Galileo’s watercolours of the various moon phases from 1609. Note how the terminator between the light and dark sides is not smooth – thus showing that the moon’s surface is also not smooth.
Moon Phases by Galileo Galilei
Category: Space
ISS in Real Time
The ISS in Real Time is a fully interactive timeline of the ISS’s operation and is more than a little cool. They’ve managed to dig out all sorts of old footage and photos, crew manifests and daily schedules, and have put it all together in a pretty but usable interface. The flightpath widget is also a nice way of showing where the station was at any particular time.
Inside the Globus INK: A Mechanical Navigation Computer for Soviet Spaceflight
Righto.com has a rather delightful introduction to and teardown of a Globus INK – a Soviet-era mechanical navigation aid for spaceflight.
A Breakdown of the SpaceX Superheavy Landing from Yesterday.
A nice little breakdown of yesterday’s SpaceX Superheavy booster capture. The whole thing is tremendously ‘Thunderbirds’…
Apollo-Soyuz Test Project Concept Art / NASA (1973)
A lovely spot of concept art from what became July 1975’s Apollo–Soyuz mission.
Via NASA.
Astronomical Engineering: A Strategy for Modifying Planetary Orbits
The Sun’s gradual brightening will seriously compromise the Earth’s biosphere within ~ 1E9 years. If Earth’s orbit migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun.
D. G. Korycansky, Gregory Laughlin, Fred C. Adams
Apparently the solution to everything getting warmer is to just move the planet.