‘Supermoon’ Alert: Biggest Full Moon of 2012 Occurs This Week
The moon will officially become full Saturday (May 5) at 11:35 p.m. EDT. And because this month’s full moon coincides with the moon’s perigee — its closest approach to Earth — it will also be the year’s biggest.
The moon will swing in 221,802 miles (356,955 kilometers) from our planet, offering skywatchers a spectacular view of an extra-big, extra-bright moon, nicknamed a supermoon.
And not only does the moon’s perigee coincide with full moon this month, but this perigee will be the nearest to Earth of any this year, as the distance of the moon’s close approach varies by about 3 percent, according to meteorologist Joe Rao, SPACE.com’s skywatching columnist. This happens because the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular.
CREDIT: Tim McCord
The Descriptive Camera
Matt Richardson created a camera which doesn’t deliver a photo but a description of the photo it made. Eh what? After the shutter button is pressed, the Descriptive Camera sends the photo to Amazons Mechanical Turk for processing. Somewhere someone receives this photo and writes a short description about what’s on the photo, that person receives a small payment for this task. As soon as that text comes back, a thermal printer outputs the result in the style of a polaroid print.
How cool is that!
Art of Science by Stephen Gaeta. In this project, Gaeta uses passages from significant historical science texts to form his images.
World Travels of a Giant Duck
Florentijn Hofman is a Dutch artist based out of Rotterdam. He’s internationally renowned for his large-scale sculptures which often originate from recognizable, everyday objects. In his ongoing Rubber Duck series, Florentijn takes the iconic rubber duck (that children around the world can identify), and takes it to a massive scale. The biggest one so far was spotted in St-Nazaire, France at a towering 26 meters (105 ft).
In Hofman’s own words:
The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate people and doesn’t have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!
How can a giant inflatable rubber duck not brighten one’s day? It’s big, happy and awesome. Check out the travels of Hofman’s giant inflatable rubber duck below. Enjoy!
Soviet Science Propaganda Posters
Science and communism are inseparable! That is the basic message of this amazing collection of Soviet space propaganda posters that will be auctioned off on Apr. 22.
Featuring Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, the first and second humans to reach space, along with Krushchev, and of course Lenin, these posters glorify the the Soviet Union’s technological prowess and importance in the world, and in the universe. Many of the posters focus on the role the workers played in the space race, and the ordinary citizen’s duty to feel immensely proud of Mother Russia’s accomplishments.
The posters have messages such as “Comrades! Soviet Land Has From Now On Become the Shore of the Universe!” or “The Tenth Planet Symbolizes the Victory of Communism!” and “Be Proud, Soviet, You Opened a Path from the Earth to the Stars!” One of my favorites is “Lenin Is With Us, Immortal and Majestic, the Thoughts, Words and Deeds of Ilyich Are Propagating Through the Universe.”
