Neil Armstrong’s Postcard From the Moon
Maybe they thought there would be mailboxes on the moon, and that it would be brown. This postcard is a reminder of what an exciting, unknown frontier it was when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed there 43 years ago. Though Armstrong left us in August, those first steps are still legendary. So the auctioneers’…
Dive Right Into the Largest Ever Image of Our Galaxy’s Centre
You are looking at more than 84 million stars, the largest ever catalogue of the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Astronomers at the Paranal Observatory in Cerro Paranal, Chile, stitched the 9 gigapixels of the original image from thousands of individual infrared pictures.You can see the full, zoomable version here. It contains more…
Mystery Particles on Mars Revealed by Curiosity’s Junk
Sifting through soil on Mars, NASA’s rover Curiosity paused to take a picture – and exposed its own bad behaviour. The shot included a bright object lying in the Martian dirt, and a closer look suggests that the rover is guilty of littering: it appears the object is a piece of plastic wrapper that has…
