Exploration - Blog Posts
Did You Know the Natural History Museum held human remains?!
NO. 1
Robert Peary, the famous adventurer, and explorer traveled to Greenland around 1897. There, he studied Inuit survival strategies and proved that Greenland was an island. But this isn’t about him, but about the group of Inuit descent he deceived to become famous. This is about Minik Wallace, a small boy that grew up in America because of Peary's lie.
NO. 2
Robert Peary invited the Inuit to the Natural History Museum. A group of six was chosen to go: Minik’s father, Quisk, was a renowned hunter, then the shaman Atangana (ca. 1840–1898) with her husband, renowned hunter Nuktaq (ca. 1848–1898), their adoptive daughter Aviaq (ca. 1885–1898) and the young adult Uisaakassak, the fiancé of Aviaq. The adults did not understand the purpose of the trip, but some wanted to travel. They were told that while in America, they would receive gifts, tools, and weapons. Not to mention the promise of being able to return back to Greenland after. Instead, when they arrived in September in New York, they were exploited like objects and specimens. The museum staff did not house them in a safe environment but instead made them stay in their basement. In the light of day, over 2,000 people paid for tickets to see the Inuit group. Truly, the new world was not what they expected it to be, and Peary did little to help them. Four of the group succumbed to tuberculosis, including Minik’s father, and were taken to Bellevue Hospital, and died, unfortunately, leaving Minik alone.
NO. 3
On February 17, 1898, Minimik's father passed away. Minik begged for a proper burial for his father with the traditional Inuit burial rites. The museum staff staged a fake burial, filling the coffin with stones for weight, and placing a stuffed body inside. They performed the burial for Minik’s benefit. The staff stole the body to research, and studying the dead would be impossible if their 6ft in the ground. The body of Quisuk was de-fleshed and his skeleton was sent to the Natural History Museum for display. William Wallace adopted the boy and raised him like his own son, but got fired from his job in 1901. In 1906, he found out from a newspaper that the skeleton of his father was being displayed. In Wallace’s own words, "He was coming home from school with my son Willie one snowy afternoon when he suddenly began to cry. 'My father is not in his grave,' he said, 'his bones are in the museum.' "We questioned him and found out how he had learned the truth. But after that, he was never the same boy. He became morbid and restless. Often we would see him crying, and sometimes he would not speak for days. "We did our best to cheer him up, but it was no use. His heart was broken. He had lost faith in the new people he had come among."Minik, with the support of his adopted father, urged the museum to give back the skeleton of his father.'' The museum staff denied his many requests to reclaim his father’s bones. They evaded the questions of having Inuit skeletons displayed in the gallery. Minik was never able to reclaim his father's bones.
NO. 4
In 1909, Minik returned to Greenland as an adult, but felt more alienated there than in the U.S. Minik had forgotten his native language and had to learn how to hunt. "Why am I no longer fit to live where I was born? Not fit to live where I was kidnapped?" "Why am I an experiment there and here, and tormented since the great white pirate interfered with nature and left me a helpless orphan, young, abandoned, 10,000 miles from home? I don't think both ends and the middle of the Earth are worth the price that has been paid to almost find one pole." Minik returned to live in the states again in 1916, but caught the influenza flu. He died on October 29, 1918, and it wasn’t until 1993 did the body of Minik’s father and the remains of the others were returned to Greenland for their burial. Read Give Me My Father's Body: The Story of Minik, the New York Eskimo to honor Minik, his father, and the comminity of Polar Eskimoes.
NASA's Webb Telescope just dropped this INSANE image of a star-forming region called NGC 604
March 9, 2024, NASA's Webb Telescope just dropped this INSANE image of a star-forming region called NGC 604, located a whopping 2.73 million light-years away in our neighboring Triangulum Galaxy (aka M33)!
Want to dive deeper? Check out the full article ➡️ https://www.jameswebbdiscovery.com/discoveries/james-webb-telescope-sheds-light-on-the-chaotic-cradle-of-stars-in-ngc-604
#JWST #NASA #Space #Stars #NGC604 #TriangulumGalaxy #StarFormation #Cosmology #Astrophysics #Science #Astronomy #Universe #Exploration #Learning #Knowledge
Lanzamiento del telescopio "X-ray Polarimetry Explorer" (IXPE) en el Falcon 9 de SpaceX, cuyo objetivo es estudiar los rayos X liberados por los agujeros negros y estrellas de neutrones.
