Forward Thinking Graveyard

That way it will be so much easier for all them young people to take selfies with their favorite tombstones, consarn it! These kids today!

I Like Pluto

When I was a kid in middle school I read a great Robert Heinlein book called Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, wherein a kid wins an old, castoff spacesuit in a contest by a cornflakes company and promptly is kidnapped by aliens while wearing it in his backyard.

One scene I remember vividly to this very day (and Heinlein books were very good at painting vivid scenes in my mind) is where Kip -- the hero -- almost freezes to death while trying to set off a rescue beacon and save a good alien he calls 'Mother Thing' while outside in the liquid nitrogen snow of Pluto.

This caused me to be fascinated with Pluto for the rest of my
life. This was partly because it was supposed to be a solidly frozen world, which conjured up images of a glistening glassy sphere in dark space. A crystal ball in space would be very cool!

Pluto

Photo by Eurico Zimbres

But it was also because the place was so far away that nobody could see what it looked like. It was just a tiny blip of light that slowly moved against the inky background. That's how Clyde Tombaugh discovered it: flipping back and forth between two photos of space and noticing this little light that cruised along at the outer reaches of the solar system.

But in six months that will all change with the arrival of the New Horizons space probe. This July 14th it will buzz by Pluto taking pictures from about 8500 miles away and aiming a battery of scientific instruments at it.When it's finished, and wandering off into the Kuiper Belt, we should know a whole lot more about that little blip of light.

"To Boldly Go Where Lots of People Have Gone Before!"

Photo from  The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth

We've had people in space since 1961, and they've all been taking pictures with wild abandon ever since -- even in the dark! NASA now has almost 2 billion photos stored up at, and about 1/3rd of them were taken at night, which in the space flight biz is whenever you're on the dark side of the Earth.

But unfortunately in all their training our camera-happy astronauts have never learned to jot down what it was that they were trying to capture for posterity. The end result is that we now have 666 million high tech photos of black. Black with a splotch of yellow and white in the middle, and no idea what they're of.

Then there's the fact that until 2003, they were mostly blurry.

And so now, citizens of planet earth, a lonely space agency turns their eyes to you and asks for your help. They figure that if you happen to live in that blotch of yellow and white you're more likely to recognize it, or at least can tell the difference between that and a random picture of some stars. Computers are lousy at doing that but we humans are great, so rather than building a robot to do this NASA needs your eyeballs. But if you don't feel like doing that job, the also have some nice grunt work for you sorting photos into buckets.

Interested in widening the frontiers of knowledge? Sign up at www.CitiesAtNight.org.

The Mysterious Selfie Man

Who is this man?

And you thought selfies were just a phenomenon of the iPhone age! But in ancient times they had a wonder of modern (for then) engineering called the Photo Booth, and anybody with spare change and the gumption could take as many primitive selfies as they liked.

Most folks were satisfied with just a few. It wasn't the most convenient thing, after all. Some people though caught the selfie fever, including the strain popular in our time of taking the same photo of yourself repeatedly over time so you can watch yourself get old.

Recently, a treasure trove of mysterious, ancient selfies were unearthed in an antique shop and are currently on display at Rutgers University. 450 of them, and all lovingly framed. Historians are digging into them because no one has any idea who this man was or why he was so persistent.  Did he mean to leave them behind as a small legacy of his existence? Or was he just OCD? It's an enigma.

Look closely -- is this your Grandpa?  If so, give the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers a call.

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UPDATE:  Good news! Selfie Man has been identified! It turns out he was a happy-go-lucky gentleman named Franklyn Swantek who owned Swantek Photo Service, Michigan's biggest photo booth business until he passed away in the mid-1980s. Apparently, he took all those pictures of himself to check whether his photo booths were working right.