-

Martian Vistas

Despite being a black and white image, the panoramic shot from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity bowled me over. That first link takes you to a smaller version of the shot with some explanatory text, so once there you'll want to click on the photo, or if you just want to get to it then just go here immediately to see it full size. (The full-size may take a while to load on a dial-up connection.)

All of this from tens of millions of kilometers away. Looking at it it becomes so much easier to envision a manned base there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
Insurance Company-Driven Propaganda Storm It's almost heartening to see them go to these lengths - they're getting a little scared - though I worry how many wingnut media outlets will reference the report as if it's substantive..? ( From the Washington Post ) The Insurance Industry's Deceptive Report by Ezra Klein In the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries, the health insurance industry has commissioned a report (pdf) projecting doom and despair for those who seek to reform its business practices. The report was farmed out to the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has something of a history with this sort of thing: In the early-'90s, the tobacco industry commissioned PWC to estimate the economic devastation that would result from a tax on tobacco. The report was later analyzed by the Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting group, which concluded that "the cumulative effect of PW’s methods … is to produce patently unreliable results.&qu
Read more

Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

-
Image
      Even though I've already watched the pair of debut episodes of Frasier (see next paragraph), and this week's Star Trek: Lower Decks (which continues to do a stellar job of mining  previous Trek series for character, episode and extraterrestrial culture lore and deftly applying them at breakneck speeds), I still have multiple things I'm looking forward to catching up on, including new eps of Gen V (Amazon Prime), Loki (Disney+), and both Archer and Welcome to Wrexham (both on Hulu), along with the first two episodes of a final six for Doom Patrol over on Max... and that's just off the top of my head, so getting this week's streaming post out of the way brings those one step closer for me.       I've watched the two episodes of the new Frasier series that arrived on Paramount+ this week, and while it was a mixed bag it was good to see the character back, with him attempting to move into his third act by returning to Boston, where we first met the ch
Read more

The Tease of Things I Don't Need

-
Image
     The lure of things we don't need, could easily find greater needs to apply the cash to, and which we may not even have the space for, is a very First(ish) World Problem, to be sure.        HasLabs is a special projects division of Hasbro, that occasionally pitches large and/or elaborate items - oversized figures and/or vehicles - essentially crowdfunding each project. They set the price, and a funding line - the number of people who need to pledge to buy one (or more -- up to five) at the announced price, then collect the names and information of interested parties for a period of 45 days. Once the number of pledged buys hits the target, the project is greenlit.      A couple years ago there was a HasLabs special build project aiming to fund a production run for an oversized (32" tall), elaborately-articulated action figure of Marvel comics' Devourer of Worlds: Galactus. Back on July 18, 2021 I posted a piece on the project, which at the time was just two days
Read more