Magnificent space posters take you on a solar system tour

Friday, September 11, 2015, 12:04 PM - Plan your solar system destinations with these magnificent space posters, SpaceX offers a peak inside their Crew Dragon capsule, and what a solar eclipse looks like from the other side of the Moon. It's Science Pics of the Week!

Touring the solar system through art

While walking the halls of Fan Expo 2015, one artist's display forced a double-take out of me, as not only did his work seem familiar, but it also captured the amazing and beautiful variety of our solar system in a way that brings to mind what travel posters may look like in the future.

Watch the video above for a brief preview of Toronto artist Ron Guyatt's "Space Destinations" series, and check out his beautiful "Infographics" trilogy below:

What started Guyatt's artistic journey through the universe?

"Growing up I always enjoyed astronomy and as an adult I realized I never explored space within my artwork. After some thought I decided I wanted to make a series of posters for locations on Mars. Something like a travel poster but a little less of an advertisement."
"I ended up calling them Space Destination Posters, and shortly after posting them online they had spread around the web and were featured on several websites. Realizing I had significantly underestimated peoples love of space I decided to go back and design a full collection of destinations throughout the solar system!"
"In the end I created designs for 60 Destinations ... each based on real locations or events that could be visited or experienced by humans someday."

Be sure to check out the rest of his posters on FabledCreative.com, where you can also view the artwork of his talented wife, Indy, as well!

SpaceX will take people to space in style!

Check out the control consoles of any space capsule currently in use today and it seems that we haven't advanced that much since the Apollo era. However, SpaceX is giving us a sneak-peak into their Crew Dragon capsule this week, and it looks like they're taking us on a tremendous leap from Apollo 11 to the Enterprise-D!

Elon Musk's private space company first unveiled the Crew Dragon back in May of 2014, with a launch date set for sometime in 2017. It is being designed to fly seven crew and/or passengers to and from the International Space Station, and rather than relying on parachutes and a water landing, the capsule is intended to make a powered landing on each return to Earth, with the use of landing thrusters. 

If SpaceX holds to their schedule, theirs will be the first crewed launches from the United States since the last space shuttle launch, in July of 2011.

A solar eclipse from the other side

NASA has treated us to several unfamiliar views of the Moon recently, first showing us how the far side of the moon looks as it goes through the various phases, then what a lunar eclipse looks like from the Moon, and even the far side of the Moon transiting across the face of the Earth from the perspective of NASA and NOAA's new DSCOVR satellite.

Now, as a partial solar eclipse becomes visible this weekend from areas of south Africa, the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, NASA is presenting a long-range preview of the August 21, 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. That eclipse will pass directly across the United States, but in the video below, they again offer a view from a perspective we're just not used to seeing.

According to NASA:

During a total solar eclipse, the moon completely blocks the sun’s incredibly bright face. This is possible because, though the sun’s diameter is about 400 times the moon’s diameter, the sun is also about 400 times farther away from us than the moon is, making them appear to be approximately the same size from Earth. With the face obscured, the sun’s atmosphere—the corona, which is about a million times dimmer than the face—becomes visible to eclipse-watchers. It was only because of total solar eclipses that early scientists could observe the sun’s wispy atmosphere, providing some of the earliest insight into our dynamic sun. Most modern solar observations of the corona are taken with an instrument called a coronagraph, which uses a disk to block the sun in a camera’s field of view, but coronagraphs obscure part of the inner corona as well—which doesn't happen during a total eclipse.
“During a total solar eclipse, the moon is a near-perfect fit for the sun’s disk, so almost all of the corona is visible,” said Jack Ireland, a solar physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
This means that a total eclipse can provide fantastic views of the sun’s inner corona, showing the large loops of solar material that dance through it. These eclipse events provide Earth-based scientists and photographers the chance to take more detailed images of the corona than space-based satellite missions can.

Want to watch the partial solar eclipse taking place on the night of September 12/13? Check out the live feed right from our website.

Sources: Fabled Creative | SpaceX/NASA Blogs | NASA Goddard