Just the Darndest Little Guy

Whenever I meet new people and I tell them I was a theatre major and they say “oh that makes sense” or “oh I could tell” I feel an immeasurable amount of shame

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

Blaming wildlife for consuming food and not the fleets of mega trawlers that are catching metric tons of bycatch and causing widespread destruction to fisheries, salmon included. I know what you are.

Just doing some light reading on Tax Day...

END THE DENIAL: rapid 21st century minor/major mass extinction is here

Not a SINGLE SpaceX mission has ever garnered the kind of press & goodwill of Artemis II. And that's for good reason: humanity can never truly rally behind a corporation. NASA is for the people and by the people. SpaceX is for the shareholders.

Absurd and inhuman violence is spreading ferociously through the sacred places of the Christian East, profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives, which are considered at most collateral damage of self-interest. But no gain can be worth the life of the weakest, children, or families. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood.

The Avignon Papacy reference is the detail that demands attention. An American defense official invoked a 14th-century episode in which the French Crown physically relocated the papacy to Avignon and controlled it for 67 years - as an implicit model for what happens to religious institutions that oppose state power. That's not a slip of the tongue. That's a studied historical reference deployed deliberately in a room with the Pope's senior diplomat. The message was not subtle. Leo heard it. He spent Holy Week delivering what papal scholars described as a sustained theological argument about the nature of power and imperial violence. On Palm Sunday he said Jesus rejects the prayers of those who wage war. On Easter Sunday - the same morning Trump posted his expletive-filled threat on Truth Social - Leo told world leaders to lay down weapons. On Tuesday he called the civilization threat "truly unacceptable" and asked citizens directly to contact their elected representatives. The White House's response to the Pope's Tuesday statement: "The Iranian people welcome the sound of bombs because it means their oppressors are losing." The first American pope will spend America's 250th birthday on Lampedusa with migrants. One Vatican official told The Free Press: "The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration." The Pentagon summoned a cardinal and invoked the Avignon Papacy. The Pope responded by asking 1.4 billion Catholics to call their congressmen.

The original Earthrise photo is from late Orcas Island resident Bill Anders, founder of the Heritage Flight Museum here in Washington state. Great tribute from the Artemis II crew.

Piker: Every single dollar that is spent on a bomb is stolen from each of you because that’s a dollar that they spend blowing up a school overseas instead of building schools in your neighborhood.

“You can see the surface of the Moon…we just went sci-fi.” On flight day seven, images from our @NASAArtemis II crew amazed, turning science fiction to reality. From the lunar far side to a solar eclipse from the Moon, the views are EVERYTHING. No pressure to pick a favorite.

our beautiful Earth, and whatever is happening on it.

It’s time for us to openly start talking to our boys and young men about body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and compulsive exercise addiction. They aren’t above or immune to these issues.

An Earth of 3.8 billion people and an Earth of 8.3 billion

It’s that time again unfortunately like clockwork

“When we leave Earth, we do not leave it, we choose it. We will always choose Earth, we will always choose each other” “Integrity from Earth, our single system, fragile and interconnected, we copy.” ?!??????!!!!??!?!??????!!

For the "NASA is a waste of taxpayer money" crowd, here's a good thread that puts the agency's paltry budget in perspective

We see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere. That's us, together, watching as our astronauts make their journey to the Moon.

An extremist group in Washington, DC has claimed credit for the terrorist attack on the Iranian bridge, promising further attacks on civilian infrastructure if its demands aren't met