One Day at a Time

Sometimes it's things like this that are what get you by.
Sometimes all you can do is look at a picture and take yourself there.
Take yourself away from here.
Put yourself in front of this colossal ball of gas and realize how small you are,
and how small all your problems are.
Let the rings take you away to a different world.

Sometimes,
It's all you can do.

Fear Not

I generally try to keep directly religious things off this blog, but this one was just too good to pass up. It is true that many great people were atheist or some other form of non-belief. Just because you are a Christian doesn't mean you're moral and perfect, being a Muslim doesn't make you a terrorist, being Jewish doesn't make you evil or penny-pinching.

Don't hate because of religion. How someone structures their internal beliefs is not up to you and it never should be.

You don't have to love everyone, but neither do you have to hate them.

Being

Don't be normal. Be different. Be who you are. Don't conform to who others think you are. Don't be who society says you should be.

Stand in a crowd and make your own music. Stand in a crowd and listen to something different.

Be who you are.

Wisdom of a Stuffed Bear

Gras

French 11mm black powder Gras Mle 1874 rifles.

Farther and Farther

Stargazing in the northern hemisphere.

A meteor entering Earth's atmosphere, caught by chance by a photographer aboard the International Space Station.

Jupiter along with its moons Io and Europa.

A star with a bow shock wave in a nearby nebula.

Two colliding galaxies forming a V-shape.

Power

A power station in New York, circa 1930s

Connection

Underwater cables from continent to continent.

Fall For Me

Skogafoss waterfall in the South of Iceland.

Visitors

“We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home.”

Australian Aboriginal Proverb

Caverns of Blue

Exploring an ice cave in Iceland

Memorial

 This is one of the most powerful and moving pieces of artwork I have ever seen.

Chasing Cars

If I lay here...if I just lay here, would you lie with me, and just forget the world?

I don't quite know...how to say...how I feel.

Those three words are said too much, they're not enough.

If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told, before we get too old.

Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time, chasing cars.....around our heads.

I need your grace to remind me

to find my own.

If I lay here..........

Family Photo

During the Apollo 16 mission, Charles Duke left a family photo on the moon that was enclosed in a plastic bag.

Flower Carpet in Brussels, Belgium

The first Brussels flower carpet took place in 1971 on the Grand-Place by the landscape architect E. Stautemans. Since then there have been 18 flower carpets and they have appeared every other year since 1986. The main component of every carpet is the begonia. A native of the West Indies and cultivated almost exclusively in the Ghent area since 1860, Belgium cultivates 60 million begonia tubers every year and is recognized as the world’s largest producer.
The flower carpet above, breathtakingly captured by Gaston Batistini, is from 2010. The theme was ‘Europe’ and honored the Belgian presidency of the European Union. On two opposite corners is the image of Saint Michael striking down the dragon. This is the protective image of the city of Brussels which was founded over 1,000 years ago.
On the other two corners is the stylized image of the yellow and blue iris, the emblem of the region. Between the two, there is an evocation of Gothic architecture representing the splendid surrounding buildings. In the very center, at three different angles, the EU logo is displayed.

Phases

A faint view of the crescent moon and then a small image of crescent Venus right next to it.

Unique

Every person is unique. You could force people to dress exactly the same, eat all the same food, do just about everything the same. Yet people would still be different.

Such is the nature of individuals.

Creeping Northward

For now, Comet Lemmon (C/2012 F6a), and Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) are sweeping through southern skies. Lemmon's lime green coma and thin tail are near the left edge of this telephoto scene, a single frame from a timelapse video (vimeo here) recorded on February 12, tracking its motion against the background stars. Comet Lemmon's path brought it close to the line-of-sight to prominent southern sky treasures the Small Magellanic Cloud and globular cluster 47 Tucanae (right). Sporting a broader, whitish tail, Comet PanSTARRS appears in later video frames moving through the faint constellation Microscopium. Visible in binoculars and small telescopes, both comets are getting brighter and headed toward northern skies in coming months.

