166 DAYS IN ORBIT - 6 MONTHS IN SPACE, WE ARE NOT ALONE

Sleep had to be delayed last night.  Instead, I listened to one of the best interviews ever - about an astronaut named Chris Hadfield.  Hadfield recounts what his three missions and 166 days in orbit taught him about "ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything."  One of the "anythings" included him going blind from chemicals that detached from his spacesuit, while traveling 17,500 MPH - outside of his spaceship!  His description of what caused the problem was fascinating. As was the solution after his message: "Houston, we have a problem"

One excerpt from the interview:  "I've been so lucky to have done two spacewalks. The contrast of your body and your mind inside ... essentially a one-person spaceship, which is your spacesuit, where you're holding on for dear life to the shuttle or the station with one hand, and you are inexplicably in between what is just a pouring glory of the world roaring by, silently next to you, takes up your whole mind.

It's like the most beautiful thing you've ever seen just screaming at you on the right side, and when you look left, it's the whole bottomless black of the universe and it goes in all directions. It's like a huge yawning endlessness on your left side and you're in between those two things and trying to rationalize it to yourself and trying to get some work done.

On doing a spacewalk amid Southern Lights
 
I was coming across the Indian Ocean in the dark. I was riding on the end of the robot arm ... [and] I thought, "I want to look at Australia in the dark," because everyone lives along the coast, starting with Perth and across and it's like a necklace of cities. So I shut off my lights, and I let my eyes completely adjust to the darkness, but as we came south under Australia instead of seeing just the lights of the cities of Australia we flew into the Southern Lights.

Just like the Northern Lights they erupt out of the world and it's almost as if someone has put on this huge fantastic laser light show for thousands of miles. The colors, of course, with your naked eye are so much more vivid than just a camera. There are greens and reds and yellows and oranges and they poured up under my feet, just the ribbons and curtains of it — it was surreal to look at, driving through the Southern Lights. ...

To me it was taking time to notice something that is almost always there but that if you didn't purposefully seek it out you would miss — and that is our planet and how it reacts with the energy from the sun and how our magnetic field works and how the upper atmosphere works — what it really is, is just beauty."

Click HERE for the interview.

What’s the sound of a star being eaten by a huge black hole, billions of light years away? Astronomers created a software simulation of what a star getting shredded by a black hole sounds like....click HERE.

Saw this today: "Tens of billions of planets out there are like Earth, study finds."  Click HERE.