I saw one Tuesday night and about 10 Wednesday night.

 

That's great !!!! The Geminid shower is one of the best of the year.

Happy Winter Solstice.

Happy Winter Solstice.

 

As we come to the close of yet another year on our planet, I like to reflect upon our little blue marble we call home. It's easy to forget that our home is just a 7,917 mile rock drifting through the vacuum of space at 67,000 mph and spinning on its axis ,from our vantage point here in KY, at 819 mph. I love our little blue dot in space. I wish we would be better caretakers of it. We are not guaranteed that it will remain the same beautiful life-flourishing world it is today. In fact, we are all but assured that if we continue the course we're on, our world will look very different generations from now.

 

For your pleasure, here is the probably the most detailed image ever taken of our lovely blue marble. It was taken early this year by NOAA's GOES-16 satellite.

How could we not love this world??? Just breathtaking!!!

 

I love this image of Earth and our celestial neighbor captured by GOES-16.

 

2017 will be a year I will never forget because of the fantastic astronomical event that took place on August 21. It was a spiritual re-awakening, of sorts. I felt a closer connection to the universe on that day than ever before. So many great memories and images of that day.

 

For your pleasure, here is an image captured from Wyoming on that day by a NASA photographer. Yes, that's the football field- size laboratory known as the International Space Station moving in front of the sun as the moon attempts to do the same. The ISS orbits the Earth at about 17,150 mph(about 5 miles/sec.) That means it orbits Earth(and sees a sunrise) once every 92 minutes!!!

 

 

What our sun might look like in 5 billion years...

 

There will come a time when our sun can no longer fuse its fuel efficiently, at which point it will partially collapse, blow its outer shells of plasmatic gas into space, eventually becoming a white dwarf, and forming a planetary nebula in its surroundings. One such nebula is the Calabash Nebula. The image below of the Calabash, or "rotten egg" nebula ,was taken earlier this year. We can see in the picture what happens when a star like our sun dies. The yellow-colored gas(loaded with sulfur) is moving in excess of 620,000 mph.

 

To go along with SF's GOES-16 photos of Earth, this historic photo was takes 49 years ago on Christmas Eve. The Apollo 8 astronauts were orbiting the moon and would become the first humans to view the Earth from the distance of the moon. It's one of my favorites.

 

Astronaut Bill Anders: " We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."

 

To go along with SF's GOES-16 photos of Earth, this historic photo was takes 49 years ago on Christmas Eve. The Apollo 8 astronauts were orbiting the moon and would become the first humans to view the Earth from the distance of the moon. It's one of my favorites.

 

Astronaut Bill Anders: " We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."

 

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Always loved that historic photo. Thanks for posting.

Earthrise captured by Apollo 10- May,1969. Come on people, can't we all just get along? We get so caught up in fighting one another that we fail to realize just what a blessed civilization we are.

 

I love this because it was the first photo ever captured of the Earth and Moon in a single frame! Taken by Voyager I from 7.25 million miles away, this photo is both haunting and beautiful.

 

Captured by the Juno spacecraft on its way to Jupiter in 2011, this is our world along with our closest neighbor, the moon.

 

Smile.... The Spirit rover is taking your picture!!! From the surface of Mars, that's your home where the arrow is pointing... some 161 million miles away. That's nearly twice the distance from the Earth to the Sun. No wonder you're just a damned dot!

Btw, I've always loved this photo because its the first one that ever captured the Earth from the surface of another planet.

 

Cassini took 165 photos in the shadow of the giant ringed-world to create this backlit backlit mosaic. Almost by accident, a tiny speck appears to be hiding off to the left. Look for the arrow. That's your home again...this time from nearly a billion miles away!!!

 

What were you doing on Valentine's Day in 1990? I don't remember what I was doing(probably looking at Saturn). This photo is a famous one. On Valentine's Day 1990, Voyager I was speeding away from Saturn on its journey to the outer limits of the solar system and eventually interstellar space. Voyager's camera captured our tiny pale blue dot at a distance of nearly four billion miles.

 

About the photo, astronomer Carl Sagan opined: ""We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."