Crédito: Matt Cutshall
https://instagram.com/booster_buddies
https://twitter.com/Booster_Buddies
https://nexthorizonsspaceflight.com
~Antares
The Exploration of the Colorado river. Vintage copy :)
Follow link to become the owner of it. I sell on Poshmark & Amazon.
One of the rooms of the nazi bunker in Pallasstrasse, Berlin. Totally dark, the only light was the flash of my camera. The bunker is currently closed. Some history at http://goo.gl/WuRFg9 - Google Street View https://goo.gl/maps/EB6G0
This nazi bunker in Berlin is open only for two days every year, and the entrance is allowed only to 20 people (I was one of them). It appeared in the movie "Wings of desire".
Bashar: On Astral Projection
⭐️ Likes and reblogs appreciated! Thank you ❤️
❄️ “Whooooo! Now this is an occasion! What’s the word? Ultra-mega-epic!”
🌙 #peony #pokemon #pokemonswordshield #pokemonswsh #pokemontwilightwings #pokemoncrowntundra #crowntundra #snow #explorer #pokemontrainer #pokemonpeony
Displaced, Deserted...Degraded?
Another library institution is school libraries, which if not more crucial to a community to a local library are at least equal. School libraries, as with education, can be a great building block and equalizer of the community and the current racial, economic, social, and other divides in our communities by bringing people together and expanding their horizons.
The city of Chicago has a lot of diversity with a portion of it having to do with it’s large immigrant communities. Separate from their history, the people of Chicago and from around the world come to see the renowned museums mixed with avid sports fans, corporations and religious organizations. But for a community with so much action and so many people working hard and creating, there are apparently few school libraries. While people can pretend the age of smartphones, video games, and ereaders are partially to blame and make this change okay, from 2013 to 2017 the school libraries decreased by 65% (from 454 to 157)(1). This drop has been noted by students, some who didn’t even know school libraries were a thing and it’s a bigger deal than even they may understand. Similar to local libraries that can be centers of community, education, exploration, personal and community growth while promoting opportunities; school libraries do all that earlier on while also introducing children to reading. By introducing students to libraries earlier in their school years and as a part of education where they can choose their path, learning about different people’s stories and encouraging them to see reading as an expansion of their lives and can be a guide to their futures. Even something as simple as a library cart can make a world of difference, but I hope Chicago continues to work to bring back their school libraries for now and for all of our futures.
(1) https://www.saveschoollibrarians.org/chicagoschoollibrarians
Practicality with Poise and Purpose
Libraries are becoming one of the only true public spaces in community, and not all communities have them. As we become more developed and cramped for space, parks are dwindling and most other places to explore and learn also cost money: museums, gallerys, etc. Libraries are also unique as they not only provide education access to books, movies, or night classes sometimes they also are public spaces that hold discussions and talks where those who are not as connected to the community or have a unique or newly peaked interest can explore and connect.
Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood, my local library expanded to introduce scientific talks with epidemiologists, chemists, pharmaceutical companies where these guest lectures would visit and speak, but then give us the ability to ask questions, and have discussion among ourselves. Overtime, similar topics brought similar people together and you got to meet those in your community that you became more attached to that you otherwise wouldn’t have known. Similar to more common library activities such as Mahjong, these events allowed that connectivity in diverse groups, with diverse ages and unique topics. It is important to remember that libraries as public spaces are not just for education or history knowledge, but future growth and exploration, discussion, a diverse community engagement and equality.
While not the best of ideas, in the pre-internet times--books sometimes were your only saviour. Even today, I still appreciate the new worlds, in some aspect better worlds books can take me to and inspire me to create
I believe in the power of knowledge, which comes from books. You want to learn something? Read.
Bookstore owner, Joan of Arcadia (via colemeanitch)
I’d expand this, as there is also art and discussion and life and other experiences, but yeah--these things come from other places and by putting yourself out there in a way that will get you more understanding of the situation and books are amazing for this, but sometimes a book or a just-fact book isn’t the right way either
Out of body
Books are loved for how they let us connect, how they make us feel at home, and how they allow us to see experiences from others' point of view among many other reasons
But along with these, sometimes books are more straightforward, and are just there to get our feet moving, but we have to do more of the work ourselves.
So, to both the books that show us and tell us, to the books that make us imagine and have us see the natural beauty up close, to the books that let us sit back and inspire us to venture out. Cheers
Freakonomics
Freakonomics is a beautiful book that doesn’t do a damn thing. Forget the books or, even better, tv finales that leave you with more questions than answers--this book is all questions.
Now, the book actually answers it’s questions or at least gives as much insight as possible to the questions it raises, but the questions that get you, and where it succeeds, are the questions you come up with after, on your own; looking at the world around you in a different light.
