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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.

 

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First very short movie from Jupiter

Using two Juno images of the same area, taken at slightly different times, scientists have produced what might be the first very short gif animation showing the changing circulation patterns in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The animation is only two images long, so in a sense it isn’t a movie but a blink comparison. Moreover, the difference in circulation patterns between the two images is not strongly evident, partly because the two images have different resolution and somewhat different lighting. Nonetheless, this animation foretells what will should become possible with time, as Juno’s mission continues. Eventually its images will show the changes in the gas giant’s storms.

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

2 comments

  • wodun

    Interesting, and also slightly nauseating, but I wish they would release a gif of Jupiter’s storms taken over several hours. Watching the clouds move is like staring into moving water or a fire, mesmerizing!

    There are some out there but not great. Haven’t been searching regularly for them from this current mission.

  • wodun: They can’t release the movie you’d like to see, because Juno doesn’t provide them the images to do it. When the spacecraft is far from Jupiter (the majority of the time) its camera doesn’t have the resolution to see the details necessary. When it flies in close, it only gets a quick look. Over time, from orbit to orbit (with the close flybys every 53 days or so) they will hopefully be able to compile something, but another restriction is that they don’t see the same part of Jupiter with each flyby.

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