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Seán Doran

@theseaning.bsky.social

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China Space Watch@chinaspace.bsky.social · last wk.

Celebrating Mars New Year, as the Red Planet begins another 687-Earth-day journey around the Sun. Featuring images from the surface and orbit, courtesy of China’s Tianwen-1—the first mission to successfully deploy a lander, rover and orbiter on Mars.

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China Space Watch@chinaspace.bsky.social · last wk.

On 23 September, the European-Chinese SMILE mission was declared ready for science operations, after launching on 19 May and reaching its target orbit on 20 June. The mission will study how Earth responds to the charged particles carried by the solar wind.

Don Davis@ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · 2w ago

The Sunset of September 27, 2026 was an epic spectacle whose intensity and beauty were memorable. The cloud ceiling had a wide opening toward the West that admitted Sunlight which underwent progressive color changes as it briefly in turn illuminated layers of otherwise invisible cloud textures.

The Sunset of September 27th, 2026 was one of the greatest visions the sky has ever opened up and revealed to me. It was a sunset like few I can remember in many years. I knew early on what was likely as a heavy cloud ceiling was opening up far to the West with the underside textures in that part of the cloud ceiling catching the light early on from the distant sunlit clouds. Vast connected cloud formations were in turn bathed in the last sunlight which progressively turned from a golden to orange to very red, in as pure a spectral filtering of Sunlight as I can recall seeing. One layer of cloud formations after another caught the light as the rays steadily angled upwards. The most distant yellow gold clouds were dazzling, like incandescent molten gold that defied photography. Lower layers were bathed in the reddest light that contrasted in hue with the more orange colors in the illuminated parts of the broken cloud ceiling above. Wide areas of the field of view were thus illuminated, appearing and fading one after the other like a parade of vast apparitions coming and going. The last lit clouds gave up their lurid radiance reluctantly and with a very red final flourish. But the brilliance was still happening, withdrawing beyond the Western horizon as Earth's rotation carried us into the realm of the night. The Sunset lit clouds far away were still in itself illuminating clouds nearby. From their altitude the brilliance and colors along the horizon hundreds of miles away dominate the ambient lighting. This brought an extended 'echo' of the Sunset as every cloud surface facing West shone with that fading lurid glow, like a long slowly fading piano note after a great symphony. I have seen many hundreds of Sunsets and sunrises, but something about this one struck me as almost like a kind of religious experience. Awestruck wonder and numbly bathing in the experience while periodically trying to preserve a visual record.An all sky frame of the Sunset of September 27, 2026. Canon 6D with a fisheye lens. I now shoot most such sequences aimed straight up to show the entire horizon. Unfortunately due to a technical issue this became the first frame of the time lapse sequence, but I did get the extended 'afterglow'.
Stuart Atkinson@stuartatkinson.bsky.social · 4w ago

Mars has some spectacularly insanely huge features - towering volcanoes, deep valleys, vast deserts - but kneel down in the cinnamon-hued dust and you'll also see it has exquisitely beautiful smaller features on its surface too... Sept 14th Curiosity images credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S Atkinson

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China Space Watch@chinaspace.bsky.social · last mo.

The Tianwen-3, China's first Mars sample-return mission, is progressing smoothly, entering the prototype development phase with multiple technical breakthroughs and with scientific preparations underway simultaneously, said the mission's chief scientist on Sept 3.

Don Davis@ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · last mo.

An overhead view of the Viking 2 landing site, based on the surface photography and available maps of the sample field and various references. This was drawn with ink on a scratchboard sheet which had a printed gray dot screen on it, scraping away the ink for the lighter tones and highlights.

This is a detailed scratchboard drawing, essentially a map, of the Viking 2 landing site in front of the lander. The sampling field was mapped in detail by the mission team and that as well as other sources using stereo plotted placement of features were consulted along with the surface photography. This task was made simpler than that of Viking 1 by the flat nature of the surroundings with the rocks bases etc. more readily determined. This portrayal was drawn on one of several gray dot screen printed scratchboard sheets given me in the 80's by Chesley Bonestell during one of my visits to his Carmel house and studio. He said they were quite old even then. A rapidograph technical fountain pen was used to add the inked details as dark dots and areas, and the highlights were scraped away with an X-acto knife with a #16 blade, a narrow one tapered toward one side rather than the center. The result is thus entirely defined by black and white with no gray 'continuous tone' detail. I have one pristine sheet left which I dare not touch. #Sciart
Don Davis@ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · last mo.

