Author Archives: Chompsky

‘Beyond Noh’ – a hypnotically rhythmical cycle though 3,745 masks: from ancient painted faces to pop culture mugs and the ubiquitous face-pants of the pandemic.

Created by mask enthusiast Patrick Smith, the sequence combines photos from museum archives, galleries, crowdsourced submissions and Smith’s own private collection. He sez of it:

To me, masks are an interesting way to view humanity. It seems to me that every culture in the history of the world has participated in some form of mask making, whether it’s for performance, ritual, protest, or utility.

colossal

Behold: Voyager Station – the solar system’s first space hotel, due to open in 2026. Along with one-sixth earth gravity suites, villas, restaurant, bar, gym, and an entertainment venue, the resort will offer spacewalks, low-grav basketball and a zero-g experience at the central docking hub.

Voyager Station will be constructed by robots in orbit and fitted with 44 autonomous “emergency return vehicles” for safe evacuation should something untoward happen.

Currently accepting reservations for a TripAdvisor-bothering €4,200,000 per three-day excursion.

You’ve seen Elysium. You know how this ends.

uncrate

Behold: the Canoo – an all-electric pickup truck/‘lifestyle vehicle’ competing in the boxy-but-good sector with the Tesla Cybertruck with preorders from mid-2021 and a 2023 launch.

Built on the Los Angeles-based company’s modular EV platform, the pickup will have dual or rear motor configurations up to 600bhp and a 320km range. The bed has a pull-out section for hauling large cargo, a front cargo area that folds into a work table and workspaces folding out from the sides.

Price as yet tba.

uncrate

Behold: a faint band of light reaching above the western horizon just after sunset last Sunday in rural Illinois. But what could it mean? To wit:

Taken from an old farmstead, the luminous glow is zodiacal light, prominent in the west after sunset during planet Earth’s northern hemisphere spring. On that clear evening the band of zodiacal light seems to engulf bright yellowish Mars and the Pleiades star cluster. Their close conjunction is in the starry sky above the old barn’s roof. Zodiacal light is sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust particles that lie near the Solar System’s ecliptic plane. Of course all the Solar System’s planets orbit near the plane of the ecliptic, within the band of zodiacal light. But zodiacal light and Mars may have a deeper connection. A recent analysis of serendipitous detections of interplanetary dust by the Juno spacecraft during its Earth to Jupiter voyage suggest Mars is the likely source of the dust that produces zodiacal light.

(Image: Joshua Rhoades)

apod

Behold: NGC 1499, also known as the California nebula, for obvious reasons. To wit:

Could Queen Calafia‘s mythical island exist in space? Perhaps not, but by chance the outline of this molecular space cloud echoes the outline of the state of California, USA. Our Sun has its home within the Milky Way’s Orion Arm, only about 1,000 light-years from the California Nebula […] The classic emission nebula is around 100 light-years long. On the featured image, the most prominent glow of the California Nebula is the red light characteristic of hydrogen atoms recombining with long lost electrons, stripped away (ionised) by energetic starlight. The star most likely providing the energetic starlight that ionises much of the nebular gas is the bright, hot, bluish Xi Persei just to the right of the nebula. A regular target for astrophotographers, the California Nebula can be spotted with a wide-field telescope under a dark sky toward the constellation of Perseus, not far from the Pleiades.

(Image: Yannick Akar)

apod