Are there true connections there, or are they just happenstance?
While for the most part, I love books that take you somewhere, this books brings everything to you. Different, and not so different from other books, this book makes you think. But it doesn’t just pose a philosophical quandary--it makes the world an open world of quandaries that you can ponder on your own or issues that it brings up that maybe you need to handle differently.
It’s not a cheat sheet to the world, it’s the coding manual that allows you to create all the cheat sheets in the world. You don’t go to space and meet aliens, you don’t go back in time to find out who murdered Tupac; you get to look at our world, your world and begin to answer your own questions--and are inspired to do so.
Arthur Weasley <3
As you can probably could tell by the heart, I could go on for a while about how wonderful Arthur Wealsey is as a father, a man, a husband and a human being in general. So let’s start with his picture, as dignified as he is and commanding as much respect and honor as the world can offer (that will never be enough)
The main things I want to focus on with Arthur is how he was as a father and husband, and how much he just loved the world.
As a father and husband, Arthur is the gold standard as well as a gold standard in human being all around. First in regards to fatherhood, his children adored him and he was part of their rock that was him and Molly. Yes, he caved, a lot. He was the good guy to Molly’s bad cop, that’s just who they were, but that’s not why they adored him, admired him and gave him that look of “oh brother” whenever he went on a rant or couldn’t figure something out; Arthur loved his children unconditionally, 100%. Something that is much less common than realized. Bill and Percy at banks and in government, sure; Charlie chasing Dragons and growing out his hair, Fred and George experimenting and taking risks...just be safe! He loved and supported his children with whatever they wanted to do and it just makes him so endearing and heart warming. Plus, while we didn’t see it much, we know he did the same with Molly, even thou he couldn’t scare the way she could, he would back her up (when he could control himself) and also knew how to calm her down, without “calming her down”.
Thirdly, Arthur was an outstanding role model for being a fabulous human being, and a man. While gender based stereotypes are outside my preference, it is noted that strong, positive male models are crucial for girls and boys growing up. And Arthur exemplified all of these by showing how his children could be sensitive and be excited, being supportive and caring with his wife, and being caring to others with how he and Molly took in Harry as their own and did what he knew was right and holding onto the truth and his convictions with his job long before and even during Voldemort’s return--> he was on Umbridge’s list for a reason!!
While always seen by some as a joke and good for a laugh by all, the one who laughed the most at Arthur was himself. While mostly fixed on Muggle items (and separately the respect he had for those who lived and survived and engineered without magic--> told you there would never be enough time), Arthur loved the entire world around him. He enjoyed life, learning new things, going to new places and always wanted to test himself. Similarly to Hermione who always wanted to learn and mostly did so from books, Arthur always was up for a new experience, new adventure, and to learn by doing and mastering.
I always will love Arthur Weasley for the honest and compassionate person that he is. One in a million, Molly is just as noble, kind and brilliant and it is not mystery to why they fit so well and raised such an impeccable group of children.
Perfect Balance Between Chaos I Before start working on my Great Grand Father’s book I did a series of drawings mixing different animals in an intrinsic way. I started drawing a part of a bird and then I switch to another bird. The composition was done accordingly I was adding birds. I called “The Perfect Balance in Chaos” and depicts the way the nature moves violently but always keeping the perfect balance (That is why I did it in a square shape canvas”.
Demonstration of the 1974 Arecibo message. The radio message, consisting of seven different parts showcasing human technological knowledge, was sent from Earth to star cluster M13, 25,000 light years away.
(In the actual message the different parts aren’t colored.)
So my dad posted some old pictures of our trip to Hawaii on Facebook and I just realized 10 year old me leaning on a tree wearing a bucket hat being an explorer and Milo from Atlantis wearing his granddad’s pith helmet have the “same energy” as they say.
That is to say, we both wore funny hats too big for our heads, round glasses, and went on adventures :)
(Milo image source--also I didn’t read all of that but what I did read has some pretty cool info on Atlantis. Side note, with all these live action remakes they’re doing lately, how awesome would a live action Atlantis be!!)
I kind of love the idea of travelling with my cats, but at the same time it makes me afraid that they might get away and get lost in a strange, faraway place. Like, I remember once when we were bringing two kittens home from my cousin’s in Iowa back home to Virginia, there was this moment when we stopped at a rest stop to refresh their food and water bowls, and I just had this overwhelming realization that, with their carrier door open, if they were to get out of the car, they would probably get spooked by the commotion of the rest stop and run, and I would in all likelihood never see them again. This pretty kitty seems to be quite calm outdoors, and the woods are not the same as a rest stop, but still. I would worry.
