Happy Earth Day My Fellow Travelers

Happy Earth Day!

From @NASA
Earth is special. It's the only place in the universe that we know contains life. Celebrate its beauty with these amazing images of our home planet from our #EarthDay photo gallery! Take a look, download and maybe even use one as your device's wallpaper: go.nasa.gov/2qQKCKs

NASA Celebrates Earth Day with #NASA4Earth Tools, Events

This Earth Day, NASA invites you to create your own shareable views of our home planet, help combat mosquito-transmitted diseases, and watch our fleet of Earth-observing spacecraft as they circle the globe.

NASA pioneers and supports an amazing range of advanced technologies and tools to help scientists and environmental specialists better understand and protect our home planet – from space lasers to virtual reality, small satellites and smartphone apps.

To celebrate Earth Day 2018, April 22, the agency is highlighting many of these innovative technologies and encouraging the public to use several of the online tools. Look for videos and stories to be posted throughout this week on NASA social media with the hashtag #NASA4Earth and on this web page: www.nasa.gov/earthday

Earthrise Revisited

You know the photo, but do you know the story behind it? A new video explains the circumstances that gave rise to the famous Apollo “Earthrise” photo while recreating the experience with modern data.

I don't know if they're "chilling", but they are pretty cool to see how far we've come in camera resolution.

The first, chilling images of Earth
By Mark Kaufman, Mashable | April 22, 2020

When the Allies vanquished Nazi Germany in 1945, the U.S. captured many of the Germans' powerful V-2 rockets which, after translation, is short for "Vengeance Weapon Two."

Those seized rockets didn't stay in Europe for long. After being transported across the world and pieced together on the windswept, desert plains of southern New Mexico, U.S. engineers (and, controversially, captured Nazi scientists) launched a technologically-advanced V-2 rocket 65 miles above the planet's surface on Oct. 24, 1946. In doing so, they captured the first photographs of Earth from space.

And so began an unwritten custom of looking back onto our cloudy planet — even if our spacecraft had other missions, sometimes bound for destinations millions (or billions) of miles away in deep, uncharted space.

"During almost every mission we turn around and take a picture back home," said Bill Barry, NASA's chief historian. "There seems to be an irresistible tendency to look back at home."