Patrick

Artemis II images

Posted on by Patrick
"Earthset"—the Earth setting behind the moon, taken by the astronauts aboard Integrity during the Artemis II mission.

This is large­ly a “note to self” post, but oth­ers might be inter­est­ed too: NASA has a gallery on their web­site ded­i­cat­ed to images from Artemis II’s lunar fly­by.

Here’s the full text from the “Earth­set” image above:

Earth­set cap­tured through the Ori­on space­craft win­dow at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, dur­ing the Artemis II crew’s fly­by of the Moon. A mut­ed blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar sur­face. The dark por­tion of Earth is expe­ri­enc­ing night­time. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are vis­i­ble over the Aus­tralia and Ocea­nia region. In the fore­ground, Ohm crater has ter­raced edges and a flat floor inter­rupt­ed by cen­tral peaks. Cen­tral peaks form in com­plex craters when the lunar sur­face, liq­ue­fied on impact, splash­es upwards dur­ing the crater’s formation.

Image Cred­it: NASA

You can down­load this and oth­er high-res­o­lu­tion Artemis II images from the gallery.

April First

Posted on by Patrick
An image of several explosions all in a row

My sin­gle favourite April Fools’ Day joke came about some­time in the first decade of this cen­tu­ry. An online enter­tain­ment news source post­ed a sto­ry about how Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun tetral­o­gy[1]Sort of. I guess it depends how you count Urth of the New Sun. had final­ly—final­ly—been picked up by Hol­ly­wood for an adaptation.

It was to be direct­ed by one Michael Bay.

(If you know why this is fun­ny, then you are—like me—a nerd.)

I just remem­bered a sec­ond great April Fools’ Day joke. Back in the day when X was still Twit­ter, and was only kind of ter­ri­ble instead of being a full-on Nazi bar, there was a par­o­dy account called @stats_canada[2]They’re still there, but haven’t post­ed since 2021.. They would post ridicu­lous statistics—eg, “50% of look­ing smart while watch­ing the Olympics is just mut­ter­ing “poor form” every few minutes”.

One year, on April 1st, they post­ed noth­ing but accu­rate Cana­di­an statistics.

Head­er image by Luke Jerne­j­cic on Unsplash.

Foot­notes

Foot­notes
↑1 Sort of. I guess it depends how you count Urth of the New Sun.
↑2 They’re still there, but haven’t post­ed since 2021.

Out in the dark

Posted on by Patrick
Star trails (with airplane trails and satellite tracks)

Kath­leen came home from a cof­fee-with-the-ladies evening and said, “You should go take some pic­tures.” The sky was most­ly clear and the night was warm, so I did.

The sky to the north was pret­ty busy, as you can prob­a­bly tell from the star trails at the top of this post. I was about a mile from the end of the run­way at the Bran­don air­port, and I think some­one was doing night take­off and land­ing prac­tice, because a prop plane—maybe a Her­cules, but I’m not sure it was quite loud enough—passed through my shot three or four times. And then there are all the satel­lite tracks, my word.

I also man­aged to get Jupiter and two of its moons (Io and Ganymede, if I’m read­ing this right).

Jupiter, with Io and Ganymede visible

And Ori­on was nice and bright, too. This is a stack of three pho­tos, all tak­en at 50mm, f/1.8, 10 sec­onds, ISO 400. I wish the focus was slight­ly better.

Orion

All told I was out there for about an hour. As I was pack­ing up my gear, I heard a coy­ote start yipping.