It's hard to see on this image, but the stars are completely bright and clear, and they have no trails. Therefore, the streaking you see on the city lights is due to a combination of the motion of the shuttle's orbit and the rotation of the Earth.
Image from Nasa, link via Discovery Magazine.
4 comments:
One of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the destruction of the Challenger. It's kind of strange how 'routine' space travel has become. How we don't appreciate how it represents the achievement of thousands of years of the dreams of humanity to truly touch the sky.
What an age we live in where such a thing is 'routine'.
I don't know if you're into the 'awards', but just wanted to pass along a 'versatile blogger award' to you.
Basically, the idea is to select three other bloggers for the award. List seven facts about yourself.
I have the award picture over at my bog.
J A Beard: Thank you for the award! That's really kind of you.
What breaks my heart is how we're slowly backing away from space travel. I understand the reasons why (we are not evolved for space, yo--zero-g is hard on the human body), and years ago, I even predicted this would happen--that humanity had only a narrow window of prosperity in which to do things this audacious, and then we'd be overwhelmed by keeping our (growing) populations alive.
But it does make me sad to see the shuttle program end. I'm old enough to remember when it started and how exciting that was. At one point, I seriously considered trying to get into Canada's astronaut program.
I was listening to a talk a couple of years ago where they were talking about the best way for and individual to get into space.
Basically, they said it was basically easier to start a business and make 20 million to pay for a ride on a Russian trip then to try and become an astronaut. :/ I'm a half-blind asthmatic, so I knew I would never get into space. ;)
Although I personally am mostly for doing robotic missions (despite the coolness of the idea), though I do think it's very important that we have at least a couple of self-sufficient colonies. I don't like the idea of the total extinction of our species do to some particularly nasty event. A couple of colonies could cut down the chance of that.
I used to think self-sufficient was a pipe dream, but we're at the point now where a little tweaking here and there and we can have fuel, water, and biopolymer producing microbes, so it isn't as impossible as it might seem on the surface.
J A Beard: Yeah, at the time I looked into it, Roberta Bondar was Canada's most famous astronaut because she was our first female one. Part of the information packet I was sent from the CSA included a quasi-resume for all the current astronauts, and Ms. Bondar's was outrageously long and prestigious. She obviously got her shot for being an incredible candidate, not for being a woman.
And then I looked at her insane number of accomplishments and sorta went, "Yeah. This would be a pretty hard thing for me to pull off..."
Also, I wear glasses and am prone to motion sickness. Space and me might be...messy. :)
But a space colony! I could totally do that! (Except I'm old, now. D'oh!) There's economic reasons to establish a base on the moon (not the main reason to go, but it helps justify it happening.) There's enough helium-3 in the rocks to make nuclear fusion a viable energy source.
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