Don Davis

Whenever the cops stoop to resorting to 'psychics' that tells me they are short on real leads and are desperate. If one of those 'psychics' knew too much about a case they should be considered a suspect.

I would like to read this apparently interesting and timely paper, but, alas, it is behind a paywall.

This panorama of the rainbow of February 16, 2026 was made as the storm front behind the direction of this view was shedding wind driven rain, but the cloud ceiling had not yet passed overhead cutting off the sunlight. This was brilliant visually, as bright and colorful as any I have seen.

A nice rainbow very low over the NorthEastern horizon as the storm front behind us reached the High Desert. The rain was being driven by the strong winds ahead of the cloud ceiling, and for a few minutes it underwent optimum illumination for a rainbow display.

Luna 24 had no camera? Insane. The sampler could have ended up on a rock.

I'm not making a case for the payloads involved etc, in fact the swarming of the night skies by such vermin is a problem for Astronomy. I'm just sharing the amazing sight of an optimally lit twilight launch.

'What's your proposal?

The 'event' is unknowable and far in the future. In the mean time we must stabilize the dynamics between civilization and the Ecosystem. Spreading of Humanity into interplanetary space has long term merits including redundancy in case of a major war, plague, ecodisaster etc.

If there was a military scale marshaling of resources starting in the 80s we could well have space based manufacturing with decades of activity building things like satellite Solar Power stations and giant rotating space colonies for civilization to expand to beyond Earth. Forget terraforming Mars.

Oh no not that... It made me think a little of a protoplanet congealing from a surrounding nebula, Saturn, or the black hole visualization effort for the science fiction film 'Interstellar'.

The visible plume is mostly water vapor. Each launch also deposits about the amount of carbon particles that a jet airliner does in a day of operation, roughly 250 tons. Air travel introduces roughly 800 million tons of carbon per year into the atmosphere. That's what a quick search reveals to me.

Winds at different directions at different altitudes tug, stretch and twist the launch plume about. It's kind of a probe of the upper atmosphere.

In its last stages this faint but colorful apparition looming over the dwindling twilight looked like some dark nebula or forming protoplanet near the Earth. The colors steadily merged with the city light illuminated cirrus clouds that signal the coming weather changes in Southern California. Canon 6D with a zoom lens, 5 seconds at ISO 1000 and F 5.6

Here is the fading remnant of this chromatic display looming above the high clouds. The red, blue and white plume is lit by the setting sun and twilight as seen at that altitude. The much lower cirrus clouds are lit a copper orange from the city lights for a couple hundred miles in that direction.

The colors of the last sunlight paint the loops and bands of the plume from the Vandenberg launch of the evening of February 14, 2026. Golds and blues dominate the color of the lighting in different parts of the plume depending on their altitude and proximity to the Earth shadow edge. This edge is lined with a spectral gradations of filtered sunlight going from white to yellow to orange and deep red. In places a bright blue glow dominates, perhaps from the colors most efficiently 'forward scattered' from the full spectrum sunlight upon the highest portions. This photograph is from a tripod mounted Canon SLR with an exposure of 3.2 seconds at ISO 1000 at F5.6. This is thus brighter and more colorful than the eye saw it but the detail and color are real. Think of it as a form of wide angle Astrophotraphy.

The Vandenberg launch of February 14th, 2026 was optimally timed for illumination of the initial as well as the lingering plume. Tonight this plume underwent intriguing looping and stretching as Earths shadow passed across it with reds, golds and blues dominating the last lighting here and there.

I look forward to seeing a better radar map of the planet, and possibly a new view from the ground.

This digital painting/render shows the NEAR spacecraft as it reached the surface, with attitude control jets spraying dust about. The spacecraft is a digital model I made from references, the asteroid surface foreground is based on the last photographs of the surface obtained on the way down. The rest of the scenery is painted based on more distant views. This was used on the cover of the mission final report.

This view shows the context of the final photos in relation to the landed attitude of the NEAR spacecraft. The surface relief is guesswork, with the final descent photographs draped over a hand painted Digital Elevation map of the rocks etc. That surface model became the basis of the foreground of the other portrayal.

25 years ago today the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous – Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on the Asteroid Eros, after orbiting it and making a map of the elongated 34 km long asteroid. It gently landed on the surface with its cameras obtaining views during the final descent. Digital art. #SCIART

Quite nice, especially considering the low resolution sensor used. Subtle color contrasts can be seen in some Apollo surface photography between the maria and the highlends.

Orientale will be near noon lighting at the time. It will look similar to the lighting seen on the video made during Artemis 1. But even in full Moon illumination it is interesting.

perhaps, but the best such views might be during their sleep periods. Remote control cameras might do it though, and the wide angle low res gopro external camera(s), if they are used this time.

This is a 3D render showing the Lunar far side as the Artemis II mission spacecraft will see it, subject to launch delays changing the phase etc. It is meant to imitate what the photos made out the window might look like, so no stars are shown. #sciart

Here is a render previewing the kind of photography we should see during the upcoming Artemis II mission as the spacecraft loops around the far side of the Moon. Since it is meant to imitate photography no stars are shown.

ARTEMIS ECLIPSE ANIMATION On November 28, 2022 the Artemis 1 mission photographed Earth being eclipsed by the Moon. This was captured on wide angle GoPro cameras mounted on the solar panels,…

The video views were fine, however I was disappointed that circumstances didn't permit dedicated still cameras to be aimed out the windows like the Soviets did during Zond missions. Here is my animated reconstruction of Artemis 1's view of Earth being eclipsed from the Moon:

vimeo.com/777803158.

