The International Space Station has a nice camera on board these days… View fullscreen.

Another (see previous post) impressive time-lapse video found via kottke.

Another artist from the experimental atelier made a drawing to represent the sound environment of a particular area (unknown to me) and I interpreted it in sound. The result is bellow.

I have since been told that the original space, upon which the auditory sketch was based, was an abandoned building near a power station and near train tracks. Unfortunately I don’t have a scan of the sketch at the moment but hopefully I can update this post later.

I translated the sketch into audio by reading into a microphone my impressions of the drawing. I then took samples of my own voice and altered them digitally until they seemed to me to be close enough to the sounds and sensations I was trying to get at with my verbal descriptions. For example, I took a recording of me saying “four bells, four bells, four bells, four bells” and boosted certain frequencies, limited others, and further manipulated it until it began to sound like four bells. Other instances were less literal.

If you look to the top left of Saturn, seen here eclipsing our sun, you can see the planet Earth as a tiny white dot in the background. The perfect order of such a massive object and the debris bound by it’s pull, and the perfection in turn of its alignment in space, is glorious.

From Nasa’s image of the day September 04 2011.

Wonderful idea!

Geek.com:

As you can see in these videos, not only is some of the surface ejected into space as a result of the explosion, some of it returns to crash back into the Sun. The videos are being provided through Helioviewer.org which is an open-source project, funded by ESA and NASA, for the visualization of solar and heliospheric data. It seems the video of the solar flare was so popular on Tuesday that some visitors to Helioviewer.org had long movie waits due to the increase in traffic.

More video, photo and background info at geek.com.

The European Space Agency has some insights into the unglamorous practical details of daily life as an astronaut. Snip:

Once stirred, the astronauts tend to adopt a foetus-like posture as they move weightlessly about the station. Sometimes referred to unflatteringly as the “simian hunch”, it seems to be the natural human attitude in microgravity; perhaps it really is an echo of the weightless months that every growing embryo spends floating in its mother’s womb.

The crew dress as quickly as they can: no easy task when your limbs float out at odd angles. They wear disposable clothes, replacing them once every three days: there are no washing machines in space. But the ISS does have a shower. Water squirts out of the “top” to be sucked down by an air fan at the “bottom”. The shower has to be used sparingly to conserve water, but it is a luxury item that earlier space pioneers would have envied. and today’s astronauts cherish.

More on the ESA website (via reddit)

Wiki: Hieronymus Bosch’s The Conjurer. While other figures observe objects within the painting, the woman in green observes the viewer. The painting thus makes the viewer aware of being on display.

Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, in which a child encountering a mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance. Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced by any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object.

Wikipedia

Related: Men dream of women

The Galaxy Song from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

ISS Space Officer Jon Pettit:

Few people have experienced traveling into space. Even fewer have experienced the smell of space. Now this sounds strange, that a vacuum could have a smell and that a human being could live to smell that smell. It seems about as improbable as listening to sounds in space, yet space has a definite smell. Being creatures of an atmosphere, we can only smell space indirectly. Sort of like the way a pit viper smells by waving its tongue in the air and thenpressing it to the roof of its mouth where sensors process the molecules that have been adsorbed onto the waggling appendage. I had the pleasure of operating the airlock for two of my crewmates while they went on several space walks. Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses. At first I couldn’t quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as “tastes like chicken.” The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

From NASA (via reddit).

Two things to geek out about, today. Firstly, an Earthlike, ‘goldilocks’ planet has been discovered! One not too hot, not too cold — just right for life to have evolved.

Gliese 581g’s atmosphere is hugged snugly in place by the planet’s gravity. The conditions are thought to be suitable for liquid water to exist on the surface of the planet. The climate is stable — with one side always facing the sun, it receives constant daylight on one side and constant darkness on the other. Its sun is ancient, meaning that life should have had plenty of time to gain a foothold on the planet. It’s 20 light years from our planet. That means it would take 20 years to reach the planet from ours if we were travelling at the speed of light (which is currently not possible).

“Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it,” Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

More at Discovery news.

The other story is smaller in scale but, relatively speaking, perhaps equal in merit and profundity: a father and son send an HD camera into space by balloon, practically discovering planet Earth for themselves. And the footage is glorious, perhaps all the more for the traditional home-movie-like shakiness.

(Both stories via Reddit.)

The International Space Station has a LIVE webcam, beaming video of Earth back home. Stream.

(Via reddit.)