Dear Internets, Can We Talk?

A Gesture of Love to You.

Hi. It's nice to see you again. I know it's been awhile, but I wanted to see if... well, if there are still any of the old magics between us. I know I treated you wrong, went away for a whole season without saying why (grad school). But I want you back, my digital-darlin'. As you can see by Catonkeyboardinspace, I'm serious about this. 

Mission Control Radio

Space shuttle Endeavor is in space right now. 

Also in space is SomaFm - Broadcasting ambient music mixed with the live NASA mission feed, this is truly my space jam. 

Read about it on BoingBoing. 

Experience it here. 

To quote my friend James: 

This is the coolest shit ever. Live space shuttle radio communications overlayed with ambient music... Check that shit. They're adding a node to the space station right now. I'm listening to a spacewalk live. With dark ass shit being played over it. TECHNOLOGY IS AWESOME.

 Update 

From Somafm (2.23.10):

NASA Shuttle STS-130 successfully landed tonight at 7:20pm pacific time at the Kennedy Space Center after 14-day journey of more than 5.7 million miles. Welcome Back!

You can really hear it in the voices of the astronauts and ground crew both; we took people out into space for two weeks and now they're home safely. It's party time! 

Touching to hear [and well soundtracked].

Annular Eclipse Over Myanmar

Photo Credit: Wei Loon Chin

Via APOD [1.26.10]. If you don't know about APOD then you just haven't been on the internet before [or you never had AP Biology with Mr. Hipsher in high school].

No Really, Information is Beautiful

So much so that this blog, Information is Beautiful, gets two separate posts. Use this link to get a much better look at the image below [Or this one if you speak Portuguese, or this one if you speak French]. And then maybe we can all talk about something else other than 2012.

[It works best if you start with a given believers' claim and then read the rebuttal side-by-side. I really lost it @ "No rouge planets are have been detected in the solar system".]

Related: The 6 Best 2012 Apocalypse Theories (Are All Bullshit) [via Cracked]

Kepler Telescope Sports Five Discoveries So Far

From Wired:

The Kepler Space Telescope, a designated planet-hunting satellite, has found its first five planets, among them an odd, massive world only as dense as Styrofoam.

'We expected Jupiter-size planets in short orbits to be the first planets Kepler could detect,' said Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA in a release. 'It’s only a matter of time before more Kepler observations lead to smaller planets with longer period orbits, coming closer and closer to the discovery of the first Earth analog.'

'This exquisite data is just the tip of the iceberg,' MIT astronomer Sara Seager said back then. 'We’re going to see a new world of exoplanet exploration where discoveries will come much more rapidly than they’ve come in the last 10 years.”

Related:

Write up in New Scientist
All you ever wanted to know about Exoplanets
NASA's Kepler Project Homepage

Starlight

Flash zen: find the viewpoint from which you see a picture. If I ever need a spatial skills test for a psych study, I'll just ask people to play one of the two timed modes.

All about the chilled out browser games.

Galactic Center Composite Proves Educational and Psychedelic

Via the Chandra X-Ray Observatory

Blue and violet represent the X-ray observations of Chandra. X-rays are emitted by gas heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and by outflows from the supermassive black hole in the galaxy's center. The bright blue blob on the left side of the full field image is emission from a double star system containing either a neutron star or a black hole.

Yellow areas represent the near-infrared of Hubble. They outline the energetic regions where stars are being born as well as reveal hundreds of thousands of stars.

And red represents the infrared observations of Spitzer. The radiation and winds from stars create glowing dust clouds that exhibit complex structures from compact, spherical globules to long, stringy filaments.

Collectively they give us the most dramatically trippy window into the heart of the milky way that has ever been captured.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures quite a strange close-up

The MRO really gets around Mars. On board this baby is the HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which by the looks of it is one hell of a successful experiment (resolution quality gets measured in inches per pixel). Soon NASA is taking suggestions from the general public on areas of Mars to be shot next. Have your selections ready, my nerd brethren.

Photos from Boston.com
New Images from HiRISE's developers at their blog
NASA's project page
HiRISE on wikipedia
Google Mars

The Visible Universe (now with live updating)

...or considering the billions of years that this light takes to travel in allowing us to get these stagering shots, it's a just bit slower than "live". Definitely go full screen on this one. Controls are listed when you right click.

Bonus: the most in depth single photograph of, well, everything.
I guess it's good enough to adorn your desktop.

Or maybe this high rez capture of the Andromeda galaxy, courtesy of NASA's Swift satellite. It's more laptop shaped anyway.


More on Hubble Ultra Deep Field
More on M31

Interactive Ultra Deep Field Photographs (thanks NASA/ESA/Steve Beckwith)

Stellarium

Open source planetarium program that is being used in real projectors around the world. Tons of features. Recommend checking out their FAQs on Sourceforge for the full list. I enjoyed Mars, personally, most of all. Available for multiple platforms.