My portrayal of the Partial Lunar Eclipse of August 27-28, 2026. These were painted in Photoshop based on my observations through a 10 inch telescope and binoculars. Among the variable clouds I saw just enough of the event to get the observation I wanted, a look at the colors in the Earth shadow.

My setup for these events has been similar for 40 years. I have a stack of printed Moon images on a clipboard, little lights clipped on tripods and on me, and things arranged so only modest motions are needed for me to observe through the telescope and through the binoculars to get complimentary impressions of the colors. The telescope gives a detailed survey of the color differences in various parts of the Moon, The binoculars give an overall color summary and tend to show more saturated color. One then the other are peered through, and once in a while a photo is made with my still camera nearby kept aimed at the Moon. The photos are modest but provide tonal details in the shadows that supplement the sketches with low res but objective references. During this event I am furiously sketching atop the printed Full Moon image sheets, scribbling outlines of perceived color zones and writing color description labels. These labeled 'color by number' summaries are supplemented with sketches of the overall tonal values across the Moon, done on small printed circles provided for this purpose next to the larger printed maps. The time each sketch is made is always written next to it. All during the observing session I have a small portable shortwave radio tuned to WWV, with its eternal ticking off of the seconds and the voice of the Digital Time God. There I am alone in the night, just me and the rare event. The nominal shadow colors were seen, with the outermost zone adjacent to the Sunlit area a neutral gray, and smaller concentric zones of subdued golden, then orange surrounding the very dark rusty brick red, 'core'. The entire color range was seen on this occasion. I then reduced my sketches and visual memory into a pictorial summary. It is vital to do the balance of such work immediately afterwards while the visual impression is fresh on ones mind. The digital paintings were done on top of a digital Full Moon photo I obtained immediately after the Eclipse ended.
Seán Doran@theseaning.bsky.social · last mo.

'Curvature of Earth' 200 photographs by Chris Williams on ISS Expedition 74 are cropped, resized, repaired, remastered & retimed to create this video of vertical cloud stacks looming over the limb of Earth, with music by Chris Zabriskie. Credit: Chris Williams / ISS / NASA / ESRS / Seán Doran

Don Davis@ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · 2mo ago

On this date, August 23 1966, The Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft obtained this first view of Earth from Lunar orbit. On the left is my treatment of the the wider angle photo taken the same time as the more widely circulated high res image. Also a contemporary poster describing the photo's context.

This is Lunar Orbiter 1 frame 1102 M, for 'Moderate' resolution. The Lunar Orbiter camera system was a modified reconnaissance satellite system that used a film camera, developing the B&W film spools and scanning the negatives and converting the opaqueness detected in the precision scanning of 'rows' into data. The signals were reconstructed on Earth making large negatives whose contact prints were impressively large, roughly 20 X 30 inches. While serving the needs of landing site investigations and map makers, the Lunar Orbiter images had issues. They were scanned on board in little strips whose tonal values did not necessarily match between adjacent 'framelet' edges, and there were sometimes repeating variations in the recorded intensity within each scanned line making up a 'framelet' which added more tonal idiosyncrasies. These were only of esthetic concern and the high quality camera system overall performed magnificently, although bad fogging of optics ruined much of Lunar Orbiter 4's systematic Lunar mapping effort and the chemical development process occasionally left defective globs on the negatives. The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project was undertaken to rescue the original telemetry data of those Lunar images. The great majority of the Mission images were successfully recovered using a lovingly reconstructed massive high end tape reader in a leftover MacDonalds building at the fringe of Moffett Field. Once the best such image data is available the various stages of accounting for and 'cancelling out' the known departures from what the pristine negative must have looked like can begin in earnest. This attempts to reconstruct something closer to what the original negative from the spacecraft could yield. The famous view that appeared in many magazines and books a the time is here seen in more of a context. The prominent dark lava filled crater is Tsiolkovsky, among the first farside features to be named. Earth is about to set for the spacecraft.This is a scan of a NASA poster from 1966 giving background to the landmark first photo of Earth and the Moon from Lunar orbit by Lunar Orbiter 1 on August 23, 1966. This photo was widely circulated at the time, in horizontal presentation, and appears in NASA's classic Special Publication SP-168 'Exploring Space With a Camera'. Lunar Orbiter was a Lunar mapping project funded in support of the Apollo Moon landing program to enable high quality maps of the Moon to be prepared, particularly of the candidate landing sites. The camera system was modified from a spy satellite design, using dual cameras with wide and narrow angle optics capturing a detail and context image. This reproduction of the narrow angle High Resolution image 1102H shows the 'stripes' caused by uneven scanning of the negative on the spacecraft, which while doing the job of conveying the needed information also bought a distinct 'look' to most photos from that mission. Scanned from my collection.
Don Davis@ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · 2mo ago

During the recent Total Solar Eclipse the South Korean Danuri spacecraft obtained a nice view of Earth from Lunar orbit with the Moons shadow just visible on Earth. Here is their image, with attribution added, my colorized version and the nearly simultaneous EPIC-DSCOVR image used for the color.

