Rust Cohle In The Long Bright Day

The  darkness  likes how you taste, dearie. And now that it started the meal it’s gonna finish it.

You can no more fly from your fate that can that  s w a n .

How to Safely Watch the Aug. 21 Solar Eclipse

On Aug. 21, 2017, a solar eclipse will be visible in North America. Throughout the continent, the Moon will cover part – or all – of the Sun’s super-bright face for part of the day.

Since it’s never safe to look at the partially eclipsed or uneclipsed Sun, everyone who plans to watch the eclipse needs a plan to watch it safely. One of the easiest ways to watch an eclipse is solar viewing glasses – but there are a few things to check to make sure your glasses are safe:

 Glasses should have an ISO 12312-2 certification

They should also have the manufacturer’s name and address, and you can check if the manufacturer has been verified by the American Astronomical Society

Make sure they have no scratches or damage

To use solar viewing glasses, make sure you put them on before looking up at the Sun, and look away before you remove them. Proper solar viewing glasses are extremely dark, and the landscape around you will be totally black when you put them on – all you should see is the Sun (and maybe some types of extremely bright lights if you have them nearby).

Never use solar viewing glasses while looking through a telescope, binoculars, camera viewfinder, or any other optical device. The concentrated solar rays will damage the filter and enter your eyes, causing serious injury. But you can use solar viewing glasses on top of your regular eyeglasses, if you use them!

If you don’t have solar viewing glasses, there are still ways to watch, like making your own pinhole projector. You can make a handheld box projector with just a few simple supplies – or simply hold any object with a small hole (like a piece of cardstock with a pinhole, or even a colander) above a piece of paper on the ground to project tiny images of the Sun.

Of course, you can also watch the entire eclipse online with us. Tune into nasa.gov/eclipselive starting at noon ET on Aug. 21! 

For people in the path of totality, there will be a few brief moments when it is safe to look directly at the eclipse. Only once the Moon has completely covered the Sun and there is no light shining through is it safe to look at the eclipse. Make sure you put your eclipse glasses back on or return to indirect viewing before the first flash of sunlight appears around the Moon’s edge.

You can look up the length of the total eclipse in your area to help you set a time for the appropriate length of time. Remember – this only applies to people within the path of totality.

Everyone else will need to use eclipse glasses or indirect viewing throughout the entire eclipse!

Photographing the Eclipse

Whether you’re an amateur photographer or a selfie master, try out these tips for photographing the eclipse.  

#1 — Safety first: Make sure you have the required solar filter to protect your camera.

#2 — Any camera is a good camera, whether it’s a high-end DSLR or a camera phone – a good eye and vision for the image you want to create is most important.

#3 — Look up, down, and all around. As the Moon slips in front of the Sun, the landscape will be bathed in long shadows, creating eerie lighting across the landscape. Light filtering through the overlapping leaves of trees, which creates natural pinholes, will also project mini eclipse replicas on the ground. Everywhere you can point your camera can yield exceptional imagery, so be sure to compose some wide-angle photos that can capture your eclipse experience.

#4 — Practice: Be sure you know the capabilities of your camera before Eclipse Day. Most cameras, and even many camera phones, have adjustable exposures, which can help you darken or lighten your image during the tricky eclipse lighting. Make sure you know how to manually focus the camera for crisp shots.

#5 —Upload your eclipse images to NASA’s Eclipse Flickr Gallery and relive the eclipse through other peoples’ images.

Learn all about the Aug. 21 eclipse at eclipse2017.nasa.gov, and follow @NASASun on Twitter and NASA Sun Science on Facebook for more. Watch the eclipse through the eyes of NASA at nasa.gov/eclipselive starting at 12 PM ET on Aug. 21.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

This tanuki is thinking about fucking and you cannot convince me of any other interpretation of this face.

Sex-crazed

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Meet Our New Flight Directors!

We just hired six new flight directors to join a unique group of individuals who lead human spaceflights from mission control at our Johnson Space Center in Houston.

