The New York Public Library has put an amazing collection of hi-res Open Access Maps online for downloading. There are over 20,000 cartographic properties which they believe have no known US copyright restrictions. Because of that, they have put them all under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. You do have to create an account, but that is free within the bounds of being asked to support the library every so often. There is a bit of a learning curve finding your way around the site, but it doesn’t take long to pick up on it.
Ready to be a part of the first permanent human settlement on Mars? Then you might want to check out Mars One, a group planning on landing the first 4 people in 2024, with 4 more scheduled to arrive every two years after that. The initial missions beginning in 2018 will be to land supplies and robots to build a habitation for the humans who follow.
If Astronomy and Space excite you, there is some good news. It seems Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has teamed up with Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane to create a new show, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, very much in the tradition of Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos. Ann Druyan is the widow of Carl Sagan and one of the co-producers of the original Cosmos series, while animator Seth MacFarlane helped pull in the network funding. The two of them will share the Executive Producer duties for the new show, which will be running on Fox and National Geographic on the same night. Word of this project was first announced back in 2012, but now we are getting close: the first episode airs on March 9th.
My own animated goodby to 2013, and just in time for the new year, you can grab a free download of the APOD’s 2014 calendar, the printable PDF from Astronomy Picture of the Day. You want to select the one for your hemisphere depending on which side of the equator you are on, and if you run it on your tablet or other electronic device it is filled with clickable links to the original images.
Gravity is the kind of film I can believe in, something that takes amazing orbital videos and presents them embedded in a something like a story line, possibly even with a plot. Yes, I do know just how easily amused I am.
Your picture will be taken tomorrow, so be sure to look up and smile and wave for the camera. The camera is on the Cassini Spacecraft, and it will be taking a picture of the Earth from the shadow of Saturn (because taking a picture of the Sun does bad things to unprotected cameras). This is a recreation of the original Pale Blue Dot event, when Voyager took a picture of Earth from beyond the orbit of Neptune. Take a peek at the last time Cassini took our picture in 2006 to get an idea of just how amazing an image this could be. The woman who headed the Voyager imaging team in 1990 and is on board the Cassini imaging team taking these photos, Carolyn Porco, wrote a great article about the event you should check out. About the only part of the project I am not in favor of is their Message to the Milky Way transmission on the anniversary of the event, using Earth’s strongest Radio Telescope as the transmitter. Why let the Berserker’s know we are here before we have to? Thanks to Richard Branson for the heads up on this one; while I got Carolyn’s tweet about it, Richards blog entry had lots of juicy details.