Lost in Siberia

A Russian family of Russian Orthodox Christians escaped into the taiga after being persecuted and hunted by the Soviets. In 1936, they left for the forest. In 1978, they were rediscovered. Full Article

Big Old Bird

This is an Mi-6, one of the largest heavy-lift helicopters in the world. If you couldn't tell, it's Russian (well more like Soviet). Quite a few of them have been left sitting around to decay (which is sad) and are now being scrapped.

Am I the only one who wishes people would preserve things like this for future generations?

Types of Knives

I just found this on the internet. It has hardly any importance at all, I just thought it was neat (and informative).

Colors

An interesting photo I took of the sky today. I was out and about with a rather significant other while a cold front was blowing in. Dark clouds and sunsets make for interesting colors.

Foresight

Digital Curiosity

Sometimes, wild animals find us very curious too and want to take a closer look. Sometimes a bit to close to focus on.

Photo Essay - Glasses

So, I've decided to turn my boredom into creativity. I'm starting a sort of ongoing photo essay which I call Glasses.

Simply put, I'll take photos of my glasses in different interesting places that I go.

Cool, huh?

Nah, didn't think so.

Glasses

A picture I took earlier that a lot of people seem to like. It didn't take any effort or desire to be creative or anything.

I was just really bored.

Astronomy Art

Just some interesting astronomy-related art that I've found over the last few months. This is a sunrise (or sunset) in space.

A Solar Eclipse from beginning to end.

Soaring above the night time side of the Earth.

Expression

Accidents and Coincendence

On this day (well what's left of it. For me it's 11pm) in 1967 the crew of Apollo 1 died in a fire aboard their spacecraft on the launch pad. Good and bad came from this though. The deaths of these three men prompted a huge investigation and helped make space flight much safer. The bad was the program was delayed. I have conflicted feelings about this era of space travel. The space race with the Soviet Union pushed development very quickly. That was a good thing because it provided motivation to explore space and further science. It was bad because sometimes we pushed too fast.

Also on a side note, my mother knew Ed White (in the center). His younger brother had pilot training at an air force base in Big Spring, Texas, where my grandfather was stationed. She remembers him and his younger brother coming over for dinner sometimes. I just find it amazing that she knew this man. She described him as just a normal guy, which he was (even though a few years earlier he became the first human to make an EVA - or spacewalk - outside a space capsule).

I wouldn't exactly call these men hero's. I'd just call them men, as they were. Men with the guts enough to ride fairly untested rockets into space and then come back down.

Sizes

Porsche Production

Early Porsche 928s on the assembly line in the late 1970s

Too Small, Too Big, and Too Late

Two American tanks - the M22 Locust airborne tank on the left and the T-95 (T28) super heavy tank on the right. The M22 was too small to really do much (even to support infantry later in the war) and the T-95 was too big and slow to do much either (it was designed to blast through huge German defenses along the Siegfried Line and West Wall).

The German A7V (of which the chassis was found in Poland, sunk in a river). It came too late in the war to really make much of an impact, and it wasn't a very good tank anyway (one small 75mm gun and several machine guns).

Grand Caravan

A Giraffe curiously looking at a landing Cessna Grand Caravan (a very popular plane in Africa).

Capturing the Moment

In 1958, an uprising and a coup lead to the dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, fleeing the nation he once ruled. Thanks to another blog I follow, Forgotten Weapons, I have obtained some photographs of the revolution. Their focus was, obviously, on the weapons being used (which are very interesting, and I will provide a link to their article) but my focus is on the photographs. More specifically, on how the photographs caught the action. They caught the emotion, and they caught times.

Here you can see a Venezuelan soldier holding his FN FAL rifle riding on what I believe is an American M8 armored car.

Soldiers fighting in the street with civilians watching. Notice the predominantly American cars and 1950s style modern buildings.

A protest or a rally - I'm not sure which - with soldiers mingling with the crowd.

This photograph shows a lot of emotion. The man looking at the camera in the center obviously isn't happy - especially about his picture being taken.

The same group of soldiers from the last photo, this time in a slightly more serious situation.

                      Arms of the Venezuelan Coup - Forgotten Weapons

Watching Seagulls

This image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows a close-up view of part of a stellar nursery nicknamed the Seagull Nebula.

Positive Influence

- Steve Jobs

Torment of Conflict

"Kevin Carter (13 September 1960 – 27 July 1994) was an award-winning South African photojournalist and member of the Bang-Bang Club. He was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph depicting the 1993 famine in Sudan. He committed suicide at the age of 33.

On 27 July 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfontein Spruit river, near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning, aged 33. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners ... I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky." "

Curves

My dad's 1970 Pontiac GTO. Yeah call me a hipster, I use instagram. You have to admit though, this is a pretty cool photo.

Pulling Your......Strings?

Tracks

Panzer IIIs advancing in the desert.

Endless

In the Shadow of Saturn

I don't think many people realize it, but this is a real photograph. The sun was positioned right behind Saturn and it gave its rings and atmosphere a glow. One of the most fantastic and beautiful things about this photograph is on the left side of Saturn, just outside the thick rings, you can see a little bright speck.

