Common Themes

This image of the Vela Supernova Remnant was featured on APOD in March. What transfixes me is the spectacular colors in this image; the ripe raspberry reds, the bright blues. It’s simply marvelous.

The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy runs through this complex and beautiful skyscape. At the northwestern edge of the constellation Vela (the Sails) the 16 degree wide, 30 frame mosaic is centered on the glowing filaments of the Vela Supernova Remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. Light from the supernova explosion that created the Vela remnant reached Earth about 11,000 years ago. In addition to the shocked filaments of glowing gas, the cosmic catastrophe also left behind an incredibly dense, rotating stellar core, the Vela Pulsar. Some 800 light-years distant, the Vela remnant is likely embedded in a larger and older supernova remnant, the Gum Nebula. The broad mosaic includes other identified emission and reflection nebulae, star clusters, and the remarkable Pencil Nebula.

“Why I gave up on NASA”, originally posted at Hoshichan.com on July 30, 2008; reprinted in full on December 1, 2008 since the blog is no more.

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Brian sent me this yesterday. I started this post as a reply back to him but realized it made for a good rant. And good post fodder.

Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. told SCI FI Wire that fantastic space science fiction shows and movies are, in part, responsible for the lack of interest in real-life space exploration among young people.

“I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today,” Aldrin said in an interview during an ice cream party held by the National Geographic Channel at the Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., this week. “All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It’s not realistic.”

For the most part, I disagree with Mr. Aldrin. I do not think lack of realism is making kids less interested in the space program. I think lack of anything interesting happening, AT ALL, is making kids less interested in the space program. And it’s not just kids.

There’s a lot of talking, organizing, but nothing is really HAPPENING at NASA right now. Hence the commercial interest in the Google Lunar X Prize (in my opinion.) My LPI internship adviser is now the chief scientist for one of the X Prize teams, because he’s not waiting for NASA to get around to getting back to the Moon. There’s a lot of disgruntled scientists (I know, I saw them at the LPSC, in 2000 and 2003) who’ve been living on crumbs of hope, project to project, grant to grant, but how long can that really sustain you?

Since I turned my back on the scientific community, I’m going to write science fiction and go to the Moon whenever the heck I want. :P For whatever non-scientific flippant reason I want. And stay as long as I want.

So for once, for a change, I think Aldrin’s full of crap. Usually I’m pretty much on his side, he’s a great advocate for spaceflight… but people need more than realism. They need hope, dreams… things to inspire them. They need the bar set too high, to give them something to shoot for. They also need to see something happening, and if the space program can’t provide that, they’ll go elsewhere. And they will. And they are.

This isn’t the world’s best picture quality, but check out these odd little stamps from Yemen, circa 1962!

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.

At first glance I thought this art print was a watercolor of space. Turns out it’s not space, but ice:

This photograph is actually of bubbles rising on a frozen lake, but I’ve always imagined it to be a view of outer space.