Category Archives: Space

Space Station Transiting Eclipse

Smarter Every Day: Space Station Transiting 2017 ECLIPSE, My Brain Stopped Working. (YouTube, 8:38min)

What it says on the tin, the eclipse as seen from Wyoming, with a bonus appearance of the International Space Station. The ISS transit across the sun is fast, much faster than I thought it would be even though I’ve watched the ISS cross the sky many times.

Bonus link: Veritasium: Eclipse 2017 (YouTube, 5:20min), including time-lapse video from first contact to totality, viewed from Oregon.

Last man to walk on the moon

The Two-Way: Gene Cernan, Last Man To Walk On The Moon, Dies At 82.

“The last person to leave footprints on the moon has died. NASA reported that Gene Cernan died Monday at the age of 82, surrounded by his family.

Gene Cernan flew in space three times, including twice to the moon. Cernan was big, brash and gregarious. And if he hadn’t been lucky, he could have missed his chance to walk on the moon.”

See also MetaFilter: The Last Man on the Moon for more links.

A strong woman

The Washington Post: Annie Glenn: ‘When I called John, he cried. People just couldn’t believe that I could really talk.’.

“As John [Glenn] himself wrote, “We practically grew up in the same playpen. We never knew a time when we didn’t know each other.“ (Annie says they were 2 years old when they met.)

But they were different. John was athletic and outgoing while Annie barely spoke, not because she didn’t have anything to say, but because when she did, people often assumed she was either deaf or mentally deficient.

For most of her life, Annie was afflicted with an 85 percent stutter, meaning she would become “hung up on 85 percent of the words she tried to speak, which was a severe handicap,“ as John put it.

Those years must have been torture for Annie.”