Alan Eustace, a senior vice president of Google, parachuted from a balloon near the top of the stratosphere on Friday, October 24, 2014, falling faster than the speed of sound and beating the record set by the Austrian Felix Baumgartner in 2012.
Category Archives: Space Exploration
The first earthrise ever seen directly by humans
On December 24, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8, the second human spaceflight mission in the US Apollo space program, were the first humans to witness Earthrise. The “Earthrise” is photographed by astronauts on board Apollo 8. It is one of the most famous photos ever taken and became the symbol of one the greatest […]
NASA needs your help to identify cities in the night images
Since the “space-age” has started in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken more than 1.8 million photographs of the Earth from orbit, and about one-third of them (approximately 600,000) have been taken at night. But they don’t always know what they are looking at. You can help, announced NASA.
Krakatoa, from space
On August 26-27, 1883, a small island in the Indian Ocean obliterated itself in one of the most notorious volcanic eruptions in history. Krakatau (often spelled Krakatoa) erupted with such violence that two-thirds of the island, about 23 square kilometers, sank into the Sunda Strait. The explosions heard in the 1883 eruption remain the loudest […]
Will We Ever Visit Other Stars?
Earth is our one and only home. As Carl Sagan said (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space), “On Earth, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident […]
Great supermoon photos by Russian Cosmonaut
August 10, 2014, was the closest, brightest supermoon of this year. A Russian cosmonaut, Oleg Artemyev from International Space Station took wonderful photos of this great astronomical event while the moon was setting.
Pale Blue Dot
The farthest spacecraft from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 Notes 1 probe took a photo of planet Earth in 1990, from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40 AU) from Earth. The photo is known as the Pale Blue Dot. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a fraction of a […]
