Giovanni Domenico Cassini, the real founder of telescopic astronomy, was born 8 June 1625 #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/t...

The real founder of telescopic astronomy.

In most books on the history of science one finds Galileo Galilei credited with being the founder of telescopic astronomy. This is only true in a very limited sense; Galileo was along with Thomas H…

thonyc.wordpress.com

Planets form in swirling disks of gas and dust around newborn stars. It's not just a theory--we can watch it happening! These images show the rotating disk around young star AB Aurigae, 520 light years from Earth. They were taking over 4 years at Paranal Observatory. 🧪🔭 www.eso.org/public/video...

Psyche is making glorious contributions to my collection of beautiful misfit space imagery www.planetary.org/articles/thr...

#Psyche Mars Flyby in five hours psyche.ssl.berkeley.edu 🧪🔭

Wow... Just posted by NASA Artemis: high-resolution video capturing the separation of the Orion Integrity spacecraft’s crew module - carrying the astronauts - from the European service module. #Artemis

An excellent, albeit quite brief article from @inverting-vision.bsky.social, written for @jstor.bsky.social. A great introduction to the fraught-sounding relationship between Arctic explorers Roald Amundsen of Norway and Umberto Nobile of Italy. Lots of links to additional reading. | 🛩️ 🎈 🥇 | 🧵 1/2

Arctic Airships and the Rise of the Technological Explorer - JSTOR Daily

Competing expeditions to the North Pole redefined exploration in the early age of aviation.

daily.jstor.org

One hundred years ago, Roald Amundsen reached the North Pole in the airship Norge. Just days before, Byrd had claimed to reach the pole by airplane. Their technological race to the pole redefined what it meant to be a "heroic" explorer. daily.jstor.org/arctic-airsh... #histSTM #otd 🗃️ #aviation

Arctic Airships and the Rise of the Technological Explorer - JSTOR Daily

Competing expeditions to the North Pole redefined exploration in the early age of aviation.

daily.jstor.org

One hundred years ago, Roald Amundsen reached the North Pole in the airship Norge. Just days before, Byrd had claimed to reach the pole by airplane. Their technological race to the pole redefined what it meant to be a "heroic" explorer. daily.jstor.org/arctic-airsh... #histSTM #otd 🗃️ #aviation

Arctic Airships and the Rise of the Technological Explorer - JSTOR Daily

Competing expeditions to the North Pole redefined exploration in the early age of aviation.

daily.jstor.org

If, like me, you've been curious about the drills Honeybee Robotics has been building for NASA's Dragonfly mission, you might enjoy this video. Dragonfly's a #Titan lander that can #drill down and convey samples to its chem lab. Being a whirlybird, it can then relocate, to drill another day. 🪐🟠🚁 🔭

DrACO - The Dragonfly Sample Acquisition and Delivery System for Titan

YouTube video by HoneybeeRoboticsLtd

youtube.com

You can watch the planet grow larger in the windshield as the spacecraft approaches over the next few days with a newly active raw image feed: solarsystem.nasa.gov/psyche-raw-i... And track its position (or even fast-forward to the encounter on May 15) here: eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-s...

Focusing on the mischievous drill bit that got stuck into the Atacama rock 🔍 ℹ️ science.nasa.gov/blog/curiosi... Credits images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/IRAP/IAS/LPG #Mars 🧪🔭

Poking around the Truman library photograph collections, I have discovered that first NSF director Alan Waterman knew how to party www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-r...

This is incredible. The new NASA image release from #Artemis includes a sequence of 'Hello World' still photographs. I've been processing / animating them and here's what the original didn't show us: Satellites, including their solar arrays, lightning storms and dancing aurora!

If you enjoy playing with these data (stretching, exposure stacking, timelapse, etc.) please note that these releases are lossy .jpg versions and that the Artemis II lunar science team is preparing the full-res RAW and native .tif files for release in the Planetary Data System. Stay Tuned!!!

Scientific American@sciam.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Want to go to the moon? Travel vicariously through the more than 12,000 photos NASA just posted from the Artemis II mission

I only have seven followers on Reckoning Science. I am reckoning most of you don't realize that is me (and my great research associate, @kaurov.org So please follow us! bsky.app/profile/reck...

I still think crewed planetary flybys are a worthwhile class of space mission. Kind of like Artemis II, except even more capable of doing exploration by virtue of increased duration, workspace, and instrument payload. spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2015/12/miss...

