Much of what I’ve been working on over the past few months is in this album! High-res color composites using uncompressed raw images from Cassini, Voyagers, Galileo, and Mars rovers.
Category: Features
No, the Solar System (Still) Isn’t a Vortex
Like a bad penny (or a grossly inaccurate science meme) this tends to rear its shiny animated head online at least a couple of times a year, and it seems this year will be no exception. It’s a GIF showing the motions of the Sun and planets through space, trailing glowing lines (which they don’t…
Voyager 1’s Famous Long-Distance Valentine
If you’re in love with space then you’ll fall head over heels for this: it’s a picture of Earth taken from the Voyager 1 spacecraft after it passed the orbit of Pluto back in 1990—on Valentine’s Day, no less. That image of our planet from almost 4 billion miles away inspired Carl Sagan to write his famous…
Space Geek Gift Alert: The Year in Space 2017 Calendar!
What brings you an entire sidereal year of awesome space facts and pictures, each and every day? That’s right: The Year in Space calendar! And it makes a super great gift for the space fan in your life (especially if it’s yourself.) Find out how to order below.
NASA Sets Sail to Study Ocean and Climate
NASA has launched on another mission of exploration, except this time it wasn’t on a rocket ship from Cape Canaveral but rather on a research ship from Cape Cod. NASA’s North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study—aka NAAMES—is a five-year-long investigation to resolve key processes controlling ocean system function, their influences on atmospheric aerosols and clouds…
Pale Blue Dot: Our Valentine from Voyager 1
If you’re in love with space exploration then you’ll fall for this: a picture of Earth (and five other planets) taken from the Voyager 1 spacecraft after it passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, 26 years ago today. That image of our planet from almost 4 billion miles away inspired Carl Sagan to write his…
Scientists Prove It’s Still Einstein’s Universe and We’re All Just Living In It
In what has truly turned out to be a momentous occasion in astrophysics, today scientists announced the first-ever direct observation of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment, which consists of two enormous detector facilities located in Louisiana and Washington state and an international consortium of thousands of researchers. First predicted by Albert Einstein in…
It’s Officially 2016 and Officially Time for a New Calendar
If you just looked at your calendar and realized you’re literally out of days (Happy New Year!) then it’s way past time to get yourself a new one. And if you love space, these are the ones you’ll want. Produced by Starry Messenger Press in conjunction with The Planetary Society, the 2016 Year in Space calendar…
Voyager’s Valentine Turns 25 Today
If you’re in love with space exploration then you’ll fall for this: it’s the picture of Earth taken from the Voyager 1 spacecraft after it passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990. That image of our planet from almost 4 billion miles away inspired Carl Sagan to write his famous “Pale Blue Dot” passage, and…
A Matter of Scale
Note: this post was first published on Feb. 22, 2011. I’m reposting it again today because 1. the video creator has since updated the soundtrack, and 2. it’s still awesome. One of the things that fascinates me so much about the Universe is the incredible vastness of scale, distance and size. On Earth we have…
How Does NASA Change a Spacecraft’s Orbit? Easy as Pi.
It’s “Pi Day” (March 14… 3.14… get it?) and, based on how we write the date in the U.S. anyway, all those of a sufficiently geeky nature take a moment to honor the universal usefulness of pi, the glorious Greek letter used to represent the mathematical ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The…
Voyager’s Long-Distance Valentine
This is from a post I originally published in 2010. I’ll keep trotting it out until it’s not cool anymore. (Which I don’t think will ever happen.) On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the solar system, the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to…
Lights in the Dark 