It's all been a bit space based round here recently, but this video is too good not to share, a Shuttle launch caught on video from an Air Canada flight.

Hat tip: 37 Signals

Sometimes you see things that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

The Deep Impact spacecraft, with it's original mission complete and now undertaking science under the EPOXI moniker, turned it's cameras back towards the Earth from 50 million kilometers away and over the course of several hours caught The Moon transiting The Earth!

Phil Plait sums it up beautifully:

While there is science galore in these animations, I think their real impact is the visceral one from simply seeing them. As Carl Sagan once said: everyone you have ever met, every human who has lived and died, lived out their lives on that blue ball. And yet here we are, in the 21st century, plains apes allowed to evolve and satiate their curiosity, now with the ability to lob metal proxies into deep space, look back, and see ourselves.

Science. I love this stuff.

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

- Arthur C. Clarke (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008)

Italian astronomer and physicist. Galileo discovered the importance of acceleration, and established the law of parabolic motion. He invented the refracting telescope and used it to make astronomical observations. He saw the mountains on the moon and observed that the Milky Way was made up of stars. He was condemned by the Inquisition for his belief in the Copernican system of planetary movement which states that the planets, including the Earth, move around the sun, rather than believing the Earth to be the fixed centre of the universe. In the statue Galileo holds two lenses, one in each hand. Caen stone statue by Alexander Munro.

- Oxford University Museum of Natural History

John Naughton has an example. The equations for “powered flight of rocket through terrestrial atmosphere with prescribed thrust direction as a function of time, considered as a system of reference rotating with the earth”.

I'm really quite glad I didn't finish my Aerospace Systems Engineering degree.