A Japanese astronaut is tweeting photos from space. That up there is a view of Pico De Orizaba, the highest mountain in Mexico.

THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL. More photos on his Twitpic page here.

PHOTO:Virgin Galactic

You’ve probably already heard that the world’s first commercial space flight is here—or will be in a couple of years. If you’re planning on being one of the first tourists in space, you might want to take a gander at this fascinating list of ceremonies that Russian cosmonauts are said to engage in before every spaceflight.

Weird and Wonderful Highlights:

• Everyone watches the 1969 Russian romantic action comedy White Sun of the Desert the night before the launch. As far as I can tell, it’s like an old-fashioned Western set in the Caucasus, with harems. And singing.

• Everyone sips champagne and signs their names on their hotel room doors as they leave for the launch site. As they walk out of the hotel, a song by the Russian band “The Earthlings” is played. It’s called “A Green-Grassed Lawn,” it contains the immortal words “But still we hear space music of romance!” and you can listen to it here!

• The buses that take the cosmonauts to the space shuttle have upside-down horseshoes hung on them for good luck. For even more good luck, when they reach the end of their journey, everyone gets out and pees on the bus wheels! Russian cosmonauts are awesome.

If the Virgin Galactic team in charge of herding tourists onto the SpaceShipTwo is smart enough to steal some of these superstitions for their flights out, I’ll let you know. 

Over the past couple of months, NASA has been busy releasing a new series of stunning photographs produced by the Hubble telescope. The photos are test images that were taken in order to see how the telescope is doing after the complete makeover and repair it received in May 2009. The verdict: It’s doing AWESOME. See?

On Wednesday, I was lucky enough to be among 300 people who gathered in the Art Institute of Chicago’s (swanky) Fullerton Hall to hear astronaut John Grunsfeld speak about his role in those repairs. For instance, he and his fellow spacewalkers Mike Massimino and Drew Feustel removed several electrical circuits from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and replaced them with new ones, put in a new Fine Guidance Sensor (an instrument the size of a baby grand that helps Hubble point its nose in the right direction), and installed new insulation on the telescope’s external surface to protect it from crazy space temperatures—ranging from -200 degrees Fahrenheit to +200 degrees Fahrenheit.

I’m posting this particular image because it’s one Grunsfeld showed in his talk, and it illustrates a really neat astronomical phenomenon. Sometimes, he explained, two galaxies that are close enough together start to literally tug on each other’s hearts, exchanging gases and other matter in a beautiful, slow-motion collision. Eventually, this causes the galaxies to merge and form a single nucleus. If you look closely, you can see this process happening in the image above, which shows five galaxies known collectively as Stephan’s Quintet. The middle two galaxies are involved in a merger. There are two bright spots of light very close to each other, and two fainter tails swirling off to the top and the bottom. Inside those tails, huge numbers of new stars are being born:one of the neat side-effects of galactic mergers.

Oh! And the best part? At least for me, because I hadn’t heard about this before? Grunsfeld also explained that Earth’s own galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to be involved in the same kind of dance with the Andromeda Galaxy. If and when we do collide with Andromeda, things could get pretty weird. Both the Earth and the Sun are likely to get spun out into the boondocks of the new, bigger galaxy, where—if anyone is still there to see it—the night sky would burn a hundred times brighter with the light of all those extra stars. Don’t worry, though. We’ve still got a couple of billion years to prepare for it.

If you weren’t there on Wednesday in Chicago (and really, what are the odds you were?), you might enjoy this video of the first spacewalk on the 2009 repair mission.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Inkling really likes stories about space.

Sooooo you know the milky way galaxy? The one in which we reside not the chocolate bar.

Well a bunch of Australian astronomers at the University of Sydney showed a slew of astronomers up when they proved, after only a couple hours of internet-based research, that our home galaxy is a is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years thick it was previously believed to be (the width of our disc shaped galaxy remains constant, however, at 100,000 light years across).

Here’s the hilarious quote from team leader Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler from the University of Sydney news page:

“Some colleagues have come up to me and have said ‘That wrecks everything!’” says Professor Gaensler. “And others have said ‘Ah! Now everything fits together!’”

It’s been a while since I’ve longingly gazed at Nasa eyecandy. So perhaps that’s why these gorgeous photos of Mars took my breath away - or rather, slowed it down to a meditation-induced crawl. You don’t always know what you’re looking at but it sure is striking. And the captions give you some clues.

All together there are 45 images, the cream of the Mars expeditions’ crop. They are all worth your time.

The geography is akin to reading Tolkien where the names are all exotic but the feel for the place is palpable.

There’s the rainbow “Hebes Chasma region at the northwestern end of Valles Marinaris” (pictured above). There’s Mars’ south pole all covered in frozen carbon dioxide that’s referred to as the “swiss cheese terrain” for its mazes and pock marks. And then there’s the Chasma Boreale in the north pole where bands of dust and ice accumulate up year after year to look like the contour lines on a topographic map.

Otherworldly and gorgeous. Ideal for taking you away from your work and far out of the office for a spell.

Link: Mars as Art. Go!

Now I only know one person with an iphone. And I barely know them at that. But that’s not to say that I don’t covet the iphone. And got really excited to learn that if you are one of those lucky few who own this piece of sleek glossy everything all in one you can now change that planet Earth background to any of our planets and moons. Me? I like the robin’s egg turquoise Uranus.

Go download them over at WanderingSpace - quick quick, before they twig and start charging for this spacey eyecandy. 

(PHOTO: DAVE DI BIASE)

Computers can now “laugh”, so to speak, at jokes, thanks to clever programming. Its rudimentary and simple sense of humor is good enough to chuckle at this one:

Mother: “My, you’ve been working in the garden a lot this summer.”
Boy: “I have to because teacher told me to weed a lot.”

Julia Taylor and Dr Lawrence Mazlack from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, put together some software that checked to see whether each work in a joke fit with the context of the sentence. When it finds a work that’s out of place, it then runs that word against similar sounding words to suss out the word play.

According to The Telegraph:

Taylor is now working on personalising the programme to take into account variation in the user’s sense of humour. She said: “If you’ve been in car accident, you probably won’t find a joke about a car accident funny.”

Me? I want a Will Ferrell robot! That plays the cowbell!! That would make me laugh way more than any punning piece of tin.

via New Scientist