Triple-Flyby: Venus-Mars-Venus Piloted Missions in the Late 1970s/Early 1980s (1967)

The story of spaceflight told through missions and programs that did not happen - that is, the great majority of them.

spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com

It's the last day of April, and so I am in a rush to commemorate the centennial of AMAZING STORIES, which made its debut with the April, 1926 issue. With a chilling cover by Hugo Gernsback's long-time illustrator, Frank R Paul. 1/n

Presidential control over the NSF was a major issue during the initial debates about creating a federal science agency. I wrote about the political battle to create the NSF last year. Includes lots of links to great scholarship: 🗃️ #Histsci daily.jstor.org/science-in-w...

Science in War, Science in Peace: The Origins of the NSF - JSTOR Daily

The 1950 establishment of a federal agency devoted to space, physics, and more belied a cross-party consensus that such disciplines were vital to national interest.

daily.jstor.org

Presidential control over the NSF was a major issue during the initial debates about creating a federal science agency. I wrote about the political battle to create the NSF last year. Includes lots of links to great scholarship: 🗃️ #Histsci daily.jstor.org/science-in-w...

Science in War, Science in Peace: The Origins of the NSF - JSTOR Daily

The 1950 establishment of a federal agency devoted to space, physics, and more belied a cross-party consensus that such disciplines were vital to national interest.

daily.jstor.org

#NASA's #Mars #Perseverance rover April 28, 2026 (Sol 1844) Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera (Hazcam) mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mul... NASA/JPL-Caltech/j. Roger

I see these and I remember Candy Hansen. She made sure every early spring, as soon as the sun was barely up, that we were looking with HiRISE to see if we could catch any of these gas jets in action. Ad Astra, Candy.

Riding With Robots@ridingrobots.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Spider terrain near the south pole of Mars, as seen by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in February. The area shown is about a kilometer across. These araneiform structures are likely caused by gas escaping from beneath a layer of ice. www.uahirise.org/ESP_091490_0...

Time to take a dive into the science from humanity's three asteroid sample return missions: Hayabusa, Hayabusa2, and OSIRIS-REx! 🪨🛰️🔭 Written for non-geophysicists (like me!), and those new to the field who don't yet ask to "pass the halite" at the dinner table 🧪, this is my review journal paper:

The science from asteroid sample return missions

To date, three samples from near-Earth asteroids have been delivered to Earth by Japan's Hayabusa (2010) and Hayabusa2 (2020) missions, and the United States OSIRIS-REx mission (2023). Free from terre...

arxiv.org

The construction of Dragonfly is so exciting. I am impatient for this mission to start. It's going to be so cool! #planetaryscience 🧪 science.nasa.gov/blogs/dragon...

NASA’s Dragonfly Rotorcraft Gets Decked Out, Tested - NASA Science

NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft is beginning to take shape – literally – with the delivery of the panels that make up the rotorcraft lander’s body. Built from ultra‑lightweight honeycomb panels designed a...

science.nasa.gov

Tonight's launch from Vandenberg was late enough that it reached the sunlight only relatively late in its ascent. When it did it rose through first the red of the last filtered sunlight, then climbed to the daylight with a striking pale blue radiance coloring the upper portion of the plume.

Curiosity is reporting organics on Mars again. The experiment is the neat part though. The Sample Analysis on Mars experiment took ~70 sample cups with it and 9 were for wet chemistry experiments , and this one used up 1 of 2 with a strong alkaline base 🧵1/4 doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🔭🧪 #planetsci

Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment - Nature Communications

Curiosity detected over 20 organic molecules in 3.5-billion-year-old Martian rocks using a wet chemistry experiment, showing complex carbon compounds can survive for billions of years and may preserve...

doi.org

Jesuit, mathematician, astronomer, physicist, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, author of the monumental Almagestum Novum (1651), was born 17 April 1598 #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2024/07/10/a...

A monumental astronomy tome from the seventeenth century

Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671) was a third generation, seventeenth-century, Jesuit mathematician and astronomer. A student of Giuseppe Biancani (1566–1624) at the University of Parma, who w…

thonyc.wordpress.com

This is pretty niche stuff, but the Artemis II Orion-to-Earth audio is slowly beeing uploaded to the Internet archive. #Artemis archive.org/details/Arte...

Artemis II ACR Collection : john.l.stoll@nasa.gov : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Artemis II ACR Collection

archive.org

I have two articles in The Space Review this week. This is one of them: thespacereview.com/article/5201/1

Hold on to Moon Joy www.theatlantic.com/science/2026...

The Challenge the Artemis II Crew Gave the Rest of Us

Hold on to “moon joy.”

theatlantic.com

My new article (1 of 2) is up. It is about a bunch of new photos of HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite launches. (I also have photos of other previously unseen launches that I will publish later.) thespacereview.com/article/5198/1