Sigh, indeed.

Amazing to think that we landed on the Moon just 42 years after the first major intercontinental flight, and that we are now 42 years after that.

NASA's Image of the Day shows some stunning photos occasionally, and this is one of them.

Endeavour docked to the ISS, taken from Soyuz (click for bigger)

I was struck by the caption of today's NASA Image of the Day. Here is a small copy of the image, and I've copied the caption below as it is hard to read on this small image:

NASA does do much earth science, but it's within its purvue of space: satellites and so on.

It looks like NASA is doing whatever it can to keep its budget even when it is nothing to do with its mission statement.

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You may know that NASA's Mars Exploration rover Spirit has been bogged in one place since about April 2009. It broke through the crust into soft sand, got bogged and then one wheel stopped working.

Copyright NASA
Click for larger image in new window

From what I read, they're not hopeful of freeing it. The issue now is that dust is accumulating on the solar panels and, with winter approaching, they are not confident that the batteries will recharge. Which means the end of it.

It's too early to call for closing-drinks, but it's getting near.

Interesting to see a plastic shopping bag, and a well-used track heading off to the local shops and a pub, no doubt. That's where we'll have the last drinks.

It's done a great job. It's design brief was for an extendable 90     [continued...]

I recently wrote about converting text to an image, and gave a brief example using image magick. To recap, here's the command-line:

One very useful way of using this text-to-image feature is to add a caption to an image. We will go through this and use NASA's Image of the Day as an example. (In actuality, image of the working week give or take a day. No image on the weekend, I'm afraid.)

If you're not familiar with it, NASA's Image of the Day is a high-scale photo released by NASA's PR department, usually chosen for its stunning imagery or its relevence to a science mission. It's been going for years and is a bit of an institution among the astronomy and science set.

The image used to be available on it's own page, along with some explanatory text and photo credits below. Having its own page meant that you could store a simple bookmark, which would never change, to view it every day.     [continued...]