Hey, remember the picture I posted of the ISS and Shuttle as seen from the ground by an amateur astronomer Ralf Vandebergh? It was very cool, right?
Yeah, well, check this out. It’s another image by Vandebergh, and may show an astronaut doing an EVA on the ISS. Wow. I can’t tell if it’s actually showing what’s claimed or not, but given the size constraints, yeah, it’s certainly possible.
That oughta make your Friday afternoon a little more surreal.
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The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
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April 10th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
And how much will THIS image get on ebay
April 10th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
When the astronaut finally found a place where he could be alone someone taking a picture of him from Earth.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Damn paparazzi!
April 10th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
[Rant]
Yeah, well, I had tried to submit that APOD feature to Digg early this morning, but some lazy bastard who could NOT be bothered to copy-and-paste a few lines of the description before submitting it, beat me to it. I HATE inconsiderate Diggers who do that!
[/Rant]
April 10th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Extremely cool, if that really is a glimpse of an astronaut.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Have the Powers-That-Be ever released an example that shows what their toys can do?
If memory serves, images only below some specific altitude taken by ground-tracking scopes are released to avoid giving away the scopes’ capabilities.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
He was probably clearing a wedgie from his ass at that very moment.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Or……..it could be an alien checking out the station *ducks for cover*
Either way, very cool
April 10th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Joe! Hey Joe!! You’re fly’s open!
April 10th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Ho. Ly. SHEET.
What a feat.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Speaking of the ISS, could you use your NASA contacts to have them name the new latrine after Colbert? They will announcxe the name on Tuesday on his show. Imagine if NASA astronaut announced that the latrine is named after him…
April 10th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Link to AP Story on that: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NASA_COLBERT?SITE=FLFNW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
April 10th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
USAToday website has a cool animation showing how the ISS has grown over the years:
http://i.usatoday.net/tech/graphics/iss_timeline/flash.htm
April 10th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Yeah, but where’s the giant nebulous hand trying to crush him? I thought you said this was “very cool”? Well I, for one, want much cooler images now.
April 10th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
@justcorbly:
Memory doesn’t serve so well then. Big telescopes = more light = shorter exposure time, however the atmosphere conspires against you. For a good idea of what it’s like looking down, have a look at the ‘quickbird’ images which have a fairly high resolution – sure you can do better but why – pointing and selecting what data to view just become a bigger issue. With larger apertures on the ground you can get a better image looking up at the ISS; you can do a quick calculation of the ultimate telescope resolution to get an idea of how many pixels will make up an astronaut on the ISS. (Maybe the BA will be kind enough to do the calculations or post a plot of theoretical resolution vs. effective aperture size.) Since this guy is taking images while manually tracking his telescope, he’s doing very well.
There really aren’t any secrets about what people can see with telescopes; it’s not as if there’s a global conspiracy to hide physics from non-military users. You can even trawl the web and find a lot of articles about contemporary military equipment and what they do – just don’t expect to find full specs for the instrumentation on a military bird.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:11 am
@Chip: “USAToday website has a cool animation showing how the ISS has grown over the years”
Nice animation. Three errors with it (2 major ones, one update error):
a) P6 did not grow like Lego blocks on top of Z1 (it’s one piece)
b) The truss isn’t attached to Node 1, but to the Discovery lab module
c) Node 3 will attach to the side of Node 1 (opposite the airlock module)
April 11th, 2009 at 1:40 am
“an astronaut doing an extravehicular activity on the ISS”
“an astronaut doing extravehicular activity on the ISS”
All sounds ugly. Is one grammatically incorrect?
April 11th, 2009 at 3:25 am
astronaut doing activity
\an \ extravehicular \on ISS
\the
wondered if I could diagram that sentence or not……..
J/P=?
April 11th, 2009 at 5:56 am
It’s not often you look up into space and see a human being outside of a spacecraft.
April 11th, 2009 at 6:09 am
@MadScientist:
I wasn’t suggesting a conspiracy, or a theoretical interest in optics. I was just curious if NASA or anyone else had released similar images. It’s a fact, though, that the technoloogy used to look up can also be used to look down, and the government does not release images displaying the full capabilities of either.
April 11th, 2009 at 11:49 am
A commenter on another site said that based on the spacewalker’s location, it was probably Joe Acaba. I don’t know if it is, but I do know Ralf Vandebergh is DA MAN!
April 11th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
justcorbly,
There is no conspiracy to conceal the capabilities of telescopes, nor could the government do anything to prevent research or educational institutions from fully exploiting and demonstrating the capabilities of the quite modern telescopes in their possession.
April 11th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Adrian, where did I say anything about a conspiracy? I just wondered if the government had released images of similar or better quality, and pointed to fact that the government does not release images demonstrating the full capabilities of similar telescopes, i.e., reconnaissance satellites.
April 11th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
This is hearsay, and therefore not quite evidence, but I once spoke to a telescope operator who had worked at one of the USAF facilities. He described them being able to tell the arm positions of cosmonauts working outside on Mir. (This is the kind of application that got the USAF to spend a lot of money on adaptive optics while astronomers were, in comparison, practically tinkering in their garages).
April 11th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Since the pioneering work of Ron Dantowitz starting over a decade ago it’s only been a matter of time, patience, and skill until someone was also *lucky* enough to get an image of an astronaut during a spacewalk. Congrats to Vandebergh for being that person! Dantowitz has recounted how his images got him a visit by people most likely working for organizations with abbreviations of 3 letters……..
In terms of looking the OTHER way, I’ve been telling my students for a couple of decades that they ought to be a little concerned about who is watching when they’re on a deserted beach or rooftop. A couple of years ago the USAF GAVE away (practically speaking) a $20M+ adaptive optics 4 meter class mirror to researchers at the Air Force Academy (for unclassified use, one of the folks is a foreign national). That can only lead one to believe that they (and associated others) are currently flying optics with considerably greater capability. Holographically corrected inflatable optics anyone?
September 1st, 2009 at 12:59 pm
[...] Wow. You may remember Ralf’s earlier ISS shot, or when he caught an astronaut doing an EVA. [...]