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.
Europa Report is the planetary adventure this week, searching for life on Jupiter’s fourth largest moon. While not the largest budget film ever, this one looks very interesting indeed. The other one I would really like to see is Library Wars, if I can just make it over to the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco. In 2019 a new law is passed, which allows the government to create an armed force to destroy objectionable printed material. Opposing this is the Library Force, teachers and librarians out to protect all books, and they too are heavily armed. I know which side I would be fighting on! Or you could just go for the action roller coaster and see 2 Guns; it’s not genre, but it looks like a lot of fun. Notice how I didn’t even mention Cockneys vs Zombies?
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.
I actually took some time off the other week, and besides attending NADWCon I spent a bit of time at the National Aquarium while hanging out in Baltimore. One of the more interesting exhibits was the Jellyfish section, which had quite a selection of types. As I remembered from swimming in the ocean, Jellyfish are not real good at orienting to the local up and down, which should be a bit of a plus for surviving in space (or any other zero G environment).
Friends of the Planetary Society, founded by Carl Sagan and others to promote the colonization of space, have a Kickstarter project: ARKYD. The team at Planetary Resources has begun a project for mining the asteroids, starting with the ones featured in all those tweets from Low Flying Rocks which come much closer to the Earth than a lot of folks find comfortable. Step one is finding them heading our way when they are still far enough away that we have time to intercept them, and for that they are launching a gaggle of small telescopes specially designed to see the faint reflected light from their surfaces. And when there aren’t any rocks fling at us, they can use the telescope farm to monitor interesting things, like Jupiter and Saturn. One of the telescopes will be used to allow pretty much anyone who wants to contribute to take their own pictures of the things that interest them from an orbiting telescope, or have a picture of their choosing photographed in space, with the Earth as a backdrop. There are still 11 days until the project funding window closes, and they have made over $900,000 of their one million dollar goal, so you still have time to contribute and help make this project happen! And, if you contribute a hundred dollars or more, you also get a years membership in The Planetary Society along with the other rewards.