kottke.org posts about space
Operation Space Station is a two-part PBS documentary series on the International Space Station. Here’s a very short teaser trailer:
Watch video on YouTube.
A synopsis:
The size of a football field, the International Space Station hurtles around Earth at 17,000 mph, shielding its astronauts from the most hostile environment humans have ever endured. After 25 years of continuous human presence in space, astronauts and Mission Control insiders reveal the most terrifying moments aboard this remarkable orbiting laboratory, where a single mistake could prove fatal. From ammonia leaks, meteor strikes, and docking disasters, to spacewalk horrors, potentially lethal showers of space junk, and the moment the entire ISS backflipped out of control, follow life-or-death dramas unfolding 250 miles above our planet — and the human ingenuity and teamwork that save the day.
(via installer)
Good luck losing less than an hour to this: a huge archive of logos for government, non-profit, private, military, and even fictional space agencies and companies. There is also a book, but it looks like it was only available on Kickstarter — hopefully it’ll be republished? (via sidebar)
A gem of a find by The Public Domain Review of a collection from the Rijksmuseum: photographs of plaster models of the Moon’s surface that were made from observations of the Moon through a telescope.
Peering through a self-made telescope, James Nasmyth sketched the moon’s scarred, cratered and mountainous surface. Aiming to “faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow” he then built plaster models based on the drawings, and photographed these against black backgrounds in the full glare of the sun. As the technology for taking photographs directly through a telescope was still in its infancy, the drawing and modelling stages of the process were essential for attaining the moonly detail he wanted.
These are incredible; I love them so much. While Nasmyth’s models were spikier than the Moon’s actual surface, they still look amazingly realistic for something produced in the 1870s. (The 1870s!)
The book from which these were taken also contains this page, where Nasmyth seems to hypothesize that certain mountain ranges on the Moon (and Earth?) are formed by “shrinkage of the globe”:
You win some, you lose some. 🤷♂️
See also Henry Draper’s photographs of the Moon from the 1860s and 1870s.
In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I’ve seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical images and yet there are always new, mind-blowing things to see. Like this 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption by PengFei Chou:
Or Close-up of a Comet by Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger:
Or Electric Threads of the Lightning Spaghetti Nebula by Shaoyu Zhang (Lightning Spaghetti Nebula!!!):
Or Dragon Tree Trails by Benjamin Barakat:
Teasingly, the official site only has a selection of the shortlisted entries but if you poke through the posts at Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography, you can find some more of them. (via colossal)
Watch video on YouTube.
I read Project Hail Mary (by The Martian author Andy Weir) a few summers ago; it was fine. I suspected at the time it might make a better movie than a book and after watching the trailer, I’m excited to see this next summer. Ryan Gosling stars and Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, produced the Spider-verse movies) are directing. Out in theaters March 2026.
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.
Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
Watch video on YouTube.
I could watch that allllll day long.
More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.
Watch video on YouTube.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this video except wow. Wow wow. It’s almost inconceivable that we live in a world of sights like this. Feels like science fiction but is actually real. Captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 35 years ago and in celebration of that milestone, Alan Taylor collected some recent images from the Hubble, whose mission is still ongoing.
Photographer Joshua Rozells on his photo of our increasingly crowded night skies:
The light pollution caused by satellites is quickly becoming a growing problem for astronomers. In 2021, over 1700 spacecrafts and satellites were put into orbit. Light pollution caused by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are the worst offenders because they are low Earth orbit satellites, and they travel in satellite trains. One can only assume the issue will exponentially increase in the next few years, with SpaceX alone intending to launch over 40,000 satellites in total. The space industry is almost entirely unregulated, with no limits on the amount of satellites that anyone is able to launch and there is currently no regulation in place to minimise the light pollution they cause.
The Hubble Space Telescope “has observed some fascinating cosmic wonder every day of the year, including on your birthday”. Just enter your month and day of birth to find out what it saw. My birthday image is of the Egg Nebula (shown above):
Where is the center of the Egg Nebula? Like a baby chick pecking its way out of an egg, the star in the center of the Egg Nebula is casting away shells of gas and dust as it slowly transforms itself into a white dwarf star.
