Help Kickstart LightSail



Planetary Society’s first ever Kickstarter is up and it is already sailing toward it’s goal. In just 24 hours they are halfway to reaching their 200K goal! This will fill the existing budget gap the Society is currently operating under and will make LightSail a fully funded before it’s first planned launch later this month.

A part of the rewards in the offing is Chopshopstore’s Poster #6 from their Historic Robotic Spacecraft Series. However, about 2/3 of all the large scale screenprints are already spoken for. So if you want to help the Society’s first campaign as well as secure #6 in this series — do it asap.

Malmer’s Model

It is hard to imagine that this is a 3D model by Matthias Malmer. Not a series of 120 images released by the Rosetta team and stitched into a movie, but rendered from just 4 images. I processed this quick animated gif and looking at the individual frames, cannot detect the difference between the individual frames and still images taken by Rosetta.

Check Out Kurzgesagt

Especially if you have kids with an appreciation for science. These guys regularly do great animations that explain complex science — appropriate for all ages. They also promise a series of cool videos about cool moons in our solar system. So far they have only covered our own, next up… Mars’ Deimos and Phobos.

The Cassini Mission in Stark B&W

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Gorgeous idea — taking the raw images from the Cassini mission and making a long flip-book style movie. Leaving in the flaws and noise of raw images happens to add a nice stylistic touch to the overall feeling of the film. The nature of multiple images taken by the spacecraft often with large and small gaps in time coincidentally makes some engaging jumpy into smooth segments.