Moscow at Night

Moscow appears at the center of this nighttime image photographed by the Expedition 30 crew aboard the International Space Station, flying at an altitude of approximately 240 miles on March 28, 2012.

hiredgoons:

“When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it’s lost space when there’s something in it. If I see a chair in a beautiful space, no matter how beautiful the chair is, it can never be as beautiful to me as the plain space.”

The Space Shuttle Discovery on its Mobile Launcher Platform slowly moves through the high bay doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building en route to Launch Pad 39A, where Discovery is scheduled to lift off on the STS-82 mission on Feb. 11. A seven-member crew will perform the second servicing of the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope (HST) during the 10-day STS-82 mission.

bbook:

The idea of the time-space continuum (time as the fourth dimension of space) in modern physics means, among other things, that a certain event (the encounter of multiple particles) can be much more elegantly and convincingly explained if we posit that only one particle travels forward and backward in time. This logic involves the static space-time picture described by Einstein: events do not unfold with the flow of time but present themselves complete, and in this total picture, movements backward and forward in time are as usual as movements backward and forward in space. The illusion that there is a “flow” of time results from our narrow awareness, which allows us to perceive only a tiny strip of the total space-time continuum. Is not something similar going on in the alternative narratives? Beneath ordinary reality there is another, shadowy, pre-ontological realm of virtualities in which the same person travels forth and back, “testing” different scenarios: Véronique electron crashes (dies), then travels back in time and does it again, this time surviving.

The Forced Choice of Freedom

squintystumbles:

From the project “The Other Night Sky” by Trevor Paglen

“The Other Night Sky” is a project to track and photograph classified American satellites in Earth orbit, a total of 189 covert spacecraft. […] I spent almost two years working with a team of computer scientists and engineers at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology to develop a software model to describe the orbital motion of classified spacecraft.

With these tools, I am able to calculate the position and timing of overhead reconnaissance satellite transits and photograph them with telescopes and large-format cameras using a computer-guided mechanical mount. The resultant skyscapes are marked by trails of sunlight reflected from the hulls of obscure spacecraft hurtling through the night.

Filigree and Shadow

Wispy tendrils of hot dust and gas glow brightly in this ultraviolet image of the Cygnus Loop Nebula, taken by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The nebula lies about 1,500 light-years away, and is a supernova remnant, left over from a massive stellar explosion that occurred 5,000-8,000 years ago. The Cygnus Loop extends more than three times the size of the full moon in the night sky, and is tucked next to one of the ‘swan’s wings’ in the constellation of Cygnus.

blech:

One last Richard Avedon photograph from the 1965 Harper’s Bazaar modern special: Naty Abascal. (You’d never allow a cigarette near the pure-oxygen atmospheres of a 1960s space mission, but never mind.)

The Jewels of Messier 9

The Solar Flare