Plus I have three cats and I think it would be harder to travel with them all than with just one kitty like this, and I would feel bad picking one cat over the others to take somewhere--although I suppose one could cycle through.
It’s certainly a tempting notion, travelling the world with cats in tow, and I love photo sets like this (or adventurecats.org is a fun site, too). Maybe some day, when I’m confident in their leash training and I have money to travel and such. It’s a lovely thought. And these are very pretty cat-and-nature pics.
My cat loves travel around the world
Why Bennu? 10 Reasons
After traveling for two years and billions of kilometers from Earth, the OSIRIS-REx probe is only a few months away from its destination: the intriguing asteroid Bennu. When it arrives in December, OSIRIS-REx will embark on a nearly two-year investigation of this clump of rock, mapping its terrain and finding a safe and fruitful site from which to collect a sample.
The spacecraft will briefly touch Bennu’s surface around July 2020 to collect at least 60 grams (equal to about 30 sugar packets) of dirt and rocks. It might collect as much as 2,000 grams, which would be the largest sample by far gathered from a space object since the Apollo Moon landings. The spacecraft will then pack the sample into a capsule and travel back to Earth, dropping the capsule into Utah’s west desert in 2023, where scientists will be waiting to collect it.
This years-long quest for knowledge thrusts Bennu into the center of one of the most ambitious space missions ever attempted. But the humble rock is but one of about 780,000 known asteroids in our solar system. So why did scientists pick Bennu for this momentous investigation? Here are 10 reasons:
1. It’s close to Earth
Unlike most other asteroids that circle the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Bennu’s orbit is close in proximity to Earth’s, even crossing it. The asteroid makes its closest approach to Earth every 6 years. It also circles the Sun nearly in the same plane as Earth, which made it somewhat easier to achieve the high-energy task of launching the spacecraft out of Earth’s plane and into Bennu’s. Still, the launch required considerable power, so OSIRIS-REx used Earth’s gravity to boost itself into Bennu’s orbital plane when it passed our planet in September 2017.
2. It’s the right size
Asteroids spin on their axes just like Earth does. Small ones, with diameters of 200 meters or less, often spin very fast, up to a few revolutions per minute. This rapid spinning makes it difficult for a spacecraft to match an asteroid’s velocity in order to touch down and collect samples. Even worse, the quick spinning has flung loose rocks and soil, material known as “regolith” — the stuff OSIRIS-REx is looking to collect — off the surfaces of small asteroids. Bennu’s size, in contrast, makes it approachable and rich in regolith. It has a diameter of 492 meters, which is a bit larger than the height of the Empire State Building in New York City, and rotating once every 4.3 hours.
3. It’s really old
Bennu is a leftover fragment from the tumultuous formation of the solar system. Some of the mineral fragments inside Bennu could be older than the solar system. These microscopic grains of dust could be the same ones that spewed from dying stars and eventually coalesced to make the Sun and its planets nearly 4.6 billion years ago. But pieces of asteroids, called meteorites, have been falling to Earth’s surface since the planet formed. So why don’t scientists just study those old space rocks? Because astronomers can’t tell (with very few exceptions) what kind of objects these meteorites came from, which is important context. Furthermore, these stones, that survive the violent, fiery decent to our planet’s surface, get contaminated when they land in the dirt, sand, or snow. Some even get hammered by the elements, like rain and snow, for hundreds or thousands of years. Such events change the chemistry of meteorites, obscuring their ancient records.
4. It’s well preserved
Bennu, on the other hand, is a time capsule from the early solar system, having been preserved in the vacuum of space. Although scientists think it broke off a larger asteroid in the asteroid belt in a catastrophic collision between about 1 and 2 billion years ago, and hurtled through space until it got locked into an orbit near Earth’s, they don’t expect that these events significantly altered it.
5. It might contain clues to the origin of life
Analyzing a sample from Bennu will help planetary scientists better understand the role asteroids may have played in delivering life-forming compounds to Earth. We know from having studied Bennu through Earth- and space-based telescopes that it is a carbonaceous, or carbon-rich, asteroid. Carbon is the hinge upon which organic molecules hang. Bennu is likely rich in organic molecules, which are made of chains of carbon bonded with atoms of oxygen, hydrogen, and other elements in a chemical recipe that makes all known living things. Besides carbon, Bennu also might have another component important to life: water, which is trapped in the minerals that make up the asteroid.
