Mourning a chimpanzee
Can you look at this picture and not get a lump in your throat? You can just feel the grief in the line of chimpanzees sombrely watching the body of their beloved friend being wheeled away.
Dorothy died last year – among her friends after a lifetime of abuse and imprisonment. Her death caused huge sadness among her extended “family”, both human and chimp. Her story makes one wonder what she must have thought of her human cousins; capable of great cruelty yet also of caring and kindness.
Looking at this picture, are those mourning chimps merely objects of amusement? Are they simply handy laboratory animals? Is there really no moral question on killing these creatures other than the destruction of someone’s property?
I think not. I think it’s high time the rest of the world follows Spain’s lead and extend real rights to our closest cousins.
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Photo of Shuttle docked with Space Station
Photo Credit: Thierry Legualt
Here’s another astounding image taken by Thierry Legualt, known for his ground-breaking astronomical photography. It shows space shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station, on July 26th 2009.
One can’t just take a snapshot of the ISS – even with the most powerful and sophisticated equipment. It needs to be backlit, and the Sun is the most handy light to use. But consider this: the ISS was 500 km away, and moving at a speed of 7 km/sec (that’s 25,000 km/hr!) and the transit across the Sun took just 0.75 seconds. Now that’s planning.
Interestingly, when the Endeavour docked on July 15, a new record was set for space-vehicle occupancy – the 13 people of the combined crews.
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100 years ago in full colour
I don’t know about you, but I tend to form monochrome pictures in my mind when I think of the past, well at least times before the ’70′s. I suppose it’s because the snapshots and movies from those times are usually in black and white – as are 95% of my childhood pics. I’ve also noticed that film-makers trying to recreate the ’70′s, sometimes use washed out colours – like the footage from the Vietnam War.
Well if anyone needed reminding that no, the world wasn’t less colourful back then, look at the picture below. It looks like it could have been taken with a modern digital camera, yesterday. But it’s a hundred years old! Yep, taken in 1909.
You can view this great collection of 100 year-old colour photos here. They were taken by the Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. A trained chemist, he developed the colour technique himself.
Exactly one hundred years ago a Russian photographer, began a remarkable project. With the blessing – and funding – of the Tsar, Nicholas II, he embarked on an extraordinary journey to capture the essence of Russia in full color photographs. Many of these pictures look as if they could have been taken yesterday, with only the costumes worn by the people captured in their moment of time betraying the age of the work.
Shuttle against the Sun
Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)
This amazing photo was taken of the space shuttle Atlantis during a “solar transit” – basically moving between the viewer on Earth and the Sun. It was taken on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida, before the Atlantis the crew had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope.
It was photographed by Thierry Legault using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.
For more on this photograph and others in the series, visit Solar Transit of Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope.
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