Looking unnervingly similar to a scene from 2010: The Year We Make Contact, this photo of the ISS at night looks less like NASA Image of the Day material and more like material from a science fiction movie! All-in-all, an incredible photo of the present meeting the future…

Links:
the NASA Image of the Day Gallery
The above photo

Here are six of the better images I’ve taken over the last year. Use them in good health. They’re licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. In other words, feel free to use them as you see fit, with the exceptions that you must attribute the original works to me (and other contributors - sell below), you cannot use them for commercial purposes (money making - unless you ask - I can be flexible for the right price :) and you must license any derivative works under the same license. Clear as mud? Just follow the link to the Creative Commons license at the bottom for a full explanation.

The font I’ve used for the site logo on these came from the Sull-A-Day blog, another site you should definitely checkout. Anyway here they are, to download, right-click and do a “Save Target As” (IE) or a “Save Link As” (Firefox):

LD_BG01_1024×76 LD_BG01_1280×960 LD_BG01_2816×2112 LD_BG01.7z	LD_BG02_1024×768 LD_BG02_1280×960 LD_BG02_2816×2112 LD_BG02.7z
LD_BG03_1024×768 LD_BG03_1280×960 LD_BG03_2816×2112 LD_BG03.7z	LD_BG04_1024×768 LD_BG04_1280×960 LD_BG04_2816×2112 LD_BG04.7z
LD_BG05_1024×768 LD_BG05_1280×960 LD_BG05_2816×2112 LD_BG05.7z	LD_BG06_1024×768 LD_BG06_1280×960 LD_BG06_2816×2112 LD_BG06.7z

Download all these in a single file:

backgrounds_luckydisasters.com.7z [080207]

At some point I’ve got to make some 1440×900 versions of these too, that’s my laptop’s screen size after all…

These wallpapers are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I heard on NPR this morning on my way to work that today is Chuck Yeager’s birthday. So, in celebration, I decided to go over to NASA’s image gallery and find some images of the Bell X-1. NASA doesn’t lay copyright claim to many of it’s photos as long as you’re not using anything with their logo to promote something. This begs the question “Why isnt’ this stuff licensed under a Creative Commons [insert your favorite Creative Commons license here] license?” Who knows…

If you checkout NASA’s GRIN (Great Image in NASA) you can find many nice high-res images of early computing, flight and so forth. Some of these were used by Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim a few years back for their “bumps”. These image gallery links and more below:

NASA Image of the Day Gallery
Great Images in NASA library of images (GRIN)
Astronomy Picture of the Day
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center Gallery
NASA Image eXchange (NIX)

As always, read the fine print if you’re going to use any of these images. If you have any other good goverment/other image galleries I’d love to hear about them!