This is a reduced version of the photo released today by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. Earth is seen from Lunar orbit during the recent Total Solar eclipse. The Moon is barely showing shadows behind the sunlit surfaces, and the shadow of the Moon itself is just at the horizon, or perhaps 'Limb' better suits an orbital view. One very wide shadow shows a fuzzy edge on a distant rise. I added the attribution. This is my version of the Danuri Lunar orbiter photo, with color added. I combined their Earth photo with a color EPIC-DSCOVR image made at about the same time, rotated a little in 3D to better match the Danuri viewing angle for compositing. The sharpness of the B&W original is preserved with the DSCOVR full Earth photo mostly used for the color values. I also prefer this orientation with the foreground Moon at the bottom.This is the EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) image from the DSCOVR satellite made at close to the same time as the Danuri image, shown in reduced form but otherwise as released. The exposure is naturally for the sunlit Earth and clouds. The Moon shadow's wide peripheral zone of gradual darkening, the 'penumbra' is where the illumination decreases as more of the Sun is eclipsed. At this time the outermost shadow area was near the Great Lakes, from this perspective a circular zone of that radius thus surrounds the progressively underexposed zone around the Moon shadow. If the exposure were adjusted to define the actual umbra, or zone of totality, the resulting small black dot in the image , about 30 percent the size of the underexposed portion seen here, would be surrounded by the greatly overexposed fully sunlit rest of the world.
China Space Watch@chinaspace.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🌕 Countdown to China’s August 2026 Chang’e-7 Moon mission! - Launched in 2010, Chang’e-2 mapped the Moon in 7m detail, then travelled to the Sun–Earth L2 point to test deep-space navigation. In 2012, it flew within 1km of asteroid Toutatis, capturing detailed images.

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China Space Watch@chinaspace.bsky.social · 2mo ago

📍🌕 China has completed an updated 1:5 million-scale geologic map of the entire Moon, the Institute of Geology said. A major scientific update from the 2024 version, it incorporates new research and significantly revises our understanding of the Moon’s geologic history.

Don Davis@ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · 2mo ago

51 years ago I painted a trio of Viking related works for NASA HQ including the widely reproduced one of the landing on Mars. I have reimagined the Landing portrayal in updated form using digital methods of visualization and painting. I chose the same angle but with reality replacing anticipation.

This oil painting portrays the Viking 1 landing on Mars, which appeared in countless publications. The story of this work is relayed in an earlier post and is shown here for comparison with the new portrayal of this very view, showing the event as it would have appeared. This 1975 anticipatory painting was done with oils on a gesso smoothed 16 X 20 canvas panel, using traditional art methods including a tracing paper guide featured earlier. This work shows in retrospect my ideal of the 'spirit of space art', showing something of a summary of what is known of the subject while conveying what it is about the subject's known or theorized attributes that I find visually compelling. The new digital painting updates that visual impression with one based on our current knowledge. The new digital work was also done at the same size as this one was for possible printing purposes, 16 by 20 inches at 300 DPI. #Sciart In 1976 the pair of Viking spacecraft orbiter/lander combos were sent to Mars. Before Viking, Mars was still largely a place of our imaginations, an unknown that we wrote stories about then studied from Earth and space. The dominance of cratered terrain on the portions of Mars photographed by Mariners 4, 6 and 7 gave an initially Lunar impression of that world, which changed during the development of the Viking lander after Mariner 9 revealed the planet. The first landing was aimed for a flat flood plain, judged as a decent place to search for life. The landing date was July 4, however the intended site appeared too rough for comfort in the high quality orbiter photos, causing the landing to wisely be delayed. A smoother site further 'down stream' was found using photo and radar data. The landing proceeded quite nominally, a magnificent achievement that apparently accounted for what it had to and made it the first time. The first photo from the surface was a look at a footpad to see how solid the 'footing' appeared. Then a moderate resolution panorama of the surroundings was obtained, first showing the rocks, hills, dunes-and bright sky. The latter was my biggest surprise as a space artist. The adjustments to the color balance of the later photos were gradually narrowed down. The ubiquitous dust is planet wide, suspended in the air and coloring the sky a luminous tan ochre. This digital painting shows the view a meter above the surface seeing the lander briefly kicking up dust less than a second before touchdown with the footpads 1.4 meters high. The landing rockets were designed with many nozzles to disturb the surroundings as little as possible. The nearby disturbed dust resembles in color that of the sky. We are 6 meters away from the center of the lander. field of view is 60 degrees, we are looking Northwest with the Sun and Earth off the frame to the left. This is a digital art update of the pre mission oil painting I did for NASA HQ 1n 1975. #Sciart
Robert Simmon@rsimmon.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is a fantastic essay. Read it If you have any interest in satellite imagery. “Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD? In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore.” By @henkvaness.bsky.social