That little speck is Earth. It is right here. It is everything you own, everything you hope to achieve, everything that has ever been in the history of Human civilization.

And from this perspective, it's just a small speck of light.

Eyes

Childhood Lessons

This came from one of my most favorite comics as a kid - Calvin and Hobbes. They were walking around one night looking at the stars wondering if there was any life out there.

Fairly quickly they came to the conclusion that of course there was. There was so much life around them, how could there not be life other places?

Evolution on a Large Scale

Images

Does he understand what he sees? Or is it lost to him?

Competition for Planetary Resources: Deep Space Industries

"As we begin to deplete some of our planet's most valuable resources over the course of the next century, it is vital that we invest in space exploration so that we are no longer limited to a world of diminishing resources.

Deep Space Industries is joining the ranks of Planetary Resources in developing means to harvest resources from near-Earth asteroids. Their goal is to use these resources to develop a permanent presence in space and make space exploration more affordable by eliminating the need to send regular resupply & refueling missions from Earth, which is very expensive."

                                                                                   
                                       More Info - Article from The Verge

Kummakivi

Kummakivi means "strange rock."

It's a very rare nature phenomenon in the southern Valtola Savoni, Finland. The giant monolith is balancing on another rock surrounded by forest.

Left Overs from Wars Past

A Syrian Panzer IV knocked out by Israeli tanks during the Six Day War.

A Syrian rebel during the current internal conflict carrying an STG-44 from a large cache found several months ago.

Nitty Gritty

The TV series Firefly and then the movie based off the series, Serenity, are great examples of what a human space-faring civilization might be like. Star Trek is a nice pretty picture, but all in all it's fairly unrealistic. A civilization filled with smuggling, crime, governments at odds, small conflicts, confusing borders, backwater settlements, and many other troubles is much more likely.

Blue Moon

My first thought when I saw this image was about the possibility of life in sub-surface oceans on a few of the moons in our solar system (namely Europa and Enceladus). In reality these are jellyfish from Earth, but what if something like this exists in those oceans? Even something much more similar - like bacteria - would mean life is possible in many places.

But what if there is more? What if it isn't just simple little bacteria? What if it's jellyfish-like life, or even something more than that?

That would mean that fairly intelligent organisms are possible in many other solar systems.

That might mean that the universe is quite populated.

Images that Inspire

Good Construction

What the hell is that arch made of?

Luck, that's what it's made of.

Throwing Barnard a Loop

A gaze across a cosmic skyscape, this telescopic mosaic reveals the continuous beauty of things that are. The evocative scene spans some 6 degrees or 12 Full Moons in planet Earth's sky. At the left, folds of red, glowing gas are a small part of an immense, 300 light-year wide arc. Known as Barnard's loop, the structure is too faint to be seen with the eye, shaped by long gone supernova explosions and the winds from massive stars, and still traced by the light of hydrogen atoms. Barnard's loop lies about 1,500 light-years away roughly centered on the Great Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery along the edge of Orion's molecular clouds. But beyond lie other fertile star fields in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. At the right, the long-exposure composite finds NGC 2170, a dusty complex of nebulae near a neighboring molecular cloud some 2,400 light-years distant.

Imagining Dreams

This grainy picture was taken on October 24, 1946, almost 14 months after the end of World War II and almost 11 years before the Sputnik launch. It was taken by American military engineers and scientists, using a Nazi rocket launched from the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico.
Yes, a Nazi rocket—the V-2.
At the time there was no NASA, and human space exploration wasn’t a mainstream idea. The only people who were really thinking about spaceships at the time were the Nazis of a few years earlier and their spitzenreiter mad rocket science, a man by the name of Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun.
Von Braun dreamed about spaceships and wanted to build rockets at all cost, so he became a member of the Allgemeine SS and the Nazi Party. It was then that Hitler gave him the money, material and slave labor to built the V-2, the rocket bomb that terrorized London at the end of the WWII, morals be damned.

But by 1946, von Braun had become an American rocket scientist. And the Americans had a bunch of V-2s, having seized the ones that weren’t launched or were under construction when the Allies captured their launch and factory sites at the end of the war. They were imported to the United States, along with Von Braun.
Von Braun and the Americans kept working on these and other missile designs while launching the existing V-2s into space for testing. One of the engineers, Clyde Holliday, had developed a 35mm camera that took a photo every second and a half. None of the other scientists and engineers cared much about photography. They only wanted information about cosmic rays and aerodynamic performance.
Holiday understood even then that images were going to be the most powerful application of space rockets. He was right. Not only did space photography become instrumental in our understanding of Earth, its surface and its weather systems—hello frankenstorm Sandy—but it did something even more important: make humanity realize where, and how small, we are.
In 1950, National Geographic showed these photos to the world for the first time, and Holliday wrote that this is “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship.”
I’m sure that everyone who saw them instantly had the impulse to jump in a rocket and go see it themselves first-hand. I know I still do.

(article from War History Online)

Interesting Architecture

The Eiffel Tower under construction from 1887 to 1889.

I have no idea where this is (I'm guessing somewhere in Asia) but it looks very interesting.

Empire State building, New York City.