Just a quick update: a new series of pictures of the Dragon capsule as seen by astronauts aboard the International Space Station has just been released, and they’re way cool. Here’s one:

[Click to embiggen.]

Earlier today, Dragon passed just 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the station, performing a series of tasks to make sure it was ready to dock with ISS tomorrow. I’m sure the folks at SpaceX are poring over these images to make sure their capsule’s OK. And of course, tomorrow we’ll get even more dramatic images and video!

Image credit: NASA

It’s a tough time to be a science fiction hero. Just look at the headlines for proof!

First, there’s this:

Honestly, that’s not surprising. He does seem to get into trouble wherever he goes. So misunderstood. But it would’ve been interesting to know where the TARDIS materialized in that situation.

This next one though is clearly her own fault:

Not that I blame her. I’ve spent many an hour alone in an observatory, and I imagine the Astrometrics Lab on Voyager wasn’t that much more entertaining. Hey Janeway, maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you had let her use the Holodeck more!

Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to my sister Marci, and to Jeri Ryan on G+ who linked to Kevin Hanning’s post. And yes, those are real headlines.

Early this morning, the SpaceX Dragon capsule passed just 2.4 kilometers below the International Space Station, completing another critical step in its mission profile that’ll lead to it docking with the orbiting station Friday morning.

From the station, astronauts captured video as the capsule cruised by:

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Very, very cool. You can see the Dragon capsule in this video frame grab: it’s in the lower left corner, silhouetted against the Earth. The extended solar panels are obvious, and you can just make out the shape of the capsule itself.

This flyby was an important milestone, since it showed that the capsule could approach the station and also abort the approach if needed. Other key elements it demonstrated were that it could float freely (as it will have to when it docks with ISS), that its proximity sensors worked, and that its GPS was operational as well. Astronauts on the ISS were also able to command a strobe light remotely, confirming they could link to the capsule.

All this leads up to the big show on Friday: docking. At about 09:00 UTC (05:00 Eastern US time), NASA will decide if the capsule is ready to approach. If so, over the course of an hour or two it will come with 250 meters of the station. It will then perform some last maneuvers to prove it’s ready to go, and then it will make its final approach.

Then, around 13:00 UTC, it will come within just a few meters of ISS, and astronauts on board will grab it with the robotic arm, bringing it in to mate. After that, there will be quite a few checks done which will take some time, leading up to the hatch being opened Saturday morning, scheduled to happen around 11:00 UTC.

All the fun stuff so far has been happening in the middle of the night for me in Boulder, but the approach tomorrow morning isn’t too bad. I’ll get up a little early to watch it live (06:00? We’ll see). I’ll live-tweet the events as they happen.

This is all very exciting! The capsule has been performing essentially flawlessly since launch, so I have high hopes for the next few days.

Image credit: NASA

Someday, Mars will stop surprising me.

Today is not that day.

The image below was taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been taking devastatingly high-res pictures of the Red Planet for many years. While passing over the edge of the Tharsis Shield — a huge uplifted region of Mars home to its four gigantic volcanoes –it saw this bizarre fieldof craters:

[Click to hephaestenate.]

First, you may think these are mounds and not craters, but that’s an illusion. Our brain uses illumination to gauge up and down in pictures like these, and assumes the sunlight is coming from above. However, these really are craters, but the illumination is coming from below — north is roughly toward the top of the picture and the crater field is at a northern latitude of about 50°. Flip the picture over if it helps (I’ll be honest, even doing that makes it hard for me to see these as other than mounds; confounded brain!). You can see more examples of this illusion here, here, and here.

But that’s not the weirdest thing about these craters. What’s really odd is they aren’t circular! Impacts are generally round unless 1) the impact is at a very shallow angle, b) the terrain suddenly goes from one kind of material to another, creating a discontinuity, or γ) something happened after the crater was formed to distort it.

A shallow-angle impact is almost certainly not the case here, since there are so many craters spread out over the region that an incoming object would’ve had to break up into a gazillion pieces, all of which came in at that angle. Not impossible, but it seems unlikely.

The changing terrain idea doesn’t work, since again the craters are spread out over the area. You might see one crater with a sudden break in its rim or change in shape, but dozens? Spread out in all directions? Nope.

That leaves after effects, and in this case we have two more clues. (more…)

I’ve posted a lot of stuff about Sunday’s annular eclipse (see Related Links below), and I figured I was done… but then I got a pretty remarkable picture sent to me.

During the eclipse, in northern California, two men sent a small (6 cubic meter) helium-filled balloon up to 90,000 feet (roughly 27 km). Equipped with a camera and an ingenious system that used puffs of gas to orient the payload, they took this pretty amazing shot of the eclipse:

[Click to penumbrenate.]

That’s the Earth on the left (duh), and on the upper right you can see the eclipsed Sun! They used a solar filter to cover half the camera’s view so that they could get the correct exposure for both the Earth and the much brighter Sun.

I really enjoyed reading their story on how they set this up and executed it. I especially liked how they launched, sat around to watch the eclipse itself, then set off to find the balloon once it came back down (shredded after it popped at its lofty apex).

I love stuff like this! Basic equipment, clever people, and a can-do attitude results in something remarkable. Well done!

P.S. My friend and fellow Boulder astronomer Stuart Robbins posted a series of lovely timed sequences from the eclipse that he took in Albuquerque. It’s well worth a click!

Via my pal Miss Cellania (possibly not her real name) at Neatorama, I saw this short cat video which is really pretty funny:

Ha! This is a great example of audio pareidolia; hearing (instead of seeing, as it’s usually done) some recognizable pattern in a completely unrelated series of noises. It helps a lot if you’re cued in some way to hear it with subtitles. In this case the title of the Neatorama post had me listening for the words "I don’t want to", but I think I would’ve heard it anyway.

But I wonder: if they were going to a dispensary and asked the cat what they were getting, would you hear "marijuana"?

Check out the posts below for more of this sort of thing. The first one still makes me laugh.

Take 7+ years of Saturn observations by the Cassini spacecraft, stitch a whole lot of them together into short, film-noir-like segments, and add a Beethoven soundtrack. What do you get? Awesomeness.

The video was put together by Nahum Chazarra, who says on Twitter he’s a "Geology student, science lover". There’s literally too much in this to describe! Moons, rings, the planet itself… but I think my favorite part is when some object, usually a tiny moon, stays centered while the rings and planet and other objects wheel around it. It’s a change-of-perspective effect, but amazing to watch. And you really can’t go wrong with "Moonlight Sonata".

Something like this video has been done before (specifically here and here, and both are well, well worth your time to watch) but to be honest it’s impossible to get too much of this. The changing lighting and exposure, the sometimes jerky apparent motion (due to the inconstant times between exposures combined with the spacecraft’s motion), and the simply jaw-dropping spectacle of the ridiculously gaudy Saturnian system, all combine to make this an engaging and even mesmerizing show.

Tip o’ the dew shield to Dark Sapiens.