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The Joy of Tech has summarized how a lot of us feel about the end of the Space Shuttle.

Click the image or the link for the full cartoon.

That Tom Tomorrow fella sure has a way with words. He says:

It doesn’t matter if you believe in global warming.

Global warming believes in you.

Reality always seems to have a way of grabbing your attention, even if it’s not always in time to allow you to alter reality.

Apple electrified the tech industry this week with its iCloud announcement.

This photo has nothing to do with that.

Boston.com has a collection of photos documenting an eruption of the Puyehue volcano in Chile. Pretty amazing stuff, including a couple views from space.

New science:

A 10-year study has revealed that the electron is very spherical indeed.

To be precise … if an electron was the size of the solar system, it would be out from being perfectly round by less than the width of a human hair.

This seems very strange to me. For some reason, I’ve always pictured electrons as very tiny minus signs.

From Astronomy Picture of the Day: I’ve looked up at the Little Dipper many times, never suspecting just how much I was missing.

(Click the image to see a much bigger version.)

Last week, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of manned spaceflight, astronaut Cady Coleman played a flute duet with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull.

If you have a high-speed internet connection, try viewing in full-screen mode.

Too brief, but very nice.

This looks interesting:

Update: NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is this 2003 photo of the earth from the International Space Station, looking much like it might have looked to Yuri Gagarin:

Commenting on the first view from space he reported, “The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very clearly”. His view could have resembled this image taken in 2003 from the International Space Station.

Fifty years ago today, the headline on the front page of the New York Times read, “Soviet Orbits Man and Recovers Him; Space Pioneer Reports: ‘I Feel Well’; Sent Messages While Circling Earth.”

It was the first time any human being had gone into space.

The human being was Yuri Gagarin, a Russian pilot in the Soviet Air Force. He orbited the planet once, in the process flying higher and faster than any human being before him.

At the time, his nationality seemed to be the most important fact about his achievement. The Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a desperate space race — almost exclusively for propaganda bragging rights. President Kennedy’s famous challenge to land a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s was an attempt to set the finish line sufficiently distant so that the United States, starting from behind, might still have a chance to win.

The space race ended in July 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon. The United States won.

That rivalry seems unimportant now, with Americans and Russians and other nations working together on the International Space Station (ISS). Late last year, the ISS marked ten years of continuous human presence in space.

Yet, without that rivalry, I doubt that humans would have gone to the Moon yet. And that would be a shame.

More important than the technical advances called forth by the drive to get to the Moon, more important than the scientific knowledge beamed back by scientific instruments and brought back in boxes of Moon rocks, was this: astronauts could look up and see the whole Earth.

During the Apollo 8 mission, astronaut Jim Lovell realized he could cover the entire planet with his thumb. Everyone any of us has ever heard of — all of history, science, the arts, philosophy; all the nations, all the causes, all the beliefs and faiths; all the great achievements, all the great crimes — all of it on that little blue sphere suspended in the blackness of space.

I think that has something to do with why Americans and Russians work side-by-side with people of other nations on the ISS.

We couldn’t see our rivalry in proper perspective until the rivalry lifted us high enough to truly see ourselves.

Russians certainly have reason to be proud of Yuri Gagarin. Fifty years later, as a fellow human being, I’m proud of him, too.

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site, here’s an amazing photo of the tallest known cliff in the Solar System, Verona Rupes, on Uranus’ bizarre moon Miranda. The cliff is estimated to be 20 kilometers deep — almost 12 and a half miles, and ten times the depth of the Grand Canyon.

The photo was taken way back in 1986. Why was it featured on the NASA site now? I’m guessing that NASA believes this will increase Congressional interest in funding deep space missions. To politicians who seem determined to run the country off a cliff, this has gotta be irresistable.

I guess if you can’t be there in person, you can watch the video. If you have a fast connection, you might want to view this full-screen, with “720p” selected.

There’s a low rumble that starts about a minute into this video. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but I wonder whether that’s the sound of the shuttle.

If you’re like me, you’re probably never going to get into space, even though it’s something you’ve dreamed about your whole life. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to settle for IMAX movies and amusement rides for your space experience.

But NASA is offering to send your face and name into earth orbit on one of the two final Space Shuttle missions.

If earth orbit isn’t ambitious enough for you, NASA is also offering to send your name to Mars, encoded on a microchip on a future lander.

Listen, I once felt a little thrill, during a long distance phone call, at the thought that my electronically-encoded voice might be bouncing off a communications satellite. If this the only way this space nut gets into space, it will do.

(Thanks to dealmac.)

Via Slashdot: NASA does a huge amount of photography on every Space Shuttle launch in order to assist in detecting problems and analyzing system behavior. Here’s a 45-minute video narrated by a couple of NASA engineers.

You may want to click the little four-arrow icon in the lower right corner of the video to view this full-frame.

And if that’s not enough for you, here’s another ten minutes worth:

A couple weeks ago I attended a NASA panel with Mercury astronaut John Glenn, Apollo 17 moon-walker Harrison Schmitt, and Space Shuttle astronaut John Grunsfeld. After the panel discussion, I got to actually step up and meet Schmitt and Grunsfeld.

Grunsfeld is probably not as famous as the other two, but he’s flown on five Shuttle missions. He’s been to the Russian Mir space station, and to the International Space Station (ISS). He’s visited the Hubble Space Telescope three times, doing eight separate space walks to perform maintenance and repairs on the telescope.

I asked something I’ve been curious about for years: did he think of the Hubble Telescope more as a thing, or as a place? Grunsfeld said that, strange as it sounded, he thought of it almost as a person. He had spent years studying the telescope, and felt it almost had a personality — perhaps the way some of us earthbound types think of our cars or our computers. He said the Mir and the ISS both felt like places.

While Schmitt took one of NASA’s most requested photographs, Blue Marble, I told Grunsfeld he deserved credit as a co-author of many of the amazing Hubble images which wouldn’t have been possible without the work he did to repair and upgrade the telescope.

Which brings us to the Boston Globe’s 2010 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar: 25 photos, with one new photo revealed each day until Christmas. (They include links to the advent calendars from past years.)

It’s a big universe out there.

I like to go out some nights to watch the International Space Station (ISS) pass overhead. (NASA has a site to help track the ISS from almost anywhere on earth.) It looks like a very bright star or planet, always moving west to east, sometimes trending northward, other times southward.

What do astronauts see when they look out the window on the ISS? How about this, via the Astronomy Picture of the Day site:

A docked Russian Soyuz spacecraft and parts of the ISS are visible in the foreground, apparently lit by a quarter moon. Above one of the solar panels of the Soyuz are the lights of New Orleans.

North (left) of New Orleans, a line of lights tracing central US highway I55 connects to Jackson, Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. Of course, the lights follow the population centers, but not everyone lives on planet Earth all the time these days. November 2nd marked the first decade of continuous human presence in space on board the International Space Station.

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

Via Boing Boing:

NASA attached a video camera to a Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) on a 2008 Space Shuttle launch. At the beginning of the video, we’re looking at part of the Shuttle’s external fuel tank and the underside of the Shuttle’s nose. We get a wider view when the boosters separate about two minutes into the flight. The video continues until the booster splashes down.

To me, the most astonishing thing about this video is the audio track, which grows quieter as the air grows thinner, and then louder again as the booster falls into denser air.

Spaceflight isn’t magic. Spaceships are physical things, built by humans. That becomes really apparent when you hear the creaking and clanking of the booster as it settles into the water.