Your Space Adventure 2: You stay in space for half a year!

So you want to go to space?
Let's say you are invited to the International Space Station. We take two scenarios from here:

1. You arrive to the space station, but your colleagues don't like you. They send you to an EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity a.k.a. spacewalk) without a space suit. Oops. (An impossible scenario, but for now let's just assume this can happen.)
2. Your colleagues love you and make you stay for a half a year. (Much more likely.)

How does your body take all this?  Here it is for Scenario 2:

Moonrise over LA

A very cool time lapse video of the Moon rising over LA by Dan Marker-Moore.



And a time slice collage:

In the meantime on the ISS - Ammonia leak fixed

News reports have been all over the media about the liquid ammonia leak at the International Space Station. On May 9, astronauts aboard the ISS noticed small white "snowflakes", the frozen ammonia coolant, floating around outside the station.

Leaking ammonia coolant   --   via Discovery News

Visualizing Meteorites Throughout History

This is an amazing visualization of meteorites, those meteoroids that survived the impact with the Earth's surface. Click on the animation for more info.

Your Space Adventure 1: Out in Space without a Space Suit

So you want to go to space?
Let's say you are invited to the International Space Station. We take two scenarios from here:

1. You arrive to the space station, but your colleagues don't like you. They send you to an EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity a.k.a. spacewalk) without a space suit. Oops. (An impossible scenario, but for now let's just assume this can happen.)
2. Your colleagues love you and make you stay for a half a year. (Much more likely.)

How does your body take all this?  Here it is for Scenario 1:

Fuzzy Slippers

--   image sources: 1. amazon.com; 2. credit: Gillett Griffin

Moon Phases & Faces

Why do we see the Moon changing shape on the night sky? Why do we see only one side of the Moon, and what's up with that "dark side"?

Lunar Phases

This will be a little visualization exercise.
Imagine that you are above the North Pole looking down on the Earth and the Moon orbiting around it. The Sun, shining from your right, illuminates the half of the Moon that faces it, this is the day side of the Moon.
From the Earth, we see the Moon changing shape: as the Moon revolves around the Earth, we see varying amounts of its sunlit day side and dark night side. This causes the lunar phases.