The Egg Nebula is a rapidly evolving pre-planetary nebula spanning about one light year toward the constellation of Cygnus. Thick dust blocks the center star from view, while the dust shells further out reflect light from this star. Light vibrating in the plane defined by each dust grain, the central star and the observer is preferentially reflected, causing an effect known as polarization. Measuring the orientation of the polarized light for the Egg Nebula gives clues as to location of the hidden source. The above image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope is false-color coded to highlight the orientation of polarization.
Cool! I like my birthday nebula. (via the morning news)
Watch video on YouTube.
A few days ago, on March 2, the first lunar lander operated by a private company landed successfully on the Moon. The video of the landing is really something — I wonder if I will ever get accustomed to or tired of watching footage of spacecraft landing on other bodies in our solar system? The answer is a resounding NO so far…this is cool as hell.
You can read more about Firefly’s Blue Ghost on Wikipedia. The mission delivered 10 science and technology investigations to the surface of the Moon for NASA. (via phil plait)
From astronomer Yuri Beletsky, a photo of Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) arching over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Unfortunately, it seems like the comet disintegrated as it swooped around the Sun, always a danger.
The nucleus of Comet ATLAS (C/2024 G3) held together during a brutal perihelion but not for long. Lionel Majzik of Hungary was the first to report and record dramatic changes in the comet between January 18th and 19th. The bright, strongly condensed head rapidly became more diffuse, a sure sign that its nucleus was disintegrating based on past observations of crumbling comets. His superb sequence, photographed remotely from Chile, clearly reveal the dramatic transformation, which was later confirmed by Australian observers.
The tail will be visible for a few days after the breakup — such comets are called “headless wonders” by astronomers. (via @philplait.bsky.social)
Moon Lidar is a visualization of the data collected by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) mission. According to this factsheet, the visualization includes nearly six billion measurements.
LOLA data was captured by a polar orbiting laser altimeter. Think of it like the range finder you would use to measure how far away the hole is from your current position at a golf course, except you press the button six billion times, save the position from where you are measuring, save every distance measurement on a hard drive, and then phone that data back to earth.
Watch video on YouTube.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released a pair of visualizations of the phases the Moon will go through in 2025, one for the northern hemisphere above and one for the southern hemisphere below:
Watch video on YouTube.
Look at that sucker wobble! Each frame of the 4K video represents one hour and there are lots of locations labeled on the map, including the landing sites of the Apollo missions.
But also: How have I never noticed that the Moon is upside-down in the southern hemisphere?! I mean, it makes total sense but I’ve just never noticed or thought it through. 🤯 (via the kid should see this)
I know astronomical imagery is on the verge of being over-processed these days (those colors don’t exist out there!), but this image from the JWST is shocking. Clear evidence of Sesame Street’s Yip Yip Martians from billions of years ago. What did Jim Henson know and when did he know it?
Watch video on YouTube.
Meteorite hunter Roberto Vargas tracks fireballs on the internet and then goes to see if he can find them.
Usually I’m alerted that something has fallen or that people have seen a fireball through the American Meteor Society I book a flight, go to wherever it is, and then I start searching. I would just walk around and use my magnet cane to tap rocks. If they stick to the magnet and they have a black outer shell, they should be meteorites.
Vargas has over 500 meteorites in his personal collection.
See also The Meteorite Collector, The International Meteorite Market, and The Boomerang Meteor.
Oh wow, this is cool: an article in Scientific American about the Arecibo message, the first message purposely sent by humanity out into interstellar space. The piece is written by science writer Nadia Drake — the daughter of Frank Drake, who designed the message — and it digs into the details of how the whole thing came about.
I’ve somehow never read about the Arecibo message before. It was sent out from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico on November 16, 1974 towards global cluster M13. The message was in binary and when properly decoded upon receipt, should look like this:
The drawing on the right is Frank Drake’s recently discovered first draft of the message.
Dad targeted a globular cluster of stars called Messier 13 (M13), or the Great Cluster in the constellation of Hercules, because it would conveniently be overhead at the time of the ceremony (nestled in a sinkhole, Arecibo’s giant dish was not fully steerable). In about 25,000 years, Dad’s message will reach M13 — or at least part of it, because the majority of the cluster’s thousands of stars will have moved out of the telescope’s beam by then. But anyone who’s around to detect the Arecibo transmission, and who figures out how to decode it, will have a blueprint telling them a lot about us: what we look like, which chemical elements and biomolecules make up our DNA, what our planetary system is and how many of us existed in 1974. Dad’s transmission concluded with a binary encoded representation of the Arecibo dish itself.
