The Known Universe

This is pretty awesome.

The Moon Landing, 33 Years Later

This happened in 2002, but I only saw it for the first time a few days ago amidst the hubbub over the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11.

Buzz Aldrin may be a lot of things (astronaut, recovering alcoholic, possible UFO spotter), but this shows that American hero is still one of them. And goddammit, I hate conspiracy theorists.

Canadian Meteor

Here's a pretty nifty video of a meteor striking somewhere around Edmonton, from a police car dashboard camera. I love the look of it, the kind of spontaneous majesty that no Hollywood effects artist could create.

The Mars Phoenix lander

Nerd news, the NASA Phoenix lander touched down on Mars on Sunday. I'm always excited when a spacecraft lands on another planet and doesn't immediately roll into a crater and then is never heard from again. After the successes of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, the mission is to search for water ice at the North Pole of Mars, water being obviously extremely useful for whenever we finally send a manned mission.

This is especially cool - we now have enough spacecraft orbiting Mars that they could take pictures of the Phoenix as it landed. That's it, dangling from a parachute, in the lower left-hand corner box.
It's Martian Summer at that particular location now, and the hope is that the lander will keep working until Martian Winter begins (the Martian year is almost 22 months long), to learn more about weather and climate on Mars.

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

This one is less of a surprise, but for me it's even more painful, because I grew up as a sci-fi nerd and Clarke was one of my trinity of favorite writers, along with Asimov and Bradbury.

Clarke's particular focus had to do with an expansive view of the universe, in which people are only a tiny part of a vast, grand cosmos, but with our own unique potential. His was an optimistic, humanistic voice that has been a huge influence on not just science-fiction but in popularizing science and making people aware of the larger world around that we all share.

But as he said last year on his 90th birthday, he mostly wanted to be known as a writer and as an entertainer, and he succeeded at that admirable: 2001, Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood's End, all terrifically entertaining and inspiring.

Also, he wasn't above wondering about ape-men and the Loch Ness monster:

In the Shadow of the Moon (2007)

Good stuff, although a little paint-by-numbers as so many documentaries tend to be. Nothing really surprising, this just hits all the marks from Kennedy's announcement that the country would land on the moon to the Apollo 1 tragedy to the triumphant landing of Apollo 11 and the hiccup of Apollo 13. Most of the movie is hanging out with the former astronauts, a bunch of mild-mannered military types who think the literary idea of 'the right stuff' is kind of funny.

Actually now that I'm writing about it, the movie's gaps stick out more - nothing is said of why the Moon landings were curtailed after Apollo 17 in 1972 and I would have loved to know what each of the various astronauts did with their lives after their missions. The movie ends by having the men talk about how fragile the world seemed, how small its problems felt in context, which is one of the movie's more interesting segments.

I also liked hearing from Michael Collins, aka the Apollo 11 astronaut who didn't actually walk on the Moon, who thought to himself that as he orbited, on one side of him were three billion people on the Earth plus two on the Moon, and on his other side...what? Anything?

Lastly, I'm a little embarrassed for the movie that the filmmakers even had to address the various wingnut conspiracy theories about the Moon landings being faked. It's an aside over the end credits, but it's a shame they felt the need to debunk these ideas at all.