Pas sur la Lune

First television picture from space, TIROS 1 satellite, april 1, 1960.

The launch of TIROS I (Television and InfraRed Observation Satellite) on April 1, 1960 marked the first day it became possible to observe the Earth’s weather conditions on a regular basis, over most of the world from the vantage point of outer space. [...] Read more
—Source: NOAASIS

View of Earth from a camera on V-2 #13, launched October 24, 1946.

On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful —the first pictures of Earth as seen from space. [...] read more
—Source: “The First Photo From Space” By Tony Reichhardt, Air & Space Magazine, November 1st, 2006.

Captain Ronald E. Evans (1933-1990) was a US Navy pilot and an Apollo astronaut. [...] Ronald Evans was command module pilot for the last manned mission to the moon, Apollo 17. He accompanied astronauts Harrison Schmidt and Gene Cernan, and piloted the command module America in lunar orbit while Schmidt and Cernan descended to the Taurus-Littrow Valley on the lunar surface below. There they set up and operated science experiments and collected geological samples. While in orbit, Evans completed a range of scientific tasks. He recorded geological observations and, using hand-held cameras, photographed key lunar features. Read more

See also: Astronaut Bio: Ronald E. Evans, NASA

The world’s first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the Moon. The photo was transmitted to Earth by the United States Lunar Orbiter I and received at the NASA tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid, Spain. This crescent of the Earth was photographed August 23, 1966 at 16:35 GMT when the spacecraft was on its 16th orbit and just about to pass behind the Moon.
—Source: NASA

[December 29, 1968] This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the Moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation, though it is more commonly viewed with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo. Earth is about five degrees left of the horizon in the photo. The unnamed surface features on the left are near the eastern limb of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar horizon is approximately 780 kilometers from the spacecraft. Height of the photographed area at the lunar horizon is about 175 kilometers.
—Source: NASA

Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts; Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders did a live television broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and Moon seen from Apollo 8. Lovell said, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.

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The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.

– Photo by Bernd Nies

Control Room: ”South Wales Police, what’s your emergency?”

Caller: “It’s not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there’s a bright stationary object.”

Control room: ”Right.”

Caller: ”If you’ve got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It’s been there at least half an hour and it’s still there.”

Control: ”It’s been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?”

Caller: ”It’s in the air.”

Control: ”I will send someone up there now to check it out.”

Caller: ”OK.”

The mystery was soon solved, as the exchange between control and an officer at the scene, makes clear.

Control: “Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?”

Officer: ”Yes, it’s the moon. Over.”

– «Police say UFO was just the Moon», BBC News, 4 juillet 2008.

» Via Neatorama

» Dave Fleischer on Wikipedia
» Dancing on the Moon on IMDb

» More works inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

That it is so is a matter of experiential fact. But whether it is so or not is not a question to be settled by producing a microscope or telescope or any recondite observations of any kind. Its evidence stares us all in the face every hour of our lives. Nor is any ingenious reasoning needed to make it plain. If one does not see it, it is for the same reason that some men have not a sense of sin; and there is nothing for it but to be born again and become as a little child. If you do not see it, you have to look upon the world with new eyes. (CP 1.219, 1902)
The writer of a book can do nothing but set down the items of his thought. For the living thought, itself, in its entirety, the reader has to dig into his own soul. I think I have done my part, as well as I can. I am sorry to have left the reader an irksome chore before him. But he will find it worth the doing. (CP 1.221, 1902)

—Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931-1935). Collected Papers Of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vol. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vols. 1–6 eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols. 7–8 ed. Arthur Burks.

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

– KIMMELMAN, Michael (2008). «Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82», New York Times, 14 mai.

– With Georgia Peckham-Krellner, Cupcakes’ best friend, in Bukowski’s kitchen at Carlton Way (photo by Joan Levine Gannij).

and to think, after I’m gone
there will be more days for others, others days,
others night.
dogs walking, trees shaking in
the wind.

I won’t be leaving much.
something to read maybe.

a wild onion in the gutted
road.

