Mike Mitchell's Tumblr of Amazing Things.

“ :) “ 

One of four prints I’ll have at SPACE! The Gallery Show this Friday at Gallery 1988: WEST. Be there or be somewhere significantly less awesome. 

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STOP, READ, LOOK.

It may not look like much at first glance, but this is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while. This is a photo featuring the moon Phobos, taken by the Curiosity Rover from the surface of Mars during the day. 

This is so awesome. HD Stabalized footage of the LRV on the Moon. 

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A new picture from Cassini, Saturn with Titan in front. 

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Layers at the Base of Mount Sharp

A chapter of the layered geological history of Mars is laid bare in this postcard from NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image shows the base of Mount Sharp, the rover’s eventual science destination.

Wow

(Source: nasa.gov)

"I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats and I don’t intend to waste any of mine."

—

Neil Armstrong

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The cost of the War on Terror vs. the Curiosity mission.

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Sorry for the absence, I was on a vacation in the middle of nowhere enjoying the nowhere-ness. 

I did manage to snap a picture of the moon while I was there though! From the night of July 31st. 

View from the ISS at Night

This is one of the coolest time lapses I’ve ever seen. 

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I went stargazing with some friends tonight and snapped this photo of the moon rising over the hills. 

Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror

The precision and innovation that is required for space exploration just blows my mind. I did not realize that Curiosity will have to basically land on Mars completely unaided by man, but it’s so much more complicated than that.

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The Trifid Nebula (high res)

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Ultraviolet Image of Cygnus Loop Nebula

This view was captured by NASA’s GALEX mission, which launched in April 2003. Its main purpose was to image hundreds of thousands of galaxies, charting their rates of star formation – the science is best gathered in ultraviolet. Unfortunately, NASA cut off financial support for the mission back in February, 2011.

It’s really a shame that we invest so little into NASA. During the Apollo program, roughly 4% of the federal budget went to NASA, today it’s about .5%. 

There is a petition going on whitehouse.gov requesting we double NASA’s budget from .5% to 1%. It’s not much, but it is a start. 

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A photo of 200,000 galaxies, a mere 0.004% of our sky.

These images were taken with VISTA, the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), a 4.1 meter telescope in Chile. This huge image is actually composed of 6000 separate images, and is the single deepest infrared picture of the sky ever taken with this field of view. Hubble can get deeper, for example, but sees a much, much smaller part of the sky.

You can find the full, high rez version here. It’s worth a look, a very long one. (17,121 x 10,824 pixels & 250MBs)

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New Hubble Telescope image. Messier-9

Hubble’s new photo is the most high-resolution image ever taken of Messier 9, and reveals the ancient cluster as never before. So many details of the stars are visible, despite the fact that the whole image spans an area no bigger than the size of the head of a pin held at arm’s length.