What is the identity of the above image? The correct answer to that question could be considered scientific: a precise location (name for it).

As a former psychology professor, I have seen how many students prefer fill-in-the-blank type questions vs. true/false or multiple choice.

What?! There is one correct answer?! Don’t I get credit for thinking, period?

True, simply parroting “the answer” is not indicative or a deeper type of learning. But to simply string words together in a longer answer that seems familiar to the instructor (resembling his/her own word strings) . . . ? Is that a higher learning, or just clever?

Hmm.

[photo of Devil's Tower thanks to NASA]

Technorati Links: education, NASA

Beautiful. The launch of a spacecraft over water. [photo thanks to NASA]

The root of providence is to provide. The term is a favorite among religious folk. Providence is what their god does. Provide. Their everything.

What does the space program provide? Knowledge, for sure. Technological advances that improve our limited days, yes. Ever-lasting life? No. Transportation to a supernatural realm? Naw. Some argue that space travel may one day be our ticket “out of here.” And by that they mean to another hospitable planet. This one may not remain hospitable. Not forever it won’t.

When is providing knowledge not enough? I guess the cost must be considered.

Care to explore new realms of thought and perhaps gain some knowledge at very little cost (some effort, some time, no exchange of cash)? I recommend checking out the 131st Skeptics’ Circle posted yesterday over at . . . Providentia.

I’m going to blast that way later on today.

Technorati Links: knowledge, NASA

Oh man. To be that guy. Or gal.

A dream of mine: to float above the Earth like that, tethered to a nearby spacecraft by a mere cable. A great, big, beautiful, blue planet before me. Home. Behind me and otherwise all around — the vastness of relatively black space.

I just went a bit breathless thinking about it.

[photo thanks to NASA]

Thanks to the Cassini spacecraft our eyes can appreciate this far-out view (in both senses of the term): Saturn’s moon Tethys “setting” behind it, with Saturn’s roughly 96% hydrogen atmosphere clearly visible. That image of those rocks, rocks!

[photo thanks to NASA]

Technorati Links: cosmos, NASA

While the moon landing was not a hoax, I thought I found the equivalent of a waving flag in the above photo NASA posted on its photo-of-the-day site.

Can you spot it?

Check out that shadow. Even if the light sources were bright enough to cast a shadow, with sources, plural, the shadow certainly wouldn’t be that neat and clean.

But wait. It’s no hoax. The caption to the photo called the image by photographer Larry Landolfi a “tantalizing fantasy.”

Damn. I thought I had stumbled upon fresh evidence that there was second gunman aboard Apollo 11. Or something.

Technorati Links: conspiracy, NASA

This image from the NASA site Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive brings to mind the expression uttered by human beings when viewing other human beings far below: They look like ants!

Those bright spots in the night sky, from so far away, look like the luminous equivalent of ants. And yet the closer you get — they are all different. Each and every one unique.

Technorati Links: cosmos, NASA

What in the world!?

It’s a crater. On a moon. Not THE Moon. On the Martian moon Phobos.

Cool. Amazing.

Who needs drugs when you have astronomy?

[photo thanks to NASA]

Technorati Links: cosmos, NASA

Hey young thinkers, see all those bright dots in the night sky? Connect them and see what you can create! The beauty of this activity is that there is no right answer. Of course, your creations will likely reflect ideas your culture has planted in your mind. And perhaps the applause you anticipate for creations that “make sense” to your social group.

Still. There is no wrong answer. Which means there is no right answer.

[photo thanks to NASA]

Technorati Links: constellations, cosmos

Saturday and Sunday: There they are, orbiting the work week. Or maybe rather than being satellite-like days, the weekend couplet of waking hours feels like home. During the week we commute to the moon of a work schedule.

Ahhh. To be home. Home. The familiar.

But spend too much at home and that moon looks kinda interesting.

[photo thanks to NASA]

In the above Polaroid [thanks NASA!] we see a closer crescent-sliver of our Moon and a distant sliver of the planet Venus. In other words, the faces of these two bodies have a nose pointing toward the Sun. And those faces are kissed straight-on by light. But because our perspective is from slightly behind, we see merely a crescent ear. Or something.

Technorati Links: cosmos, moon