I know everyone’s at least seen the so called “Little Bigfoot” photo taken by the Spirit rover. Oh, you haven’t well a few days ago it was the photo of the day on the Astronomy Photo of the Day page. Go check it out. Done? Okay, here’s the thing, I looked at that, and yeah, I saw it. but here’s the thing, same scale, opposite side of the photo (nearly all the way over), there’s a feature I’ve dubbed the “Wolfman of Mars”. Go ahead take a look, here’s a blow up to help find it:

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See anything familiar looking? No? How about if you compare it to this:

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Image from Wikipedia.

Now, I know that NASA is rolling their eyes at this whole thing. All I’m saying is that maybe we’re not looking at the problems from the right angles. Maybe we should be looking for scaled down versions of life instead of microscopic or full sized. Maybe we shouldn’t let our preconceived notions of what life should look like cloud what we see or what we’re looking at. Eh, what do I know. All I know is that Martians are little and red-brown. No wonder we never saw them there before…

1. Go to: http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/search.cfm

2. Search on the phrase “assembly building”.

3. Go to page 2 of the results (should show the large booster tank)

UPDATE! 070622

Weeeell, it looks like the KSC team regularly updates their photo archive, so to get you to the results more quickly (actually find them I mean) here are replacements for the above steps:

2. Search on the phrase: “KSC-07PD-09″

3. Scroll about halfway down the page (you should see the large, orange booster tank seemingly inserting itself into the repair building).

All this wouldn’t be necessary if the KSC web developers had seen fit to allow a suitable search address for the results to be linked to. Then I could just post the link…

4. Scroll down the page and let the space p 0 r n begin (insert funky bochikiwow music here)!!

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!