A flight director manages all human spaceflight missions and related test flights, including International Space Station missions, integration of new American-made commercial spacecraft and developing plans for future Orion missions to the Moon and beyond. 

Only 97 people have served as flight directors, or are in training to do so, in the 50-plus years of human spaceflight. That’s fewer than the over 300 astronauts! We talked with the new class about their upcoming transitions, how to keep calm in stressful situations, the importance of human spaceflight and how to best learn from past mistakes. Here’s what they had to say…

Allison Bollinger

Allison is from Lancaster, Ohio and received a BS in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University. She wanted to work at NASA for as long as she can remember. “I was four-and-a-half when Challenger happened,” she said. “It was my first childhood memory.” Something in her clicked that day. “After, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said an astronaut.” 

By high school a slight fear of heights, a propensity for motion sickness and an aptitude for engineering shifted her goal a bit. She didn’t want to be an astronaut. “I wanted to train astronauts,” she said. Allison has most recently worked at our Neutral Buoyancy Lab managing the daily operations of the 40-ft-deep pool the astronauts use for spacewalk training! She admits she’ll miss “the smell of chlorine each day. Coming to work at one of the world’s largest pools and training astronauts is an incredible job,” she says. But she’s excited to be back in mission control, where in a previous role she guided astronauts through spacewalks. 

She’s had to make some tough calls over the years. So we asked her if she had any tips for when something… isn’t going as planned. She said, “It’s so easy to think the sky is falling. Take a second to take a deep breath, and then you’ll realize it’s not as bad as you thought.”

Adi Boulos

Adi is from Chicago, Illinois and graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign with a BS in Aerospace Engineering. He joined us in 2008 as a member of the very first group of flight controllers that specialize in data handling and communications and tracking systems aboard the space station. 

Most recently he served as the group lead in the Avionics Trainee group, which he loved. “I was managing newer folks just coming to NASA from college and getting to become flight controllers,” he said. “I will miss getting to mentor them from day one.” But he’s excited to start his new role alongside some familiar faces already in mission control. “It’s a great group of people,” he said of his fellow 2018 flight director class. “The six of us, we mesh well together, and we are all from very diverse backgrounds.” 

As someone who has spent most of his career supporting human spaceflight and cargo missions from mission control, we asked him why human spaceflight is so important. He had a practical take. “It allows us to solve problems we didn’t know we had,” he said. “For example, when we went to the moon, we had to solve all kinds of problems on how to keep humans alive for long-duration flights in space which directly impacts how we live on the ground. All of the new technology we develop for living in space, we also use on the ground.”

Marcos Flores

Marcos is from Caguas, Puerto Rico and earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico and an MS in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University. Spanish is his first language; English is his second. 

The first time he came to the Continental US was on a trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as a kid! “I always knew I wanted to work for NASA,” he said. “And I knew I wanted to be an engineer because I liked to break things to try to figure out how they worked.” He joined us in 2010 as an intern in a robotics laboratory working on conceptual designs for an experimental, autonomous land rover. He later transitioned to the space station flight control team, where he has led various projects, including major software transitions, spacewalks and commercial cargo missions! 

He shares his new coworkers’ thoughts on the practical aspects of human spaceflight and believes it’s an expression of our “drive to explore” and our “innate need to know the world and the universe better.” But for him, “It’s more about answering the fundamental questions of where we come from and where we’re headed.”

Pooja Jesrani

Pooja graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Aerospace Engineering. She began at NASA in 2007 as a flight controller responsible for the motion control system of the International Space Station. She currently works as a Capsule Communicator, talking with the astronauts on the space station, and on integration with the Boeing Starliner commercial crew spacecraft. 

