Ahhh…

It’s a balmy 70º F here in Winston Salem, NC and our big oak trees still haven’t shed even half of their leaves. Got the windows open and are getting some airflow through the house. If things keep up like this, we’ll be having another one of those winters where the temperatures are constantly fluctuating between extreme highs and lows. Oh well. Guess global warming is having its fun with us.

Turkey’s in the oven with fixing being prepared, and we’re having a nice little time here together just the three of us. Hope everyone else is too!

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!