Making a Astronomy focused bday present for a friend - anyone have any (very obscure) cool space photos with really interesting stories behind them, or just cool stories about Astronomy that not many people know about?

Submitted by GiveMeTheFullerenes t3_10v8fnz in space

Basically the title; It’s a friends 18th and I’m making one of those letter-art galleries, and painting small photos of cool space photos, and writing thier stories on the back of the letter - of course having some reference to her birthday.

Eg: story of the mariner 4 probe whose researchers colored a wall according to the 1’s and 0’s they received, and ended up with a pre-visualization of the photo the probe sent back before actually processing the image.

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bburghokie t1_j7g2n0m wrote

Lots of cool apollo stories. You can Google some of those and might find something too?

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Waddensky t1_j7g4bi4 wrote

What a great idea!

A little-known fact is that Galileo observed Neptune in 1633 while studying Jupiter, 233 years before the planet was actually discovered in 1846. He thought it was a background star. A 2009 study even suggests that Galileo was well-aware of Neptune's movement and therefore could be credited as the discoverer of the 8th planet.

This paper has some of Galileo's sketches of Jupiter and Neptune, you might be able to use these in your gallery.

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Historical_Gur_3054 t1_j7gg0lg wrote

This photo from Apollo 11

Taken by Michael Collins from the command module as the lunar lander ascent stage is approaching.

Every human being alive at the time, except one is in that picture.

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