MetaFilter: “An Audience With Neil Armstrong is an hour long interview with Neil Armstrong about the moon landings from 2011, including a comparative view of footage from the Eagle’s landing alongside Google Moon maps.”
Category Archives: Space
Venustransit
One more link about this year‘s Venus transit: Transit of Venus. Link via Hal, if I remember correctly.
Venus Transit 2012
Garret reminds us that this year you can watch a rare astronomical event on June 5th and 6th: a Venus transit, i. e. the Venus in front of the sun. This only occurs once every 105 to 122 years, in pairs separated by eight years. The last one was on June 8th, 2004, and I watched it with my students at school.
Venus transits were used in the past to measure and calculate the distance from the earth to the sun – which is easy with today’s technology but was not so easy a few centuries ago. They’ve only been observed six times so far: 1639 (Kepler calculated the one in 1631, but it was not visible from Europe), 1761 and 1769, 1874 and 1882. The next one after this year will be in 2117, and I’m not sure how many of us are going to be around then… so if the transit is visible from where you live, make sure to take a look! Sadly I will only be able to see the last part of the transit here in Germany in the early morning.
More information and discussion at this MetaFilter thread: Venus to transit sun in June.
Mehr Informationen auf deutsch gibt es bei Venustransit.de.
Going to the moon
Sometimes I find something worth reading or watching, but before I get around to posting it here, it gets posted on MetaFilter. And sometimes this happens twice in one day.
Robert Krulwich poses the question on his weblog: How Big Was It, Really? and compares the distances on the first moonwalk to a football or baseball field.
The next day, Neil Armstrong writes to Krulwich: Neil Armstrong Talks About The First Moon Walk.
(MetaFilter: The Original MoonWalking)
Ascent – Commemorating Shuttle is a 45 minute long YouTube video:
“Photographic documentation of a Space Shuttle launch plays a critical role in the engineering analysis and evaluation process that takes place during each and every mission. Motion and still images enable Shuttle engineers to visually identify off-nominal events and conditions requiring corrective action to ensure mission safety and success. This imagery also provides highly inspirational and educational insight to those outside the NASA family.
This compilation of film and video presents the best of the best ground-based Shuttle motion imagery from STS-114, STS-117, and STS-124 missions. Rendered in the highest definition possible, this production is a tribute to the dozens of men and women of the Shuttle imaging team and the 30yrs of achievement of the Space Shuttle Program.”
Wenn ich groß bin, werde ich Astronaut…
Fly from one end of the ISS to the other – fascinating video tour of the ISS at Universe Today.
“The ISS is now so large that it takes astronauts about six minutes to go between the two farthest points on the space station — and that is by ‘flying,’ not walking. Enjoy this video tour of the interior of the ISS, filmed earlier this year.”