Contradictions

This quote brings to mind a lot of the things I've been learning recently in my US History class. During the early conquest and exploration of the Americas, most Europeans considered themselves to be superior to the Native Americans. They saw them as heathens because of their religions, and they saw them as unintelligent because of their lack of much technology. But were they really that way? Were they heathens because their religions taught to work with the land instead of destroying it? Were they unintelligent because they hybridized corn, beans, squash, and potato's instead of creating firearms? The great irony is the Europeans, while destroying the Native Americans, adopted many of their farming, hygiene, and even religious practices. The Europeans became healthier and more productive because of a culture they regarded as below them.

It's interesting to thing about.

A Different World

The Hindenburg flying over Manhattan in 1936. Imagine if these sleek ships hadn't fallen out of favor. The world could be a very different place.

I actually have had an idea that could bring back airships. Cruise ships take people across the seas for a few weeks to multiple destinations. You can do cruises of the Caribbean, the Greek islands, the South Pacific and many more places. Imagine if you could see all of those places, plus Europe, the Himalayas, Africa, and many other places, all in one cruise? Airships, updated with modern technology of course, could potentially offer things like that. Instead of using lighter-than-air gas, they could use steam. With current technology, we could make them lighter, faster, and give them more endurance. Granted, they may only be able to carry a few hundred passengers instead of a few thousand, but I have a feeling the market would be there (once the economy picks up well again of course).

So, could that other world still be possible?

Better Than Coffee

Richard Phillips Feynman May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988

Above all, in and out of science, Dr. Feynman was a curious character -his phrase, and the double meaning was intentional. He was never content with what he knew or what other people knew. He taught himself how to fix radios, pick locks, draw nudes, speak Portuguese, play the bongos and decipher Mayan hieroglyphics. He pursued knowledge without prejudice, studying the tracking ability of ants in his bathtub and learning enough biology to study the mutation of bacteriophages.

In his youth he experimented for months with trying to observe his unraveling stream of consciousness at the point of falling asleep; in his middle age he experimented with inducing out-of-body hallucinations in a sensory-deprivation tank.

But Dr. Feynman was no mystic, and he despised all kinds of fake learning, particularly pseudo-science. In that category he placed a good part of modern psychology, calling it ''cargo cult science.''

Dr. Feynman also devoted himself to cracking the combination safes that had been installed to protect the bomb secrets - the plutonium production schedules, the construction dimensions, the neutron radiation data, ''the whole schmeer,'' as he wrote later. When the responsible officers turned their backs he would unlock the steel doors and leave notes with messages like, ''I borrowed document No. LA4312 - Feynman the safecracker.''

''I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, so far as I can tell,'' he added. ''It doesn't frighten me.''

Meteor Falling in Russia

Shadows

Two dark shadows loom across the banded and mottled cloud tops of Jupiter in this sharp telescopic view. In fact, captured on January 3rd, about a month after the ruling gas giant appeared at opposition in planet Earth's sky, the scene includes the shadow casters. Visible in remarkable detail at the left are the large Galilean moons Ganymede (top) and Io. With the two moon shadows still in transit, Jupiter's rapid rotation has almost carried its famous Great Red Spot (GRS) around the planet's limb from the right. The pale GRS was preceded by the smaller but similar hued Oval BA, dubbed Red Spot Jr., near top center. North is down in the inverted image.

Jordy Greider Photography

Many people who follow my blog you will know that I am an amateur photographer. I've been taking a lot of photos over the last year through my Olympus OM-1 35mm camera, and I would really like to start sharing them. So, I started another blog and a facebook page to go along with it! So, if you'd like, you can check it out.

http://jordygreiderphotography.blogspot.com/

South

A view of the southern sky (including the Magellanic clouds - dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way) from a fisheye lens

Falling Angel

Angel Waterfall of Venezuela - The World's Highest Waterfall • 360° Aerial Panorama

GMC

Milky Way Stars shine bright over this decaying GMC Pickup in a field near Lake Oahe, South Dakota.

The Great Meteor Procession of 1913

One hundred years ago today the Great Meteor Procession of 1913 occurred, a sky event described by some as "magnificent" and "entrancing" and which left people feeling "spellbound" and "privileged". Because one had to be in a right location, outside, and under clear skies, only about 1,000 people noted seeing the procession. Lucky sky gazers -- particularly those near Toronto, Canada -- had their eyes drawn to an amazing train of bright meteors streaming across the sky, in groups, over the course of a few minutes. A current leading progenitor hypothesis is that a single large meteor once grazed the Earth's atmosphere and broke up. When the resulting pieces next encountered the Earth, they came in over south-central Canada, traveled thousands of kilometers as they crossed over the northeastern USA, and eventually fell into the central Atlantic ocean. Pictured above is a digital scan of a halftone hand-tinted image by the artist Gustav Hahn who was fortunate enough to witness the event first hand. Although nothing quite like the Great Meteor Procession of 1913 has been reported since, numerous bright fireballs -- themselves pretty spectacular -- have since been recorded, some even on video.

