Check out this breathtaking photo taken from Space Shuttle Endeavour of the Earth and the International Space Station.
I can’t even imagine the feeling of being in space and being able to see these types of images first hand. As beautiful as all these pictures are, actually seeing it live with your own two eyes must be such an overwhelming and rewarding experience that nothing else could ever even come close to measuring up to it.
S118-E-09467 (19 Aug. 2007) — Backdropped by Earth’s horizon and the blackness of space, the International Space Station appears to be very small as it moves away from Space Shuttle Endeavour. Earlier the STS-118 and Expedition 15 crews concluded nearly nine days of cooperative work onboard the shuttle and station. Undocking of the two spacecraft occurred at 6:56 a.m. (CDT) on Aug. 19, 2007. The lower portion of Italy is visible at left.
If you’d like to see the original picture (I resized this some to fit in the viewer my blog uses), you can get it here.
Four massive galaxies are colliding in the largest galactic merger ever seen. This merger will possibility reveal how the larger galaxies in the universe are created and why many of them stopped producing stars billions of years ago. (Click on the image to expand)
Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge found this largest major merger ever recorded. The four galaxies are known as CL0958+4702 which are at a staggering distance of about 5 billion light years from Earth. Three of the merging galaxies are the size of the Milky Way, while the other is about three times as large.
Also discovered is fan-shaped ‘plume’ of old, red stars trailing about 360,000 light years from the merger. Scientists believe that these were thrown out of the merging galaxies as they spiraled towards each other. The gravitational pull of these merging galaxies will eventually pull back about half of those stars back into the merging galaxies. The rest will remain on the outskirts of the galaxy. This could suggest that free-floating stars found within other galaxy clusters were also ejected from their birth galaxies.
The completion of the merger is estimated to happen in about 100 million years.
The second place prize goes to the Antenna Galaxies. The two galaxies that merged to form this one were about the size of our Milky Way galaxy. (Click on the image to expand)
I thought it would be fun to focus on some of the non-conventional USB gadgets that are available for your computer. By now everyone has a USB thumb drive and/or USB hard drives. Check out some other uses for your extra USB ports.
Continue reading ‘Non-Conventional USB Devices’
A user named Kasranov registered on my blog awhile ago and included a link to his blog in his profile. Always interested in who is registered on my blog, I went to check out his. I’m glad I did.
First off, if you’ve been following this blog at all you’ve probably noticed that I am a huge fan of Carl Sagan. Well Kasranov has taken the audio from Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ and put it into this awesome 40 minute documentary. I can only imagine the amount of time taken to make this.
So do yourself a favor and take 40 minutes out of your busy day, lean back in your chair and watch the video on his blog.
http://kasranov.blogspot.com/
On February 14th, 1990 the Voyager I spacecraft turned around and took the now famous “Pale Blue Dot” picture. The spacecraft, at the time, was about 4 billion millions away when it it took the picture. This was the first time man ever saw our Earth from this vantage point.
The Voyager spacecrafts (both I and II) also carry a “golden record”. This record contains images and sounds that were selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. Space being so vast, I will take about 40,000 years to come near another star. I do however think it is interesting that a part of us is floating out in space.
Continue reading ‘Is Anybody Out There?’
Recently, I started watching ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ and I have to say that it is really good. I know I’m about 9 years behind (was originally released in 1998) but I recently came across Apollo 13 on TV a few weeks ago which led me to read about it on Wikipedia, which lead me to the mini-series.
Both Tom Hanks and Ron Howard were part of the production team. The series is about the Apollo space program in the 60’s and 70’s. It mixes both historical footage with scripted footage. It really gives you a great breakdown of NASA at the time and the race to beat the communists to the Moon.
It is a 13 part series, with the first episode quickly going through all the events leading up to the start of the Apollo program. It can be hard to follow at times because of all the people involved with the program. Sometimes you forget who’s an astronaut and who is working within NASA as administrators, but that is just a minor detail.
Continue reading ‘From the Earth to the Moon’
Last week, the most anticipated cell phone of the year was release. The phone that cures cancer. The phone that cleans your house. The wonder, the glorious, the most sought after item ever .. the iPhone. Alright, I exaggerated somewhat to but some emphasis on the fan movement behind this phone.
The worst part about the iPhone for people like me, is that is actually lived up to most of the hype. It makes it hard to say, “see I told you it sucks!” Sure, a simple Google search will give you millions of pages on why the iPhone sucks or why it is the best phone to date, but overall it is a good phone (from what I’ve read) and does what is advertised to do. I’ll even admit that it is a pretty cool looking phone. Especially the UI.
What is my problem then?
Here, let me explain.
Continue reading ‘Why do people like the iPhone?’
Hyperion is the largest highly irregular (non-spherical) body in the solar system. It seems likely that Hyperion is a fragment of a larger body that was broken by a large impact in the distant past.
Here is a really cool hi-res picture from NASA showing what the moon looks like.
It is a large picture, so it might take a second to load. And it will probably fill up your whole screen. But it’s worth it. Amazing stuff.
If you haven’t had the chance to read Carl Sagan’s book called ‘Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space‘ then you’re really missing out on a good read (and if you know me, that means a lot). It isn’t just a book about the planets and the universe. In this book, Sagan mixes philosophy about the human place in the universe with a description of what was known about the solar system at the time the book was published. He also details a human vision for the future.
The image on the left is what inspired the book. This is the Earth seen from four billion miles away. The Earth is a dot suspended in a beam of sunlight (pinpointed by artificial blue circle). Check out Wikipedia’s article about the Pale Blue Dot.
Below is actually Carl Sagan reading from his book. This part of the book has become one of the famous passages from the book. Someone took it, and put it into a video with various movie clips following along with his passage. I promise you will get goosebumps and probably a tear or two.
Now, isn’t that just great?
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