Read the whole thing…it’s fascinating.
Btw, in addition to creating the Arecibo message, Frank Drake also designed the Drake equation (“a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy”), helped design the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, and generally kickstarted the whole SETI effort. (via @https://bsky.app/profile/astrokatie.com)
Wow, check out this just-released image from the JWST team of star cluster NGC 602.
The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. This cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighbourhood.
It is very worth your time to click through and look at this image in all of its massive celestial glory. I found this image via Phil Plait, who calls it “one of the most jaw-droppingly mind stomping images I’ve seen from JWST” and, directing us back to the science (remember the science?!), notes that NGC 602 is actively forming stars (it’s only about 5 million years old) and that it depicts “the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way”. Cool!
Out today from National Geographic is Infinite Cosmos, a gorgeous-looking book by Ethan Siegel (intro by Brian Greene). It’s about the history of the JWST, humanity’s biggest ever space telescope, a machine that allows us to peer deeper & clearer into the universe than ever before, and some of the amazing results obtained through its use.
Siegel wrote a piece about the book for Big Think, which includes an excerpt. Gravitational lensing is so cool:
Even with its unprecedented capabilities, JWST’s views of the universe are still finite and limited. The faintest, most distant objects in the cosmos — including the very first stars of all — remain invisible even in the longest-exposure JWST images acquired to date. The universe itself offers a natural enhancement, however, that can reveal features that would otherwise remain unobservable: gravitational lensing.
Whenever a large amount of mass gathers together in one location, it bends and distorts the fabric of the surrounding space-time, just as the theory of general relativity dictates. As light from background objects even farther away passes close to or through that region of the universe, it not only gets distorted but also gets magnified and potentially bent, either into multiple images or into a complete or partial ring. The foreground mass behaves as a gravitational lens. The amount of mass and how it’s distributed affect the light passing through it, amplifying the light coming from those background sources.
Infinite Cosmos is available for purchase at Amazon and Bookshop.
Ross Anderson and I share a favorite web page, Wikipedia’s Timeline of the Far Future, which he wrote about for the Atlantic: For How Much Longer Can Life Continue on This Troubled Planet?
Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth’s axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.
Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels. Our planet will also likely have sustained at least one mass-extinction-triggering impact, unless its inhabitants have learned to divert asteroids.
I wrote about the timeline back in 2012 (and again in 2017 & 2019).
The timeline of the far future article is far from the longest page on Wikipedia, but it might take you several hours to get through because it contains so many enticing detours. What’s Pangaea Ultima? Oooh, Roche limit! The Degenerate Era, Poincar’e recurrence time, the Big Rip scenario, the cosmic light horizon, the list goes on and on.
Watch video on YouTube.
Apollo 13: Survival is a documentary film that uses original footage and interviews to tell the story of NASA’s Apollo 13 mission, what went wrong, and how the astronauts returned safely to Earth. It’s now playing on Netflix.
55 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 16th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W television, synced to the present-day time. Just open this page in your browser today, July 20th, and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here’s the schedule (all times EDT):
4:10:30 pm: Moon landing broadcast starts
4:17:40 pm: Lunar module lands on the Moon
4:20:15 pm - 10:51:26 pm: Break in coverage
10:51:27 pm: Moon walk broadcast starts
10:56:15 pm: First step on Moon
11:51:30 pm: Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew
12:00:30 am: Broadcast end (on July 21)
Set an alarm on your phone or calendar! Also, this works best on an actual computer but I think it functions ok on phones and tablets if necessary.
Back in 2018, I wrote a bit about what to look out for when you’re watching the landing:
The radio voices you hear are mostly Mission Control in Houston (specifically Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke, who acted as the spacecraft communicator for this mission) and Buzz Aldrin, whose job during the landing was to keep an eye on the LM’s altitude and speed — you can hear him calling it out, “3 1/2 down, 220 feet, 13 forward.” Armstrong doesn’t say a whole lot…he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”. Note the change in call sign from “Eagle” to “Tranquility Base”. :)
Two things to listen for on the broadcast: the 1201/1202 program alarms I mentioned above and two quick callouts by Charlie Duke about the remaining fuel towards the end: “60 seconds” and “30 seconds”. Armstrong is taking all this information in through his earpiece — the 1202s, the altitude and speed from Aldrin, and the remaining fuel — and using it to figure out where to land.
