Wholesome Imagistic Goodness

The sad truth is you can't rely on televised news to usher forth anything remotely interesting or educational or anything to remind one that not everything is completely falling apart from the ground up these days. And maybe they can't, maybe they don't have the time. You'd think in the cushiony, consequence-free ether of existence in which 24-hours news syndications thrive they could somehow manage to fit in something that wasn't entirely doom-and-gloom-related, but I suppose not. Instead they toss (more like sneak) these stories onto the Science or Space or Technology sections on their websites, as if anyone who wasn't already interested in those topics was going to take a peek. In any event, this weekend was the first Total Solar Eclipse of the new year. And while those of us in the States couldn't see it, that didn't stop others from chasing after it and snapping some incredible photography in the South Pacific on which the eclipse set its gleaming, electric stage. While the total Solar Eclipse was exclusive in visibility to Easter Island, Cook Island, and surrounding areas of Southern Chile and Argentina, other parts of the Eclipse, like the crescent phase pictured below, could be seen from a large portion of Western South America.

Valparaiso, Chile

Moving from the sunkissed beaches of the Pacific Isles to the cold chambering frontier of the cosmos, where the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe has since February of 2004 been commissioned deep into the universe to ultimately rendezvous and study the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, while in the meantime grabbing as much photographic data on its passings and mishaps as possible. On Saturday, Rosetta flew by the asteroid Lutetia and managed to capture what might be some of the most detailed images of an asteroid to date.

The crater-pulverized, pockmarked irregular shaped rock is likely leftover from the birth of the solar system. "Tonight we have seen a remnant of the solar system's creation," Holger Sierks of the Planck Institute said.

The Rosetta probe passed by the eccentric and rotating rock at the dizzying speed of 9 miles per second and inched within 1,965 miles of Lutetia in the asteroids orbital path around Mars. 6 years and 4 months into its mission thus far, the hope with Rosetta is that it will help unlock the secrets of how our solar system looked before planets formed, 4600 million years ago when nothing other than teems of comets and asteroids surrounded the sun. If things work out as predicted, the Rosetta probe will meet with the Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, upon which it will place a lander and the two will then journey together piggybacked, harpooned to each other; they'll speed through space for several months as they approach Jupiter's orbit and then head for the sun, on which Rosetta will finally touch down after many years of intergalactic voyaging to take samples of our solar system's governing star, by far its chief component and its centerpiece, one of our main sources of light as well as many of our problems--the same sun without which we would not even exist.


Just as I was writing all that I received an update with another picture. An even more beautiful one, in my opinion, thanks to its scope and distance and frigid emptiness. The European Space Agency website has the rest of the images and a remarkable video to boot.

Lutetia--soaring, peeling layers through space--with Saturn way off the in the background, just hanging out, keeping it real.