Posts Tagged mercury
Planetary Dawn
Image Credit & Copyright: Luis Argerich, luisargerich.com
A quick post for your Wednesday…
This month, four of the five naked-eye planets gather along the eastern horizon near dawn. The celestial grouping is seen here just before sunrise on May 5, from a beach near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Starting near the top of the frame, the brightest beacon is Venus. Mercury is below and right of Venus and brilliant Jupiter is lower still, near image center. Below Jupiter, Mars is relatively faint and struggles the most to shine through a thin cloud bank and the warming twilight glow. Watch, and as the month progresses the tantalizing configuration will change, with Mars and Jupiter moving higher while Venus and Mercury wander through the sky closer to the rising sun.
On this day, 50 years ago…
Posted by Danielle in Perspectives, Picspam on May 5, 2011
…you could say that’s where it all began, for US manned spaceflight. One short trip that kicked off fifty years of exploration and innovation!
Fifty years ago, near the dawn of the space age, NASA controllers “lit the candle” and sent Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard arcing into space atop a Redstone rocket. His cramped space capsule was dubbed Freedom 7. Broadcast live to a global television audience, the historic Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3) spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Florida at 9:34 a.m. Eastern Time on May 5, 1961. The flight of Freedom 7 – the first space flight by an American – followed less than a month after the first human venture into space by Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The 15 minute sub-orbital flight achieved an altitude of 116 miles and a maximum speed of 5,134 miles per hour. As Shepard looked back toward planet Earth near the peak of Freedom 7′s trajectory, he could see the outlines of the west coast of Florida, Lake Okeechobe in central Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Bahamas.
Mercury in Color
This is a significant picture: the very first color image of Mercury taken by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, the first to orbit the innermost planet of our solar system.
On March 17, the MESSENGER spacecraft became the first to orbit Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet. This is its first processed color image since entering Mercury orbit. Larger, denser, and with almost twice the surface gravity of Earth’s moon, Mercury still looks moon-like at first glance. But in this view its terrain shows light blue and brown areas near craters and long bright rays of material streaking the surface. The prominent bright ray crater Debussy at the upper right is 80 kilometers (50 miles) in diameter. Terrain toward the bottom of the historic image extends to Mercury’s south pole and includes a region not previously imaged from space.
Although I prefer other craters (yes, on our close neighbor the Moon), this is an incredible feat and an astounding look at a fairly mysterious planet!
To the Moon
Posted by Danielle in Computer & Internet on July 7, 2010
To make up for last week’s potentially-Mac-only icon post, here is To the Moon by Iconfactory (makers of truly awesome things), and is definitely available in both Mac and PC flavors. This set has excellent detail, and no matter what re-theming I may do to my desktop, there’s always a To the Moon icon that remains. I can’t help it. (Right now it’s the re-entry icon. Such lovely transparency….)
Solar System Travel Posters
Posted by Danielle in Art & Architecture on August 29, 2008
My husband pointed out this great blog post, featuring travel posters to other times and places, real and fictional. One of the artists showcased is Steve Thomas, whose solar system travel posters are simply captivating. These are but a few, and you can get them all (plus Rivendell!) in large-format calendar form for 2009! Fantastic stuff, I hope to see more from him soon!
Astro-philatelics, part 26
Posted by Danielle in Currency & Postage on August 13, 2008
These fascinating stamps are from Fujeira, a part of the United Arab Emirates. The artwork highlights Gemini and Apollo milestones (possibly Mercury as well, looking more closely at the capsule stamp.) The images are artistic and vividly colored. I wish I could find better pictures, or at the very least, ones without postmarks (or whatever that over-stamping in gold ink is.)
NASA Images
Posted by Danielle in Computer & Internet on July 29, 2008
NASA Images is a great new(er) resource developed last year as a joint project between NASA and Archive.org. If you’ve been looking for a one-stop resource for everything NASA does, you just found it!
NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.
The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.
Books: After Sputnik
Posted by Danielle in Books & Literature on May 3, 2007
After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age is a fantastic book, showcasing not only space artifacts but some of the items influenced by the space age as well. I can’t wait to purchase it, and many a future Themes article seed is nestled in the pages!
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human-made object to orbit the Earth. This single act jump-started a new era in history — broad effort to explore, learn about, survive in, utilize, and fully understand the implications of humanity’s first steps beyond Earth. As much as any other twentieth-century undertaking, the achievement of sending humans and machines into space has transformed and shaped the way we live. From Sputnik to today, from heroic first journeys to the everyday application of space technologies, spaceflight has cut a broad swath through the contemporary experience.
As time marches closer to the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, I expect we’ll see more books of this basic theme popping up.
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About Silver Rockets
This blog celebrates space exploration, human spaceflight and the heavens, through lots and lots ofimages.
My name is Danielle Signor, and I am a space cadet. STS-133 NASA Tweetup Attendee!
This is a blog, NOT A SHOP. Click the images for their source or purchase link, if available.
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