It’s been about five years since scientists captured the first blurry image of a black hole. Using what they learned from that experience, they’ve teased out some more detailed images of the black holes at the centers of the Milky Way galaxy (top) and the M87 galaxy (bottom). The process of collecting the data for these images is interesting:
The only way to “see” a black hole is to image the shadow created by light as it bends in response to the object’s powerful gravitational field. As Ars Science Editor John Timmer reported in 2019, the EHT isn’t a telescope in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a collection of telescopes scattered around the globe. The EHT is created by interferometry, which uses light in the microwave regime of the electromagnetic spectrum captured at different locations. These recorded images are combined and processed to build an image with a resolution similar to that of a telescope the size of the most distant locations. Interferometry has been used at facilities like ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in northern Chile, where telescopes can be spread across 16 km of desert.
In theory, there’s no upper limit on the size of the array, but to determine which photons originated simultaneously at the source, you need very precise location and timing information on each of the sites. And you still have to gather sufficient photons to see anything at all. So atomic clocks were installed at many of the locations, and exact GPS measurements were built up over time. For the EHT, the large collecting area of ALMA-combined with choosing a wavelength in which supermassive black holes are very bright-ensured sufficient photons.
The images of the two black holes look similar, which was somewhat unexpected:
While this idea may initially sound somewhat mundane, it is anything but. The result is surprising because Sgr A*’s mass is about 4.3 million times that of the Sun, while M87*’s is about 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. Despite the significant difference in mass between the two supermassive black holes, the fact that their magnetic fields behave similarly and are both well-organized is an incredible discovery.
I love Yuliya Krishchik’s space-themed embroidery pieces, especially the ones featuring Milky Way-like star fields — she calls them “surreal space landscapes”. If you watch one of Krishchik’s videos, you can see that her pieces are just a bit 3D…a cool effect.
You can find more of her work on Instagram and her blog or buy original pieces in her store (they go quickly though).
This stunning 1.3 gigapixel image of the Vela supernova remnant comes to us courtesy of the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. From PetaPixel:
The Vela Supernova remnant, located about 800 light-years away from Earth, is the cosmic corpse of a massive star that exploded 11,000 years ago. It is one of the closest supernova remnants to Earth and the perfect subject for the remarkable Dark Energy Camera.
The supernova is a vast cosmic structure about 100 light-years across. For context, one would have to travel around the Earth 200 million times to have traveled a single light-year.
The full image of the supernova remnant is worth exploring. You can also watch this zoom-in of the image to observe the high level of detail available.
Watch video on YouTube.
(via colossal)
Watch video on YouTube.
A Michigan ham radio operator used a homemade setup with a handheld antenna to talk to an astronaut orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station. I didn’t know this was a thing! The astronaut even sent him a QSL card acknowledging the conversation (included at the end of the video). There’s more info on Reddit about the radio, antenna, and conversation.
The ISS even has an unofficial program that allows students to talk to astronauts on the station via ham radio.
An almost-all-volunteer organization called Amateur Radio on the International Space Station, or ARISS, now helps arrange contact between students and astronauts on the space station. Students prepare to ask questions rapid-fire, one after another, into the ham radio microphone for the brief 10-minute window before the space station flies out of range.
“We try to think of ourselves as planting seeds and hoping that we get some mighty oaks to grow,” said Kenneth G. Ransom, the ISS Ham project coordinator at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
That this is even possible with low-powered communication devices underscores just how close the ISS is to Earth: 200-250 miles above the surface. That’s the distance between Dallas & Houston or NYC to Boston.
A couple of weeks ago, Radiolab aired an episode about a puzzling object on a children’s poster of the solar system: a Venusian moon called Zoozve. Venus doesn’t have any moons and “Zoozve” didn’t show up on Google at all, so co-host Latif Nasser went on a bit of a mission to find out what the heck this object was. He talked to someone at NASA, the poster’s designer, and various astronomers and physicists, including the person who had discovered Zoozve (aka 2002 VE68).
So begins a tiny mystery that leads to a newly discovered kind of object in our solar system, one that is simultaneously a moon, but also not a moon, and one that waltzes its way into asking one of the most profound questions about our universe: How predictable is it, really? And what does that mean for our place in it?
It’s an entertaining listen and you’ll want to catch the follow-up as well, which I won’t spoil for you. And if you’re a reader rather than a listener, this piece at space.com recaps the whole thing.
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