Friday, November 30, 2012

Back to the Beginning

This image shows the surreal-looking star-forming region around the star R Coronae Australis, captured at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Inspection of Something Lost

A Canadian soldier looking over a captured Japanese Type 96 light machine gun on the island of Attu, in the Aleutians (near Alaska). Many people have forgotten about this theater of the war. Technically, it was the only campaign undertaken on American soil. The Japanese thought that by attacking the islands and ports to the north, it would draw American naval forces up there to protect the islands, and then they would have the advantage in the south Pacific. However, their plan did not work. All it really did was throw two opposing forces into one of the hardest places to survive in the world.

Alone, but not in Darkness

Lonely Lapland Tree

"It's tough being a tree in Lapland but the sky provides certain compensations."

Thursday, November 29, 2012

White Darkness

A snowy night in Roros, Norway.

From the Second Front


British troops advancing out of a landing craft. Several vehicles can be seen in the foreground, including two DD Sherman amphibious tanks.
Infantry of 50th (Northumbrian) Division moving up past a knocked-out German 88mm gun near 'Joe's Bridge' over the Meuse-Escaut Canal in Belgium, 16 September 1944.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

A Story To Tell

This impression by S. Drigin of the method by which a crippled Sunderland Flying boat was brought home from a bombing expedition to Norway. With one wing-tip damaged, the craft began to heel dangerously and it became imperative to have some compensating weight on the other wing. This was provided by members of the crew, who took turns to lie on the wing in the intense cold for a period of five hours while pilot taxied over six miles of choppy sea.

Remote

At first look this photo may appear as pretty standard or boring, when in fact it is rather special. This is Easter Island; it is one of the most remote Islands on Earth. The Island is more than 2000 miles from the closest populations on Tahiti and Chile. This photo was taken by astronauts in the International Space Station in 2002.

What makes this photo special? These astronauts, at 242 Miles above the Earth’s surface were actually closer to Easter Island than anyone else in the World at this time (aside from local inhabitants!).


Photo courtesy of NASA and caption courtesy of The Earth Story facebook page.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Silver Bear

The Tupolev Tu-95, NATO code name Bear-B, in flight. I'm not sure when this photo was taken, but it was definitely before 1991 (because this is a Soviet aircraft).


Another shot of a Tu-95. I'm pretty sure this one was taken during the Cuban Missile Crisis. American pilots found the Tu-95 to be very interesting and appeared to love to take pictures of it.
A Tu-95 of the Russian Federation refueling in flight. You can see the contrails being let out by its massive turboprops.

Food for Thought


Sunday, November 25, 2012

Cold

A sailing ship in a very frigid, yet peaceful, bay.

The Drive of Curiosity

In the beginning, it was this. Tiny two man pods. Barely something you would call a spacecraft. We would throw ourselves upward on rockets we didn't trust. We would come back down with unreliable parachutes. Yet we didn't fear, or at least not too much. We kept pushing, and that led us further.....
Then we came here. It really was a giant leap for mankind. Going to our moon. It felt like we were reaching far out into the universe. We were, truly, going where no one had gone before. We looked down on our planet and realized we were but a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam. We realized that the universe was much bigger than we had expected.....
Once we had realized that we weren't going to conquer Rome in a day, we set about thinking about how to get about it. We improved our technology. We gained experience. We put more and more people into space.


Then we started to learn how to live in space. We did experiments, we built a space telescope, we built space station after space station. However, try as they could, our governments couldn't bear the burden alone. Space was expensive, but like all things, money is to be made where new industries are started.....

So next we have this. Many people see it as discouraging, as something that will slow us down. But it is the exact opposite. It is the expansion the space industry needs. We will no longer have to rely on governments and their tight budgets to explore space. We will be able to develop new and better technologies, move more people into space, and start making space look like the real final frontier of humanity. Today we have capsules and small re-usable spacecraft, tomorrow we will have space ports and space stations, in the very near future we will have colonies on other planets and moons......

And from there it is only into the wild black yonder. Into interstellar space. Ships that can travel across great distances very quickly. First, like the early space travel, research missions. Pure science, probably funded by governments. But then, just like the space programs of today, it will grow and expand......
.......into this. New worlds, new systems, and eventually maybe even new galaxies. We will be able to look back at Earth and our home system with the fondness of a childhood home. We will be able to remember the sweet taste of when we were just taking our first steps into space. And then we will be able to look at all that is still ahead. Not just the exploration of our solar system, not just the hurdles of deep space travel or interstellar travel, but to the true exploration of the universe. Finding other life, finding other races.

All of this started when the first humans laid out at night and looked at the stars, and wondered. They got curious about what was out there. They felt so tiny under those little lights so far away.

So they decided to see what was out there.

