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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

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Looking at Jupiter’s southern hemisphere

Jupiter's southern hemisphere

Cool image time! The image on the right, reduced to post here, shows Jupiter’s south pole and much of its southern hemisphere. It was taken during Juno’s last orbital fly-by of the gas giant’s cloud tops last week, and has been enhanced by Fevig-58, an ordinary citizen who downloaded the raw image and then uploaded his enhanced version to the Juno website.

It is definitely worthwhile taking a close look at the full resolution image. At the top its shows the horizontally banded Jupiter at equatorial- and mid-latitudes that has been that planet’s familiar face for centuries. In the middle is the transitional region from those horizontal bands to the chaotic polar regions. And at the bottom is the pole, where there the storms appear to follow no pattern and form a mish-mash.

One thing about Jupiter’s pole. It appears very different than Saturn’s. While I am certain they will find a vortex of some kind there, so far there is no indication of a coherent jet stream, as seen by Saturn’s hexagon. This once again demonstrates the one unbroken rule of planetary science that has been found with every planetary mission to every planetary body, whether they be pebbles, asteroids, dwarf planets, gas giants, or moons: Every single one of them is different and unique. They might fall into a single category, say gas giants, but each has its own unique features that make it different from every other member of that category.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • eddie willers

    I wish Vincent van Gogh had seen this.

  • Dale Martin

    Pareidolia jackpot, Heronymus Bosche monsters from hell, shy virgin, three dwarfs against the wind, lounging Greek figures in the brown band, one with a fish tale….This is the best so far, and lot more fun that looking at rocks on Mars..Van Gogh would have loved this, it is really rich in imagery without Absinthe !!

  • wayne

    Dale:
    HA!
    Good stuff.

    To paraphrase Sigmund Freud (or was it Groucho Marx?), “Sometimes a cigar, is just a cigar.”
    (With or without Absinthe.)
    :)

  • jburn

    Wow, I hear the roar of music and sound effects from the 2001: Space Odyssey, etc. Clarke, Kubrick, Van Gogh — all would have loved and struggled to grasp the magnitude of these images.

  • wayne

    First Science From Juno at Jupiter
    NASA teleconference Audio with Visuals
    JPL
    5-25-17
    https://youtu.be/6o9FiTf1vZE
    (1:08:48)

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