Awesome Space

Single-use websites are all the rage nowadays, but we couldn’t help having an existential pale blue dot moment with How Many People Are In Space Right Now; RSS feed here.

Shot with a Nikon D3 and composed of 1,200 photos, the Gigagalaxy Zoom Project is an 800 million pixel image of our Milky Way; download a smaller 18 million pixel image here.

We’re still waiting for our own flight to space, but MIT students recently sent a camera 17.5 miles into near-space using a prepaid GPS cellphone, hand warmers and a styrofoam beer cooler.

The Hubble telescope is 19 years old, but you wouldn’t know it from this new set of photos snapped after recent upgrades; it sports a new Wide Field camera and spectrograph.

Inspired by a Swiss sci-fi film of the same name, Space-themed watchmaker Fortis’ CARGO Spacematic features an asymmetric 40 mm high-grade steel case and sapphire crystal.

Moonbell isn’t quite a game–it uses topographical data from Japan’s Kaguya satellite that lets you play the Moon’s surface like a record; choose from Orbit Play and Free Scratch modes.

It came from Earth: Le Petit Prince is a slightly creepy, four-legged robotic greenhouse designed to seek out nutrients on Mars; it’ll talk to other robots wirelessly for optimal locations.

Big Bang Briefly is the most important video you’ll watch today, and possibly ever: it explains your existence and that of the entire universe, and all of it in just over two minutes.

NASA apes Roland Emmerich with this Planetary Smash-Up video; it was created after the Spitzer Telescope recently detected evidence of a collision around a star 100 light-years away.

While the teaser for Dead Space: Extraction was mostly atmospheric, this developer’s diary does an excellent job fleshing out the game, both in terms of gameplay and storyline.

Experience The Planets is an ongoing art project that visualizes our solar system through the eyes of artists; it’s developed by Greg Martin, who knows a thing or two about space art.

Launch your own satellite with the TubeSat Kit; price includes a 0.75 kg module with solar panels and antennas, a ride aboard a NEPTUNE 30 rocket and a few weeks in low earth orbit.

EVE Online has been around for awhile, but this Butterfly Effect trailer does a brilliant job explaining its emergent, sandbox-style gameplay; that, and it’s a feast for the eyes.

Part of Citizen’s Campanola Collection, their latest Cosmosign is an astronomical marvel with a real-time chart of 1,027 stars,166 galaxies, sun and constellation positions.

Fisher’s AG-7 Space Pen is as close to the moon as you’ll get, as it contains Kapton foil used on the Apollo 11 Command module; translation: part of the pen flew around the moon.

For the first time in years, NASA has released new pictures of the original Apollo moon landing sites–complete with the lunar modules and even astronaut footpaths; thanks, Shawn!

The moon landing festivities continue with restored Apollo 11 footage, courtesy of NASA; it includes everything from Neil’s first step to the raising of the American flag. Thanks, Scott!

The JFK Library celebrates the 1969 moon landings with We Choose The Moon, a website which will recreate–down to the minute–Apollo 11’s journey; it starts 7/16/09 at 8:02 am.

Celebrating the July 20, 1969 moon landings’ 40th anniversary, Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts includes 21 astronauts’ favorite photos and a foreword by Stephen Hawking.

Gratuitous Space Battles continues to light up the radar of space sim fans, so this Space Battle trailer should satisfy; we get a peek at the game’s pre-battle tactical screens.

For All Mankind, Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary on the Apollo moon landings, comes to Blu-ray 7/14; it’s an HD digital transfer with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, NASA liftoff footage.

Jeff Brewer of CoolRockets takes fanciful spaceships of yesteryear and turns them into real-life, resin-casted models; each is hand-finished and comes with a collector’s card. Thanks, Chuck!

Similar to the incredible opening for Contact, Electromagnetic Leak is an infographic that plots out the distance our TV shows have traveled through space, with major stars as signposts.