Old Bird

This is a Tupolev Tu-95. It was the Soviet Union's primary intercontinental bomber in the 1950s. Today it still serves the Russian Federation as a maritime recon aircraft. It's powered by turboprops, with two counter-rotating props on each engine.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Life Events

This is one of the most amazing photographs of my lifetime so far (I'm only 19, so I have quite a bit to come yet). This is the first image taken by the Curiosity rover on Mars. I was watching the live stream of the event when it happened. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life.

I really wish I could have seen the moon landing.

Learning to Run

Sometimes I look at the stars and they strike me as so mysterious. Then I remember, I know pretty much what they're made of. I know how they form. I know how they die. The universe is vast and complex, but we get more and more advanced every day. We used to dream of going to the stars, then we started to reach for them. Now we're starting to walk, next we need to run.

Would You Like Color with Your Tea?

Very stern looking women harvesting tea in the Caucasus region of Russia.

Color photographs this good from this period (1905-1915) are hard to come by with this amount of quality. They were taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, an early pioneer in color photography. He was given the task of documenting the Russian Empire. Rather ironically, after he had finished his work, the Tsars were overthrown and the Soviet Union was created.

" Tea Weighing Station located at the Chakva tea farm and processing plant just north of Batumi, close to the Black Sea coast Georgia. The Chakva farm and plant was one of the major suppliers of tea to all parts of the Russian Empire."


Summer Skyes

The Fairy Pools on the Isle of Skye, Scotland

Forgotten Wars

Russian troops, Afghanistan, 1980s.

A war that most Americans seem to have forgotten. The Russians got pretty bloodied during their war in Afghanistan.

Iraqi soldiers in a trench, eastern Iraq, 1980s.

The Iran-Iraq war was the longest conventional conflict of the 20th century. It left both sides in terrible conditions.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The Right Moment

It's extremely hard to get pictures like this on purpose. They just have to happen by accident.

Andromeda

For some reason, I'm really obsessed with the Andromeda galaxy right now. I think it's very beautiful.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Fish in a Bottle

Fish sculptures in Rio in Brazil made from discarded plastic bottles.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Not a Squashed VW

A Porsche 356B at a rally in Monte Carlo in 1962

"None of Us Comes Fully Equipped"


Prometheus and Magellan

I watched the movie "Prometheus" last night. It explains the origins of the monsters in the "Alien" and "Predator" movies. The movie roughly goes like this: a team of archeologists uncover evidence from several ancient civilizations that point to a single creator. They follow the evidence to a solar system far away, out of view of the naked eye and even by small telescope. They discover evidence of life, but find dead bodies of  human-like beings everywhere. Then they discover why: the aliens, the monsters that is, were engineered by these human-like beings (who they also learn are our creators) to destroy Earth. In the movie, the crew of the ship Prometheus discovered their origins, their creators. One of the main characters was a Christian. She remained steadfast in her belief. Several characters were skeptics, and they did likewise.

I was browsing around on the internet and I found this picture. It is of the Magellanic clouds, two irregular galaxies. I thought about Magellan, on his voyage around the Earth, and how he must have felt going into the totally unknown. I bet he held fast in his faith.

And then I realized something else. It doesn't matter how we got here. We could have been created by a God or we could have been engineered by another species.

What matters is what we do with the life we have. Magellan wanted to sail around the world, and died trying (although one of his ships did make it home). Why should it matter what someone's faith is? If they want the best for humanity, if they want to explore and learn and help others, why condemn them for their faith?

We're all human, so let's follow Magellan's and Prometheus' examples: explore, learn, advance, help, create, and most importantly, love.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Combustion vs. Fusion

Unfortunately I think it's going to take the destruction of our planet in order for us to learn the value of the sun.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Black and White, in Color

A snowy day in Central Park, Manhattan.

Tiger in the Bushes

A Tiger hidden away in the trees in Normandy.

War in Color: He 111

A Heinkel He 111 in flight.

From the Surface

The Lunar rover from Apollo 15. These are just some photos from various missions.

Setting up an experiment.




"50 Cent Killers"

US Snipers in Vietnam circa 1970. Notice that their XM-21 rifles are fairly advanced for the time: suppressors and Starlight night vision scopes.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Home Sweet Home

I talk a lot about how I want to go explore the universe. However, one thing I've been dying to do is explore this world first. Sometimes the biggest life-changing things aren't in the stars, they're right in front of our faces.

La Grande Guerre

German soldiers in the trenches. The machine gun is an MG08/15 "light" machine gun.

Austro-Hungarian trench at the peak of Ortler (Alps) during 1917.

French observer , Hirtzbach Woods, Haut-Rhin, France, 1917.

It's relatively rare to see color photos of the first world war. The color adds a lot to the photograph. It helps put you into the past.

American troops (I believe) with a Lewis - attempting to shoot down a German plane.

Young German soldier with Kar98A, Somme 1916.

It's seeing photos like this that really get to me. This soldier was younger than I am now.