6. It contains valuable materials
Besides teaching us about our cosmic past, exploring Bennu close-up will help humans plan for the future. Asteroids are rich in natural resources, such as iron and aluminum, and precious metals, such as platinum. For this reason, some companies, and even countries, are building technologies that will one day allow us to extract those materials. More importantly, asteroids like Bennu are key to future, deep-space travel. If humans can learn how to extract the abundant hydrogen and oxygen from the water locked up in an asteroid’s minerals, they could make rocket fuel. Thus, asteroids could one day serve as fuel stations for robotic or human missions to Mars and beyond. Learning how to maneuver around an object like Bennu, and about its chemical and physical properties, will help future prospectors.
7. It will help us better understand other asteroids
Astronomers have studied Bennu from Earth since it was discovered in 1999. As a result, they think they know a lot about the asteroid’s physical and chemical properties. Their knowledge is based not only on looking at the asteroid, but also studying meteorites found on Earth, and filling in gaps in observable knowledge with predictions derived from theoretical models. Thanks to the detailed information that will be gleaned from OSIRIS-REx, scientists now will be able to check whether their predictions about Bennu are correct. This work will help verify or refine telescopic observations and models that attempt to reveal the nature of other asteroids in our solar system.
8. It will help us better understand a quirky solar force …
Astronomers have calculated that Bennu’s orbit has drifted about 280 meters (0.18 miles) per year toward the Sun since it was discovered. This could be because of a phenomenon called the Yarkovsky effect, a process whereby sunlight warms one side of a small, dark asteroid and then radiates as heat off the asteroid as it rotates. The heat energy thrusts an asteroid either away from the Sun, if it has a prograde spin like Earth, which means it spins in the same direction as its orbit, or toward the Sun in the case of Bennu, which spins in the opposite direction of its orbit. OSIRIS-REx will measure the Yarkovsky effect from close-up to help scientists predict the movement of Bennu and other asteroids. Already, measurements of how this force impacted Bennu over time have revealed that it likely pushed it to our corner of the solar system from the asteroid belt.
9. … and to keep asteroids at bay
One reason scientists are eager to predict the directions asteroids are drifting is to know when they’re coming too-close-for-comfort to Earth. By taking the Yarkovsky effect into account, they’ve estimated that Bennu could pass closer to Earth than the Moon is in 2135, and possibly even closer between 2175 and 2195. Although Bennu is unlikely to hit Earth at that time, our descendants can use the data from OSIRIS-REx to determine how best to deflect any threatening asteroids that are found, perhaps even by using the Yarkovsky effect to their advantage.
10. It’s a gift that will keep on giving
Samples of Bennu will return to Earth on September 24, 2023. OSIRIS-REx scientists will study a quarter of the regolith. The rest will be made available to scientists around the globe, and also saved for those not yet born, using techniques not yet invented, to answer questions not yet asked.
Read the web version of this week’s “Solar System: 10 Things to Know” article HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
New silly TF2 map I have been working on, check it out! Download: Steam workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3014524427 TF2maps: https://tf2maps.net/downloads/mercs_paradise.15887/ Gamebanana: https://gamebanana.com/mods/460401
Űrkutatási évfordulók
Az űrkutatás évfordulóiról és mérföldköveiről adott ki kisívet a Magyar Posta nemrég. A tervpályázatra engem is meghívtak, amin nagy örömmel vettem részt, mert mióta kiskoromban az Ég és Föld című könyvet (Kiss István tök jó illusztrációival) lapozgattam, imádom az űrkutatást. A pályázat egyik fontos eleme volt, hogy az ifjúság számára is érthető és szerethető bélyegeket tervezzünk. A kisíven négy eseményt kellett bélyegpárokban és egyet ívszélen megjeleníteni. A pályázaton, nem engem választottak, de azért elkészítettem az első napi bélyegzőt és a boríték tervet is.
Space exploration anniversaries
The Hungarian Post invited me to a competition, to design a miniature sheet about space exploraiton anniversaries and milestones in 2015. The original idea of the Post was that each pair of stamps should represent a major event about space exploration, and one extra should appear in the edge. This was my submission.
Dorka és Matild felfedezőkutyák
Egy barátom kérésére készítettem el ezt a papírkivágást, amin két kutyája, Dorka és Matild ismeretlen és új világokat fedeznek fel a világűr egy távoli pontján.
Dorka and Matild explorer dogs
A friend asked me to make a papercut about her dogs, Dorka and Matild. They are exploring new and unknown worlds in a far part of the universe with their spaceship.
41°41'03.8"N 71°10'30.2"W
