Common Themes

Today is Black Friday and the frantic pistol-start of the Christmas shopping season. HubbleSite released their holiday cards earlier this week — this is the third year they’ve offered them — and you can download beautifully-designed files, ready for the print shop… or your printer! Each year I swear I’m going to have some of these printed up, and when the time comes I can never afford it. Shown above and below are this year’s new designs; 21 others to choose from!

A farewell shot by Voyager 2, the above image of Uranus hails from January 25, 1986, at a range of 600,000 miles. (Here’s a bit more info for those so inclined.)

I went looking for Norwegian stamps because I was hoping for an aurora, and lookie, I found one! Released in 1991, these stamps feature satellite ERS-1 over Scandinavia, and a sounding rocket launch with aurora in the background.

For sheer design and simplicity, this is one of the best neon signs I’ve seen — photo by Matt.

The first “official” space item I had to have when I was interning at Johnson Space Center was a space pen. I bought the one above in 1999, and still use it on occasion, since it’s so darn compact. (I think I need a new cartridge though.) It does indeed write at any angle, underwater, etc etc etc. I picked out a few other neat ones I saw from the website, for your perusal and possible Christmas shopping inspiration:

It’s rainbow and awfully cool!

Neat grid pattern/texture on this one.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to really tell what the commemorative moon landing engraving looks like. But it’s probably cool.