Merritt Island, Fla., July 16, 1969 9:32 A.M. EST
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“You don’t know what we been through to make it this far” —Jay-Z, West, and Beyoncé, 2011
Category Archives: Space
essential discovery of maturity
The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequences of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
A boy can take you into the open at night and show you the stars; he might tell you no end of things about them, conceivably all that an astronomer could teach. But until and unless he feels the vast indifference of the universe to his own fate, and has placed himself in the perspective of cold and illimitable space, he has not looked maturely at the heavens.
Until he has felt this, and unless he can endure this, he remains a child, and in his childishness he will resent the heavens when they are not accommodating. He will demand sunshine when he wishes to play, and rain when the ground is dry, and he will look upon storms as anger directed at him, and the thunder as a personal threat. ■
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Lippmann, Walter. A Preface to Morals. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929. pp. 186-187. Print.
Hazy Mystery
Ex-Light Pollution member Nick Sherman operates as The Variable Why, creating ethereal ambient music that sends its listeners out into eternity. Forever. Don’t be late.
100,000 Stars
100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It shows the location of 119,617 nearby stars derived from multiple sources, including the 1989 Hipparcos mission. Zooming in reveals 87 individually identified stars and our solar system. The galaxy view is an artist’s rendition based on NGC 1232, a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way.
a sense of scale
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Cosmic Voyage. Dir. Bayley Silleck. Pro. Jeffrey Marvin. Nar. Morgan Freeman. IMAX Corporation, 1996.
The Overview Effect
The first color photograph of Earth from space was taken in 1968. If modern human civilization is roughly 200,000 years old, that means 99.98% of people came and went without seeing their home, something we all take for granted. In this video, a handful of the 0.02% explain their experience with what has been deemed “The Overview Effect.”
Nicholas Latkovic 