My friend Mike Gillilan sent this to me last night, and I thought it warranted sharing:
That’s the space shuttle Discovery (obviously) arriving at the International Space Station. I believe the structure in the upper part of the photo is one of several Russian spacecraft currently docked there; the Soyuz and Progress capsules serve as taxis, resupply ships, garbage disposal units, and, in an emergency, escape pods for the station crew.
Sorry the thumbnail is so small, but this is apparently how Twitter codes images for embedding on other websites. If you click on it, you’ll be taken to the full-size Twitpic version. It’s worth a click, believe me; the sharpness of the original is breathtaking.
After you look at this picture, be sure to check out the entire feed. It’s the personal Twitter account (or whatever the hell you call it) of a Japanese astronaut named Soichi Noguchi, and he posts at least a couple new photos every day. Here are a couple of my recent favorites:
That’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the day Discovery launched. The two roundish features to the right are the launch pads, one of which would’ve been occupied by the shuttle when this was taken. And here’s one that’s not so great, technically speaking — there’s quite a bit of “noise” in the image — but is beautiful and awesome — in the original, pre-1980s sense of that word — nonetheless:
The green glow that looks like classic Star Trek phaserfire is in fact the aurora borealis, the famed northern lights; a pair of Soyuz capsules are in the foreground.
As much as I gripe about the way the 21st century has turned out (as opposed to the way we all imagined it), how incredible is it that we have people living in space, taking photographs of what they’re seeing, and sending back to us via the Internet?