Paris in the dark

– Charles Bukowski, A New War, 1997 in SOUNES, Howard (1998). Charles Bukowski. Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, Grove Press, New York.

liweiart.com

11 mars 1942 – Si j’essaie d’approfondir cette «honte prométhéenne», il me semble que son objet fondamental, l’«opprobre fondamental» qui donne à l’homme honte de lui-même, c’est son origine. T. a honte d’être devenu plutôt que d’avoir été fabriqué. Il a honte de devoir son existence – à la différence des produits qui, eux, sont irréprochables parce qu’ils ont été calculés dans les moindre détails – au processus aveugle, non calculé et ancestral de la procréation et de la naissance. Son déshonneur tient donc au fait d’«être né», à sa naissance qu’il estime triviale (exactement comme le ferait le biographe d’un fondateur de religion) pour cette seule raison qu’elle est une naissance. Mais il a honte du caractère obsolète de son origine, il a bien sûr également honte du résultat imparfait et inévitable de cette origine, en l’occurrence lui-même.

– ANDERS, Günther ([1956] 2002). L’Obsolescence de l’homme. Sur l’âme à l’époque de la deuxième révolution industrielle, éd. Encyclopédie des nuisances/Ivrea, Paris, p. 38.

Martijn Hendriks: Give Us Today Our Daily Terror, 2008 - ongoing. Exact copy of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds from which all birds have been removed. 2 min 14 sec excerpt from a single channel video, color, 119 minutes

At about 16,000-17,000 feet we came across a whole series of footprints in the snow, on the lower part of the glacier. There seemed to be two groups, one rather indistinct in outline leading on to the surrounding snowfields. The others were much more distinct with, in places, a markedly individual imprint etched in the 2- to 4-inch covering of snow. We had no means of measuring so after examining them [Eric] Shipton took four photographs: two of the indistinct prints with myself, my footprints, and rucksack beside them for comparison; the other two photographs were of one of the most detailed and distinct group of prints, with my ice ax for scale, and a second one with my booted foot. […] Read more…

In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at “Dextre the Magnificent.” Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order.

– NASA, Astronomy Picture of the Day, «New Space Station Robot Asks to be Called “Dextre the Magnificent”».

Celestis, Inc.(www.celestis.com), the pioneer and global leader in Memorial Spaceflight, announced today that it has reached agreement with two companies to launch payloads containing human cremated remains to the surface of the Moon as soon as 2009.

– Celestis, Memorial Spaceflights, Luna Services, press release, March 26, 2008.

» Space burial (Wikipedia)

» Celestis (Wikipedia)

WASHINGTON - A powerful stellar explosion detected March 19 by NASA’s Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. […] “Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts”, said Swift science team member Judith Racusin of Penn State University in University Park, Pa. […] Read more…

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

» Sir Arthur C. Clark: 90th Birthday Reflections

February 29, 2008: NASA has obtained new high-resolution radar maps of the Moon’s south pole —a region the space agency is considering as a landing site when astronauts return to the Moon in the years ahead. […] read more…

Par Frédéric Vitoux — L’écrivain espagnol raconte, dans Le Vent de la lune, la vie d’un paisible village à l’heure de la conquête spatiale.

Une phrase suffirait pour définir le dernier roman d’Antonio Munoz Molina. La voici. En juillet 1969, au cours de la mission Apollo 11 où Armstrong et Aldrin marchèrent pour la première fois sur la Lune, un adolescent, le fils d’un maraîcher dans un petit village d’Andalousie que le progrès effleurait à peine, s’exaltait seul à cette prodigieuse aventure… C’est du reste toujours comme ça avec les grandes œuvres de la littérature: elles reposent sur une idée de départ, ou un «pitch», comme on dit dans l’audiovisuel, qui s’exprime en quelques mots. Une jolie fille, par exemple, est enlevée à son mari par un étranger, et chacun se met en branle […] lire la suite…

The Great Moonbuggy Race course winds around rockets and other space vehicles including a Saturn Moon Rocket, an engineering test unit of the Space Shuttle with its external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters and a model of the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module). The total length of the course is about 7/10 of one mile and is strewn with miscellaneous lunar-like obstacles distributed randomly over the course. One of the interesting terrains on the course is a lunar crater area in which the life-size replica of the LEM is located.

Attention: Moonbuggy registration for 2008 is now closed! 

– EPSTEIN, Mitch (1998). Untitled, New York, The City serie.

She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice.

God is the voice that says, “I am not here.”

– DeLILLO, Don (2007). Falling Man, New York: Scribner, p. 236.