On April 21, the 2012 Lyrid meteor shower peaked in the skies over Earth. While NASA allsky cameras were looking up, astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station trained his video camera on Earth below. Video footage has revealed breathtaking images of meteors ablating — or burning up — over Earth at night. This video is a composite of 310 still frames from that evening. (NASA/JSC/Don Pettit)
Category Archives: human spaceflight
Rock(et) man
Hmmm, this guy is getting old.
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream
Astronauts too. This is how it looks, no cooling necessary. Astronaut ice cream in tin foil. I received it as a promo package for some fair. I haven’t the faintest what it had to do with it, but it’s fun all the same. It ended up with one of my colleagues. You can click for a slightly larger version.
Soccer preferred
Tonight we had the one before last competition round of the Dutch Eredivisie, the primera division of Dutch soccer. It was exciting so I wasn’t much concerned with astronomy. Weather played a big role in tonight’s round, as thunder and lightning caused at least two games to be suspended for a while. But Ajax became national champion and there’s still batlle for second place.
In the mean time it seems SpaceX has some serious delays with the scheduled launch – that is, first scheduled on April the 30th, then May the 7th and now… who knows. Follow their twitter stream for updates. It just looks like the old days with Space Shuttles delayed, sometimes forever. And this time it’s not the weather.
A sad video
… True to form, the couple attended the launch of the ill-fated Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986. Steven, who passed away in the 1990s, recorded video of the launch, which, until now, has never been seen publicly. The Huffington Post licensed the video from Hunt and has edited it for concision.
The Challenger launch was especially important to Hope, Hunt told HuffPost. Having spent 36 years as a school nurse, Hope was particularly eager to send off Christa McAuliffe, the first participant of NASA’s Teacher in Space Project.
Hope’s excitement is palpable in the 26-year-old video: She can be heard cheering for McAuliffe as the shuttle climbs, yelling “C’mon, Chris! … Go Chris, Go! Beautiful! Oh, Beautiful, Chris! … Go, Chris, Go!”
That enthusiasm continues until 73 seconds into the launch, when the shuttle explodes, ultimately killing all seven crew members.
Hope, Steven and their companions realize immediately that something has gone wrong, and their cheers are replaced by cries of shock, horror and disbelief. …(HuffPost)
Lenin in space
I don’t know what the revenues were, but the auction sure had some interesting topics. And it’s “Soviet”, not “Russian”.
Science and communism are inseparable! That is the basic message of this amazing collection of Soviet space propaganda posters that will be auctioned off on Apr. 22.
Featuring Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, the first and second humans to reach space, along with Krushchev, and of course Lenin, these posters glorify the the Soviet Union’s technological prowess and importance in the world, and in the universe. Many of the posters focus on the role the workers played in the space race, and the ordinary citizen’s duty to feel immensely proud of Mother Russia’s accomplishments. … (Wired)
Right place, right time, indeed
Waiting for take-off, because there’s another “plane” landing.