeah… NINETEEN EIGHTY-FIVE, BABY!
I love my Astronaut Barbie — she has awesome puffy sleeves (“straight out of Dynasty!”, says my best friend), a hot pink mini-skirt for dates after a long day of exploring space, an enormous fishbowl helmet, and amazing knee-high hot pink boots! (And an amusing “personal computer” with windup scrolling screen.)
Spaceship Concepts
Posted by Danielle in Art & Architecture on February 4, 2010
Little Dragon, by teemunkle @ deviantart
I ran across this post of spaceship concept art earlier this week and had to pass the goodness on to you, dear reader! Featured are a few of my favorites.
This one just charms the dickens out of me, I can’t explain why! ↓
USS Flatiron, by Hunterkiller @ deviantart
As for this one, it’s the colors. ↓
Hollow Ship, by Masz-rum @ deviantart
Interesting shape on this one. ↓
Recon Scout, by Aksu @ deviantart
And this one is just… very strange. ↓
Test Ship, by UrbanIndustries @ deviantart
The Stars Behind the Curtain
Credit: ESO (European Southern Observatory)
It’s images like this, with a thousand thousand cosmic Christmas trees a-twinkling, that make me wish I could be out there, floating on the night. (Preferably with some protective gear and a breathing apparatus.)
ESO is releasing a magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born. Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way, which therefore serves as an excellent “local” analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies. The cluster also hosts the most massive star to be “weighed” so far.
NGC 3603 is a starburst region: a cosmic factory where stars form frantically from the nebula’s extended clouds of gas and dust. Located 22 000 light-years away from the Sun, it is the closest region of this kind known in our galaxy, providing astronomers with a local test bed for studying intense star formation processes, very common in other galaxies, but hard to observe in detail because of their great distance from us. [Read more.]
Space-Rated Paints
Posted by Danielle in Advertising & Media on February 2, 2010
Okay, so I found an ad I wanted to post after all, because the thought of using space-rated paint at home is SO amusing to me. Y’know, just in case some random part of your interior or exterior decides to launch at rocket speeds… better yet, in case you happen to host a rocket launch in your home!
Tethys and Titan
Hard to decide what to post after yesterday’s anniversary and news… all I know is, posting retro space race ads seemed wildly inappropriate. So here you go. It’s Titan with Tethys in the distance, courtesy of Cassini.
What’s that behind Titan? It’s another of Saturn’s moons: Tethys. The robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn captured the heavily cratered Tethys slipping behind Saturn’s atmosphere-shrouded Titan late last year. The largest crater on Tethys, Odysseus, is easily visible on the distant moon. Titan shows not only its thick and opaque orange lower atmosphere, but also an unusual upper layer of blue-tinted haze. Tethys, at about 2 million kilometers distant, was twice as far from Cassini as was Titan when the above image was taken. In 2004, Cassini released the Hyugens probe which landed on Titan and provided humanity’s first views of the surface of the Solar System’s only known lake-bearing moon.
Columbia
Posted by Danielle in Perspectives on February 1, 2010
Space Shuttle Columbia over Houston, July 27, 1999 - © Danielle Signor
I mentioned on Twitter last week that the Columbia anniversary is something I take pretty personally, so I’m not going to attempt to make some happy-ooh-cool-space post like I typically do. Instead I’m sharing a picture I took of Columbia (STS-93) en route to a night landing in Florida, which I took from the rocket park at Johnson Space Center during my summer internship there. (Well, my internship was at LPI to be precise; we had access to JSC and used it whenever possible. Because we could. It was fun.)
ANYWAY we decided to watch the reentry at the rocket park because it was nice and dark, and in a fit of desperation, having stupidly forgotten my tripod I took this long exposure and somehow unconsciously tracked the shuttle’s path. DUMB. LUCK. It’s probably my favorite picture from that summer, especially given what happened on this day, seven years ago….
Earlier that summer, us interns went to the public welcome-back slideshow/ceremony for STS-96 at Space Center Houston. It was my first encounter with astronauts in Houston (it was just a week or two after we’d all arrived.) I seem to remember the rookies getting their pins, but I was in such an awed daze that it’s hard to say for sure. What I do remember was getting autographs after the presentation was over. Most of the crew looked tired, inured to the procedure; signing, a polite word or two, next please. All except one: a radiant young man, brimming with energy, asking each person’s name, writing a personalized message along with his signature, chatting with everyone in turn.
I don’t relate this to bag on anyone for not being astronaut-y enough; I’m sure dealing with the public is exhausting even under the best of circumstances. It’s just that this man shone out in the crowd, and I never forgot his smiling face, his kind words, and the scripture he wrote down under his autograph (Proverbs 3:5-6.) I met a lot of astronauts that summer, a lot of really incredible people, but this was the one that always stuck out to me (and still does; the memory hasn’t dimmed in a decade.)
His name was Rick Husband.
We Remember
Posted by Danielle in Perspectives on January 29, 2010
January 27, 1967 — Apollo 1
Grissom • White • Chaffee
January 28, 1986 — Challenger/STS-51L
Scobee • Smith • Resnik • Onizuka
McNair • Jarvis • McAuliffe
February 1, 2003 — Columbia/STS-107
Husband • McCool • Anderson • Brown
Chawla • Clark • Ramon
The Future
Posted by Danielle in Fashion & Accessories, Home & Office on January 28, 2010
Who knew the future had such groovy faux-wood-paneling refrigerators? (Via Vintage Ad Browser.)
Myanmar Eclipse
Credit & Copyright: Wei Loon Chin
I don’t have much to say about this photo, aside from that it is STUNNING.
A hole crossed the Sun for a few minutes this month, as seen across a thin swath of planet Earth. The event on January 15 was actually an annular solar eclipse, and the hole was really Earth’s Moon, an object whose dark half may appear even darker when compared to the tremendously bright Sun. The Moon was too far from Earth to create a total solar eclipse, but instead left well placed observers with a bright surrounding circle called the ring of fire. Pictured above was a complete solar annular eclipse sequence as seen above the Ananda Temple in Bagan, Myanmar. The image of the ancient temple, built around the year 1100, was taken after sunset on the same day of the eclipse. The next solar eclipse will be a total solar eclipse during 2010 July.
…and that Myanmar will remind me of J. Peterman, probably for years to come.
“You most likely know it as Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me.” — “J. Peterman”, Seinfeld
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