Gorgeous Ultra HD Fly-through Of The Inside Of The International Space Station

50 Lovingly Restored Photographs of the Earth Taken by Apollo Astronauts

For his Earth Restored project, Toby Ord digitally remastered 50 photographs of the whole Earth taken by Apollo astronauts during their missions in the 60s and 70s.

The Apollo photographs are historic works of art. So in restoring them, I sought to bring out their own beauty. I refrained from recomposing the images by cropping, or trying to leave my own mark or interpretation. Perhaps in some cases this would make a more pleasing image, but it was not my aim.

And the Apollo photographs are also a scientific record of what our Earth looks like. In particular, what it would have looked like from the perspective of the astronaut taking the shot. So rather than pumping the saturation or adjusting the colours to what we think the Earth looks like, I wanted to allow us to learn from these photographs something about how it actually appears.

Many of these shots are new to me – the Apollo program and its scientific and cultural output continue to be revelatory 50 years later. (My only quibble here: the images on the website are not high-res. Would love to see much bigger versions of these.)

Enceladus, moon of Saturn, observed by the Cassini space probe on December 19, 2015. (NASA)

All here…

PLUTO

LA-LA LAND-ING   The space shuttle Endeavour, perched atop a specially-modified NASA 747 jet, approaches Los Angeles International Airport last week.  The retired spacecraft will be towed to its new home at the California Science Center.  (Photo: Stephen Confer via NASA APOD)

Space cards

A Short History of Black Holes on Radio Telescopes

So, you’ve probably heard by now that we have our first ever photographs of a black hole and its event horizon. But it’s not like black holes have just been theoretical entities this entire time, awaiting photography’s blessing to finally be anointed as real. We’ve been detecting black holes for a long time now using radio telescopes and infrared cameras. It may be outside the visible spectrum, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t real, son!

The story begins in the mid-1900s when astronomers expanded their horizons beyond the very narrow range of wavelengths to which our eyes are sensitive. Very strong sources of radio waves were discovered and, when accurate positions were determined, many were found to be centered on distant galaxies. Shortly thereafter, radio antennas were linked together to greatly improve angular resolution. These new “interferometers” revealed a totally unexpected picture of the radio emission from galaxies–the radio waves did not appear to come from the galaxy itself, but from two huge “lobes” symmetrically placed about the galaxy….

Ultimately this led to the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), in which radio signals from antennas across the Earth are combined to obtain the angular resolution of a telescope the size of our planet! Radio images made from VLBI observations soon revealed that the sources at the centers of radio galaxies are “microscopic” by galaxy standards, even smaller than the distance between the sun and our nearest star.

When astronomers calculated the energy needed to power radio lobes they were astounded. It required 10 million stars to be “vaporized,” totally converting their mass to energy using Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2! Nuclear reactions, which power stars, cannot even convert 1 percent of a star’s mass to energy. So trying to explain the energy in radio lobes with nuclear power would require more than 1 billion stars, and these stars would have to live within the “microscopic” volume indicated by the VLBI observations. Because of these findings, astronomers began considering alternative energy sources: supermassive black holes.

We’ve also been tracing the orbits of planets, stars, and other objects that do give off conventional light. All this tracks back to suggest the supermassive black holes that Laplace et al first theorized about hundreds of years ago.

So, we knew what we were looking for. That’s how we were able to find it. And boom! Now we’ve got its photograph too. No more hiding from us, you goddamn light-devouring singularities. We’ve got your number.

The planet Uranus. Taken on November 14th 2009 at 3:52 am. Using the 98 in Hooker telescope.

Sirens of Titan