In The End

As galaxies age, they tend to become quiescent. The bulk of their free gas has been used up, there is little or no new star formation, and their existing stars tend to be more aged and red in color. When we look at nearby galaxies, we see many large elliptical with these very characteristics. Astronomers sometimes refer to these galaxies as “red and dead”

But when we look further away, we are looking back in time. We see younger galaxies, laden with gas, stellar nurseries and bright, blue, young stars. By comparing the younger more distant galaxies with our closer and older neighbors, astronomers can study the course of the evolution of the Universe.

One of the aging factors in galaxies, aside from the passage of time, seems to be galactic interaction. When galaxies collide and merge, it usually triggers a period of intense star formation, using up the supply of the gas clouds within them. After this new star genesis slows or ceases, the merged galaxy then slides into old age, getting redder as its stars grow older.

This Hubble image shows an elliptical galaxy catalogued as 2MASX J09442693+0429569 in a transitional phase of this process. The galaxy has an irregular shape and tail-like features extending from it, signs that it has recently undergone a merger. Astronomers studying the light from the galaxy see no sign of ongoing star formation, another indication of a collision that disrupted gas clouds, triggered star formation and used up the supply of star forming material. Observations suggest that star formation ceased only within the last billion years.

Seismic Art

"When a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook Olympia, Wash., in 2001, shopowner Jason Ward discovered that a sand-tracing pendulum had recorded the vibrations in the image above.

Seismologists say that the “flower” at the center reflects the higher-frequency waves that arrived first; the outer, larger-amplitude oscillations record the lower-frequency waves that arrived later.

'You never think about an earthquake as being artistic — it’s violent and destructive,” Norman MacLeod, president of Gaelic Wolf Consulting in Port Townsend, told ABC News. “But in the middle of all that chaos, this fine, delicate artwork was created.'"

Madness

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy reading Mad Magazine on set.

Good Ideas Spread Quickly

A Renault 4CV at the 1952 24 Hours of Le Mans. Obviously, the 4CV was designed to compete with the VW Beetle. It was the first French car to sell over 1 million units. It differed from the Beetle by having four doors (front suicide doors as well, an interesting feature brought back from before the war). However, it had the same type of rear-engined, rear wheel drive layout.

Messier 106

New images and information an one of our neighbors....

ESA article

Dreaming

We really are quite lonely here on this planet. You can put most of human history into a few well-written books. Everything that we've ever known has been here. Every great civilization, every saint, every sinner, every failed artist, every lord and lady, every monarch and every serf, every minister and every scientist. Every single one has lived out their life on this little planet in some far off corner of the galaxy.

We go about our daily lives and think all this world we see before us is huge and complex. But when we look at the stars at night, we can realize that the universe is much, much bigger and surprisingly a lot more simple than we thought.

We look to these stars and we dream. We see our future. Every powerful ruler and every indentured servant in history has looked up at the stars and thought about what is out there.

They are not that different, the ruler and the servant.

They both look at the stars and dream.

Red Devils

A very tall whirlwind (also known as a dust devil) on the surface of Mars. It was photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Stardust and Voyager

Read the article on Vimeo, watch the video. Interpret for yourself.
Stardust - Video by PostPanic

Noctilucent clouds

Noctilucent clouds are actually crystals of ice that hang around 80 kilometers (50 miles) high in the atmosphere. The ice crystals catch the light of the Sun long after it has set on the horizon. The uppermost parts of the cloud in this image are iridescent (nacreous), which gives them the appearance of mother-of- pearl. Natural nacreous clouds occur at altitudes of 20-25 kilometers. The lower parts of the cloud have a redder color due to the large amount of dust and water in the lower atmosphere scattering blue light. The cloud’s shape is due to differing wind speed at differing altitudes.

The cloud in this image formed from the exhaust of a missile launched from a distant firing range.