Anna Kaziunas France, of Global Fab Academy, prints out a 3D model of the iconic Joy Division album cover art for Unknown Pleasures. Did you know it’s a radio waveform from the first pulsar ever discovered? And that it was lifted directly from an astronomy encyclopedia?
It’s about a bilion times smaller than our actual closest star (140 cm, the artist made sure to make this exact), but Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has managed to recreate its glowing visuals in his art piece, Flatsun.
Professor Takushi Tanaka and his team at the Fukuoka Institute of Technology built a 10 centimeter cube-shaped micro-satellite called the FITSAT-1. It was deployed from the International Space Station on October 5, 2012 and is currently whizzing over our heads at an elevation of 242 miles.
I first encountered this amazing infographic hanging on a professor’s office wall when I was visiting law schools back in 1999. I’ve been trying, off and on, to run down my own copy ever since. It’s been one of those back-burner projects that I’ll poke at when it comes to mind, every now and again, but until quite recently all my leads have come up dry. All I really knew about the poster was that it had been created in the 80s by analysts at Rockwell International and that it was called the “Integrated Space Plan.”
Laurent Laveder is a landscape astrophotographer. No, really. That’s his job! OK, he’s also an astronomy journalist, if that makes you feel any better. But it’s his amazing astrophotography, especially his series called Moon Games, that really inspires awe… and lots of FB/G+ reposting.
Starting in 1995, Frank Kovac took ten years constructing amechanical globe planetarium of his own design despite having no prior engineering experience. The Kovac Planetarium in Monico Wisconsin is only the fourth of its kind ever built as well as being the largest in history at 4000 pounds and 22 feet in diameter.
Instructables user and aerospace engineer maewert shows us how to turn a backyard shed into a personal astronomical observatory. By modding the roof of a shed so that it can slide off (either manually or driven by a garage door opener), you too can be ready for celestial observation at a moment’s notice.
