A beautiful shot of a very much-appreciated grocery delivery to the ISS.

Our ‘Progress 39P’ unmanned resupply spaceship on final approach for docking this past Sunday. It was laden with food, fuel, spare parts, and much needed supplies for our orbiting outpost. The greatest gift was just inside the hatch…some bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. Such a wonderful treat after 3 months of eating out of tubes and plastic pouches!

Illuminated crescent of Earth showing part of South America and Antarctica, image courtesy of ESA

A beautiful image of home from ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft:

The image above shows the illuminated crescent of Earth showing part of South America and Antarctica. This OSIRIS image was acquired with the the narrow-angle camera from a distance of 350 000 km at 22:28 UTC last night. The resolution is 6.5 km/pixel.

Found this amazing graphic on this blog, a map by National Geographic (which has it as a Flash-based thing; the image above links to a much larger image for your downloading pleasure.)

These stamps were issued by Japan in March 2008 to commemorate the Astronomical Society of Japan’s centenary. They feature (among other things) the planets, the Subaru Telescope, and the Hayabusa probe, which rendezvoused with near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa, sampled it, and is scheduled to return to Earth in 2010. Information from here.