Striking NASA Image

LINK TO NASA PAGE

Carl Sagan would have loved this image. If you were on Mars and trained a reasonably powerful telescope on Earth and the Moon this is what you would see. This is an image from a satellite that is currently orbiting Mars. There is just something precious about this image that makes me think of the famous Earthrise image from the the surface of the Moon.

A Quote and An Image

It has been a while and I doubt that I have an audience on this blog right now but I am slowly coming back into the ABU system after my sabbatical and I thought I was due for a posting.

I have been reading alot of Richard Feynman this past year and I like this quote:

"Scientists are explorers,

philosophers are tourists"

Richard Feynman

What gets me about both of these images is that neither explorers or tourists are "home", both set out with real intentions of returning to where they started. I would really like to talk to Feynman about this ... he was too thoughtful and intelligent for this to not be an intentional link but where did he think "home" would be for scientists? The past is not home for a positivist scientist that believes in progress. Does Feynman mean that we are all lost in space and our only purpose is to explore and never get home? Really? Man oh man.

I tripped across this image recently and it made me stop and really, really think.

Yes, it is just another pretty sunset ... but it is a sunset on Mars as captured by NASA's Mars Rover Spirit. There are a number of concentric spinning thought wheels on this image. The dominant one being how small the Sun seems and how a change of perspective changes everything. Then again, think of how blessed Earth is to be "just the right distance" from the Sun.

LINK to NASA image