All Entries Tagged With: "picture"
Billions and Billions of Inspirations
As a young child I wasn’t encouraged to watch too much television, but “Cosmos” was one exception to the weeknight homework rule. One night a week my brother and I sat together on a couch in Rhode Island to marvel at the possibilities of outer space as presented by a certain turtlenecked professor. If the universe was as big as he imagined, then surely life existed in other places and it was merely a matter of time before we connected with that life. In years when my daydreams ran wildly with the childhood pictures of nuclear winter and nightmares of being the Only One Left, Sagan’s fears were the same… but his questions, worded as only he could pronounce them, sparked in me thoughts of friendly Others, shared technology that would lead to a cure for cancer, and cosmic peace summits and universal treaties.
He made science fun and accessible, his enthusiasm was contagious, he was cool. Around that time (1979?) I wrote a journal entry proclaiming that I would go to Cornell and study with Sagan and plan a Mars mission. Well, I’d realize only a teency bit of that dream… but wouldn’t you know Sagan’s own student Steve Squyres WOULD lead the mission to Mars.
Jennifer at jenimi sent along this excellent picture and testimonial. For more please read here.
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More from flickr
If you search flickr for just sagan and begin scrolling through the matching tags, the first thing you’ll learn is that there are a lot of cats named Sagan, or else one particularly ubiquitous tabby. Lost within a thousand photos of pets and children are a few that I’m partial to, like the graffiti posted here already, and the Dr. Arroway costume in the previous post. There’s also this one, a still from the video for White & Nerdy, I think. I want that t-shirt, Weird Al. I also enjoy the one below because DC is my hometown, and it’s always nice to see a Sagan quote on the street: 
More flickr later.
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Arroway Interpreted.
Mr. Atrocity at flickr asked us to post this interpretation of Ellie Arroway, the protagonist from Dr. Sagan’s only novel, Contact.
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SIRTF
Living as I do with a computer always seeming at an arm’s distance, it is no wonder that I find myself peering into the depths of the Internet, and it is also no wonder that I am constantly amazed by the diversity found within the pools of common interest that collect.
This project-in-Sagan has provided an incredible opportunity to dip my hand into this particular pool and by turning over the different stones found therein I continue to be gleefully pleased by the variety of peoples that Doctor Carl Sagan has touched.
Students, teachers, pilots, musicians, artists, fathers, mothers, and the list goes on and fractal-ly combines and grows.
Just now I came across a profile Dr. William Reach that is accessible through NASA’s page for the Spitzer Space Telescope.
In it Dr. Reach writes:
I’ve always wanted to be an astronomer. Thinking about what “always” means, I do have a clear memory, which may be partially mixed up with Carl Sagan’s memories described in his fabulous Cosmos book and TV show, of looking at the stars and wanting to know what they were when I was little. The only real “evidence” of this early desire is a signal event when my grandfather took me to the planetarium when I was 5 years old and living in New York. They showed stars and galaxies with different shapes and colors, but also some sensationalistic UFO stuff. The best part was when they did an experiment of hurling a shiny hubcap into the sky. The photograph of that hubcap looked just like some of the UFO pictures, and a sceptic was born. Ever since then, I preferred the natural over the supernatural.
Similar to all heroes, Dr. Sagan’s influence isn’t always direct. Sure Sagan’s passion and clarity moved people to become scientists and think skeptically about the world around them, but the influence of people like Sagan can also be more graceful, re-enforcing the desire from within that strives to understand the world around us.
When Celebrating Sagan it is also important to remember the science teachers, grandfathers, and free thinkers that we all know, who helped us to grow as people, and set the stage for our desire to learn evermore.
Click on the image to learn more about Dr. Reach.
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Looking a Little Glum
I was fascinated. His voice, vocabulary, and delivery – they entranced me. Then, here he is, talking about “Comet Halley” and the like, when he starts leveling all of these unsolicited moral judgments. I was taken aback, and thought about crazy little science videos they used to make us watch in elementary school.
So here he is, talking innocuously about the history of man’s knowledge of the planet Venus. Throughout the show, he seemed to revel, not in the facts, but in past and future errors – he took a kind of delight, gave a kind of wry smile each time he was able to indulge a little prickishness into the learning.
I love how he anachronistically mocks ancient science.
I found out only later that this is Carl Sagan. He’s a gem.
Excerpted from kittenry‘s flickr page.
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Sagan Memorial Station.
After landing on Mars on July 4, 1997, the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft underwent a name change. Responsible for bringing the robot rover, Sojourner, to the red planet, the now stationary Pathfinder would heretofore be called the Sagan Memorial Station. Serving as a hub for the one-foot-tall rover, Sagan Memorial Station can be seen in this photograph from Mars.
Check out this image for a glimpse of the little Sojourner at work.
Thanks to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.
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Don Davis
Don Davis, space painter, has some recollections on his site about his relationship with Carl Sagan, and how Carl had “a pivotal effect on the vitality and development of space art through the Cosmos experience.” It’s definitely worth reading. There’s also a lot of great photos on the page, like the one on the left, which I haven’t seen anywhere else. Here is a brief excerpt enticing you to follow the link:
I first met Carl in the summer of 1972, through the efforts of Paul Fox, who worked at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where I hung out with people I knew there. I visited a commune known as ‘The Land’ atop the hills overlooking the Stanford campus, and brought with me a new painting of Mars and Phobos based on mariner 9 data. I partied and talked, then made my way to the end of one of the rooms where I saw Carl peering very closely at that painting. A short time later, we were introduced, and he complimented me on my work. He was editor of Icarus at that time, and when I reminded him of the Lunar evolution paintings recently appearing in a paper by Don Wilhelms, my supervisor at the U.S. Geological Survey, Carl related how he worked especially hard to reproduce them as well as he could. I remember asking him if he ever wanted to write science fiction, and he said that some of his colleagues thought that was what he was doing now! He gave a slide show filled with gorgeous imagery, of which he always had the highest quality examples.
Here’s the link again.
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Golden Record
The image of the ‘golden record’ that was placed on both Voyager spacecrafts has come to represent many of the attributes, both cultural and scientific, that Carl Sagan spent his life promoting.
The 12 inch gold-plated disk contains a message, a telling of the human story. On it one can find the sounds from nature (from waves crashing on the shore, to birds chirping, and the roll of thunder), spoken greetings in 55 human languages, and musical compositions from around the globe. Additionally the disks contain images from Earth and instructions on how to use the disks. The contents of these records were chosen by a NASA committee lead by Carl Sagan.
Voyager 1 left our solar system in 2004. Although this spacecraft is currently further from Earth than any other man made object excepting Pioneers 10 and 11, it will still be 40,000 years before it is in the proximity of any planetary system.
By placing a message on craft that won’t be intercepted till well after the demise of human kind, both Sagan and NASA exhibited a rare form of public pride in humanity — the notion that even though humans are a tiny and rare occurrence, seemingly insignificant on the galactic scale, our story is worth telling.
To quote Sagan: The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.
For more detail consult NASA’s page on the golden record.
To experience the content of the golden records check out re-lab‘s site.
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