She has a two-year-old daughter, and she’s passionate about motherhood, art, fashion, baking, international travel and, of course, her timing as a new flight director! “Not only have we been doing International Space Station operations continuously, and we will continue to do that, but we are about to launch U.S. crewed vehicles off of U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle in 2011. Exploration is ramping up and taking us back to the moon!” she said.” “By the time we get certified, a lot of the things we will get to do will be next-gen.”  

We asked her if she had any advice for aspiring flight directors who might want to support such missions down the road. “Work hard every day,” she said. “Every day is an interview. And get a mentor. Or multiple mentors. Having mentorship while you progress through your career is very important, and they really help guide you in the right direction.”

Paul Konyha

Paul was born in Manhasset, NY, and has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Louisiana Tech University, a Master’s of Military Operational Arts and Science from Air University, and an MS in Astronautical Engineering from the University of Southern California. He began his career as an officer in the United States Air Force in 1996 and authored the Air Force’s certification guide detailing the process through which new industry launch vehicles (including SpaceX’s Falcon 9) gain approval to launch Department of Defense (DoD) payloads. 

As a self-described “Star Wars kid,” he has always loved space and, of course, NASA! After retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2016, Paul joined Johnson Space Center as the Deputy Director of the DoD Space Test Program Human Spaceflight Payloads Office. He’s had a rich career in some pretty high-stakes roles. We asked him for advice on handling stress and recovering from life’s occasional setbacks. “For me, it’s about taking a deep breath, focusing on the data and trying not to what if too much,” he said. “Realize that mistakes are going to happen. Be mentally prepared to know that at some point it’s going to happen—you’re going to have to do that self-reflection to understand what you could’ve done better and how you’ll fix it in the future. That constant process of evaluation and self-reflection will help you get through it.”

Rebecca Wingfield

Rebecca is from Princeton, Kentucky and has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kentucky and an MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Houston, Clear Lake. She joined us in 2007 as a flight controller responsible for maintenance, repairs and hardware installations aboard the space station. 

Since then, she’s worked as a capsule communicator for the space station and commercial crew programs and on training astronauts. She’s dedicated her career to human spaceflight and has a special appreciation for the program’s long-term benefits. “As our human race advances and we change our planet in lots of different ways, we may eventually need to get off of it,” she said. “There’s no way to do that until we explore a way to do it safely and effectively for mass numbers of people. And to do that, you have to start with one person.” We asked her if there are any misconceptions about flight directors. She responded, “While they are often steely-eyed missile men and women, and they can be rough around the edges, they are also very good mentors and teachers. They’re very much engaged in bringing up the next generation of flight controllers for NASA.”

Congrats to these folks on leading the future of human spaceflight! 

You can learn more about each of them HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Remember the Night - Picture Lake, WA | FREE STAR PHOTOGRAPHY TUTORIAL INCLUDED BELOW | by Dave Morrow

Save Willow Season 2

Willow has one of the most wholesome fanbases I've ever seen, and I've been in fandoms for a long time, its so rare to see especially in online fandoms.

Apart from that the story felt nostalgic, but new, it had great characters, cute banter between its sapphic couple Kit and Jade, funny and memorable side characters. It ended on a cliffhanger that after it was eluded to that it would have 2 more seasons.

There is a petition that you can sign if you want the show to go on:

Change.org

Sign the Petition

RENEW WILLOW FOR SEASON 2

And I know you think that the chances of this succeeding are slim but shows have been brought back by fans before:

The show wasn't doing bad either if anyone wants to try and tell you that it was:

I don't normally post about petitions and such but I really, really loved Willow and its fandom.

Another thing that you can do is to stream it again, rake up those numbers, let them know we want more of this awesome show. And also please reblog this if you can and spread the word.

Galactic Tides - The Whirlpool Galaxy And Its Companion 

Astrophysicists were able to determine that the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) and its small companion galaxy (NGC 5195) are tidally entwined by analyzing the light emitted from Supernova within M51. These Supernova have provided important clues about the structure and composition of these galaxies.

Credit: Cornell Astrophysics/NASA Hubble/IPAC