Apollo + 40

For the 40th Anniversary of the Moon Landing, NASA has restored some of the original TV footage. BB, as always, has the original.

Still stunning, 4 decades later.

Also, there's something fundamentally eerie about the way we seem to have abandoned the future 40 years in the past.

Volcanoes are Awesome

Recap: astronauts on the space station have taken a picture of an exploding volcano from orbit. My 10 year old self is FREAKING OUT.

(Via BoingBoing and NASA)

Wait, what?

One fifth of the world's population can't see the Milky Way?

Well, this might get interesting.

Well, they found a bunch of damage to the Space Shuttle.  It'll probably all turn out okay, but let's keep our fingers crossed.

Warren Ellis does a great job of summing up one of the big side issues here: namely, the Shuttle actually isn't sophisticated enough to get from the Hubble to the Space Station.  Ouch.

Happy Earth Day!

In honor of Earth Day, a piece of Trivia. The picture to the left here is nicknamed "The Blue Marble," and is a photograph taken on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. (the last manned mission to the moon.)

It is, essentially, the only full picture of the whole globe ever taken, without having part of the planet in shadow, or needing computers to fill in the gaps.

Here's where this gets fun. The image is easy to spot, since it has that distinctive arrowhead shaped cloud hanging right over the horn of Africa. So, here's the game: every time you see an image of the Earth - in movies, magazine ads, computer games, science articles, whatever - take a look for that arrowhead. Odds are, it'll be there. After a while, this kinda turns into "Where's Waldo" for space buffs - pretty much every picture of the earth is THIS PICTURE. How cool is that?