Alison Killing@alisonkilling.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is wildly irresponsible of Google - allowing people to create AI generated satellite images. Satellite imagery has always been such a useful and reliable source because it came from reliable sources, but now Google is messing with it at source. www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-pla...

China Space Watch@chinaspace.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚀🌕 Sunday, August 23rd at 12:00 AM UTC Is Lift Off for China's Chang'e 7 mission. Which will explore the Moon's south pole, targeting the rim of Shackleton Crater. Its main goal is to search for water ice hidden inside permanently shadowed craters—an important resource for future lunar exploration.

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Don Davis@ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · 3mo ago

When the Viking landing sites were well photographed, maps of the surroundings could be compiled. I made a grayscale overview based on comparisons between the two camera panoramas, and with reference to sample field maps. A color oil painting of the lander was then done incorporating such work.

This vertical view of the Viking 1 landing site is based on the surface panoramas, extrapolated from the cameras views, seeking to place the featured in reasonably proper relative distances from the lander. Such work was of course drafted and executed by hand. After the Viking mission two large format NASA Special Publications were especially valuable in later efforts to portray the Viking landing sites in Perspective. First, of course, was NASA SP-425 The Martian Landscape' with beautiful large reproductions of earlier Viking photos, and NASA CR-3568 'The Viking Lander Atlas of Mars' which displayed the derived locations of landscape features in 3D space, plotted in contour lines defined by the perspective of the two cameras. This is a low resolution view of an artwork done in an odd art medium, scratchboard with a gray dot screen printed on it as a basis for making white or inked marks. Several sheets of this were given to me in the 70s by Chesley Bonestell, encouraging me to play with them. He said they were old, so that could mean WW II or so. I used all but one for such Planetary work. I did maps with them of the sites of Vikings 1 & 2, Venera 9, and Venera 10. All those were published in Sky & Telescope magazine, and in their volume 'The New Solar System', which used my art through out the book. I also made an overview of where they thought Viking 1 was, which turned out to be incorrect. An unfinished one of the Lunar Orientale basin awaits completion, at the time I started it the Western portions of that basin were still poorly photographed and my drawing was going to be an improvement in the available imagery. Now it is quite well known so there is less incentive to finish it. #Sciart Viking 1 on Mars. This oil on illustration board painting incorporated my efforts to plot the lander surroundings in perspective, and of course knowledge of the final actual lander appearance. The nearest footpad is entirely buried in the powdery dust, a sight which would have certainly been alarming if that had happened to the footpad seen in the first photo! The large rock in the right foreground was nicknamed 'Big Joe'. Just to the right of the lander along the horizon is the upraised rim of a distant impact crater. The overall color of the scenery reflects mostly influence from initial contemporary sources. National Geographic published a Viking article which featured the kind of independent first class photo work they used to be known for in the early space age. Their color chart driven version of the Martian scenery tended toward the brick red, reasonably approximating the hues as if lit by a noon time Sun in a Terrestrial sky. This painting was initially done in a similar color balance to what they mostly used, then later I learned of the ambient sky etc contributions and overpainted the scene with an orange tan layer. The result color wise is something in between what it was and what it should be, but the scenery remains valid. The Martian sky was based on Viking camera images, whose truncated brightness near the top of the frame complicated portraying the actual sky brightness range. #Sciart
Stuart Atkinson@stuartatkinson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New panoramic view of The Clayborne* Range on Mars, as seen by Curiosity. (*that's just my nickname for this, honouring Ann Clayborne from Red Mars, but I'll keep using it until NASA either adopts it or bans me from using it!) Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk/S Atkinson

Half a dozen images taken by the Mars rover Curiosity, stitched together to make a panoramic view of features on the horizon. Processor Stuart Atkinson has named this "The Clayborne Range" in honour of geologist Ann Clayborne, a character from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. It is not a name used by NASA but he says he will keep using it and ask others to until NASA either adopts the name or bans him from using it!