“Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.” -Roger Zelazny
It's always the ones you least expect that get you the worst, it seems. I went to bed last night excited that Asteroid 2012 DA14, a 200,000 ton asteroid, was going to pass within just 28,000 km (or 17,000 miles) of Earth's surface, which would make it the closest pass of an asteroid that large that we've ever observed.
Image credit: NASA / JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office.
I thought that would be the best way to celebrate today, which would be Galileo's 449th birthday. After all, it was…
russian
"We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." -Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut
From hundreds of miles up, the International Space Station speeds around the Earth, completing 18 orbits a day, looking down on us and returning some absolutely fabulous images.
Image credit: Fyodor Yurchikhin and the Russian Space Agency Press Services, of Greenland from the ISS.
But what you may not appreciate is that my favorite images taken from the ISS weren't taken by American Astronaut Don Pettit (better known as @astro_Pettit), but rather by a…
I recently came across the Russian nesting doll art of Irina Troitskaya and thought I would share. Also called matryoshka, matreshka, or "those things are freaking awesome" in Russian, nesting dolls are a traditional artform from the town of Semyonov, where the land was terrible for farming, but the trees were great for nesting dolls. Irina creates her matryoshka on a per order basis only, so get in line!
"Queer Fellows"
Animals from Russian fairy tales
Set of five animals
Set of white animals
The backs of aforementioned white animals
See all her work here or her animal nesting dolls…