Here’s an impressive shot:
May 012022
Apr 202022
This view of Phobos crossing the face of the sun has been brought to you by western civilization, engineering rigor and a determination to place objective facts over feelings. No other system ever dreamed up by Man could have come anywhere close to letting us see this. or, indeed, even imagining it: Phobos would ahve been forever unknown to mankind if not for western civilization.
The Smithsonian kindly provided a convenient fact sheet to help you make your culture capable of this sort of thing.
Jan 162022
Some remarkable imagery of the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, with several telescopic views of the booster from launch to landing. It’s *gorgeous,* and as you can see from the thumbnail, at times kinda haunting.
Jan 152022
Well this was a hell of a thing…
Jan 072022
A video from the University of Hertfordshire’s Bayfordbury Observatory shows the James Webb Space telescope drifting across the starfield. If you look closely you can also make out two asteroids… one that seems almost to be moving along with the telescope, and another, fainter moving dot in the upper right. The sky is *full* of stuff, if you know how to see it.
Dec 162021
The Parker Solar Probe passed close enough to the Sun back in April to arguably be said to have “touched” the sun by zipping through the outermost layers of the solar atmosphere. It took months to get all the collected data back, and John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab has just released the video below of the passage. The video quality is pretty potato, but it looks like it was a hell of a ride.
Once again, this moment of unutterable awesomeness has been brought to you by hard-nosed engineering rigor. STEM for the won… once again.
Dec 122021
CNN has a handful of “before and after” satellite photos showing the destruction wrought a few days ago in the Kentucky region. Some of the destruction is straight out of Tornado Cliche Central, like lightly constructed farm outbuildings turned into confetti; others are more interesting, such as a heavily built courthouse largely trashed and an Amazon warehouse ripped in half while two identically built nearby buildings seem intact.
Before-and-after images show scale of tornadoes’ devastation
I know… CNN has something newsworthy? Shocking!
Dec 092021
The question was raised: “what is that thing?” It looks surprisingly like a Hummer, though it’s clearly not. Trolling through google Image Search, the closest I could find was the “Paymover T300 Push Tractor,” though that too is not quite right. Tow tractors from the early 1960’s are somewhat beyond my field of expertise, but an inability to figure this out after a while of searching bugs me.
The vehicle in question:
Modern photo of the Paymover T300 Push Tractor:
It’s clearly not the same vehicle, though it seems to share some design aspects. Anybody able to shed some light?
UPDATE: I found another photo that seems to show a part of the tug:
Dec 072021
Things are thrilling around here, as can be seen in these photos of my cats.
Dec 062021
The National Museum of the USAF released a video a while back showing the internal crew spaces of the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, the ultimate expression of World War II era bomber design practices.