Buzz Aldrin took this picture of Neil Armstrong in the cabin after the completion of the first EVA. This is the face of the first man to set foot on the Moon, just hours earlier, on July 20th, 1969.
Neil Armstrong was a quiet self-described nerdy engineer who became a global hero when as a steely-nerved pilot he made “one giant leap for mankind” with a small step on to the moon. The modest man who had people on Earth entranced and awed from almost a quarter million miles away has died. He was 82.
The Average Color of the Universe
Credit: Karl Glazebrook & Ivan Baldry (JHU)
Explanation: What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what stars are commonplace in nearby galaxies. The answer, depicted above, is a conditionally perceived shade of beige. To determine this, astronomers computationally averaged the light emitted by one of the largest sample of galaxies yet analyzed: the 200,000 galaxies of the 2dF survey. The resulting cosmic spectrum has some emission in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a single perceived composite color.
(via drawnblog)
See outer space in 1960’s Kodachrome glory in the newly launched archives of Gemini and Mercury mission photos. The stop-motion video compilations are worth checking out, too.
via 909miles
liz:
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The UFO room at Sweden’s Treehotel, which was awarded the Swedish Grand Tourism Prize for 2011 just the other day.
You really, really ought to click through and check out the Treehotel website. Especially the Bird’s Nest room.
Wow!
“Beach House”, by Aaron Bloom.
Dark flow is the term that astronomers have coined for a recent cosmological discovery that is both thrilling and baffling: the galaxies of our universe are being pulled steadily towards a specific point in our universe, seemingly by a gravitational force. This was first detected by NASA in observations of what is known as the microwave background of the universe: radiation left over by the formation of our universe, or the big bang. During these observations hundreds of galaxies were seen to be moving at more than a million miles per hour towards a point in space between the constellations Centaurus and Vela. One explanation proposed by scientists: that the source of the gravitational pull is from an entirely different universe that is pressing up against ours. Dark flow has been used as evidence for the controversial Multiverse Theory, which is the possibility that our universe, rather than being singular and infinite, is actually only one of any number of parallel universes, all coming in and out of existence in an even larger and barely imaginable structure. This may seem unlikely at the very least, even ludicrous. However, if we were to consider the history of human belief about our place in the universe, it may start to sound a whole lot more plausible. After all, not even 500 years ago it was common knowledge that the sun revolved around the earth.
(Source: minddynamite, via fuckyeahexistentialism)