Here is my updated version, painted over a JPL release print of the art.

The Bantam paperback was the best edition. Avoid the bastardized volume connected to the documentary film. That so called 'third edition' used three of my related paintings without credit, and had someone rework one of my line drawings of the agricultural section of the Bernal Sphere.

Beautiful. So many formally obscure fainter objects are being revealed by dedicated Astrophotographers.

Those were done on scratchboard for the Bantam paperback edition of 'The High Frontier by Gerard K. O'Neill.
That medium was ideally suited for reproduction in paperback paper. Seek out that edition as it is the best, with my color cover.

This photograph was made early in the evening of January 19, 2026 at 9:47 Pacific time. The Aurora produced by a Coronal Mass Ejection stretches across the sky in this panorama spanning about 90 degrees looking North. This appears to be a diffuse and uneven SAR (Stable Auroral Red) arc which usually forms an 'outer boundary' of Auroral activity, which in this case would be below the horizon. This photo is a 13 second exposure which has been contrast enhanced to bring out the Auroral details. Aircraft connected to military exercises were leaving trails during the exposure, made from a fairly dark location about 10 miles North of Joshua Tree, California. The bright glow at center right is the light pollution from Las Vegas, Nevada 160 miles away. Tonight it made a broad illuminated 'dome', but it can often be seen truncated by local higher altitude clouds. Its visibility is an indicator of how clean or dry the local atmosphere is. A faint glow from St George, Utah is to its right. The faint red pillar above the horizon furthest right may be auroral detail along the rightmost portion of the SAR. To the left the Milky Way and a few cloud wisps loom over the beginning of the Southern California light pollution region to the West.

Tonight, January 19th, the Aurora flared across the skies of Europe and North America, and in the Southern hemisphere. From Joshua tree, California a diffuse uneven red arch loomed above the Northern horizon. The Western portion was brighter and stable with only a feeble presence toward the East.

This sequence of photos of the re entry of January 15, 2026 shows the apparent path across the sky as seen from Joshua Tree, California. The exposure capturing the sky brightness tended to wash out the re entry trail color, which was white at the tip to yellow and orange along the length. The trail dramatically shortened soon after the re entry cleared the horizon, finally fading away and the spacecraft became a reddening dot disappearing before going behind the mountains.

Here is a panoramic sequence as the spacecraft passed over the horizon from the West toward the South.

This photo, taken from Joshua Tree, California, shows the re entry of the Astronauts from the ISS. The capsule is leaving a luminous orange trail as it returns to Earth.

This morning's re entry as it cleared the horizon from the High Desert.

This frame from an ongoing animation project shows the plume from the impact of the approximately 60 meter wide asteroid 2024 YR4 which will pass nearest the Moon, with a current 4 percent chance of such an impact, about 15:20 UT December 22, 2032. This is a 3D render of the Moon as it will be lit then with the impact having just happened, with the ejecta cone spreading from the impact site. Some of this plume would likely make it to Earth and cause an intense meteor shower.

This is a frame of my animation of the passage of Asteroid 2024 YR4 through the Earth/Moon system on December 22, 2032. This is a 3D asteroid landscape I modeled using hand painted Digital Elevation maps with many separate rock models added. For a time at the beginning of this year Earth was within the 'uncertainty zone' of the asteroid path, and I was pondering what part of Earth to show getting pummeled. Then the path was better defined, sparing Earth from this one. This scene shows Earth at about the closest approach as the small asteroid passes it on the way to the vicinity of the Moon.

Seven years from tonight a small asteroid might make a new 1.3 kilometer wide crater on the Moon. Of course the refined path of 22024 YR4 may well rule this out between now and then, but for a couple years there can be a bit of photogenic suspense. Rendered in Electric Image Animator.

#Sciart

This photograph shows a cloud mass Northwest of Joshua Tree, California as the last very reddened rays of the setting Sun played across it. Intriguing dynamic textures are highlighted by the grazing light along the sides and bottom. Taken December 19, 2025 with a Canon 6D.

A nice Sunset! while the sky wasn't filled with clouds, those that were there were lit by very red rays of Sunlight shining through hundreds of miles of clean air, filtered into nearly pure spectral colors.

I can imagine VR goggles made available in kiosks at such places to see the places reconstructed in high fidelity.

This photo was made in Alexandria in 2010, when I returned home I added a digital reconstruction of the great Pharos lighthouse as it would have appeared from that angle. I became interested in the Ancient World from my work on the PBS TV show Cosmos. Later I compiled visual references for the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Much later I used these references to create digital models of these structures. This was later matched to a viewpoint I sought out when I visited Alexandria for the 2010 International Planetarium Society convention. The lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World. From about the 280s BC it weathered the elements and conquests around it until an earthquake in 796 caused major cracks. In 951 and especially 956 the top floor sustained major quake damage and a domed Mosque replaced the top story. Abu el-Balawi (name abbreviated) visited the deteriorating Pharos in 1166 and left our most detailed description of the building, including numerous measurements. A major 1303 quake brought down the second story and a side of the first story, with the building surviving well enough in 1326 for the traveller Ibn Battutain to find the interior still accessible. In his 1349 revisit he found the interior too ruined to enter. A 1375 quake toppled the remaining first story, scattering its stone blocks into the harbor in a sideways collapse. The German scholar Herman Thiersch made a detailed study of the Pharos and in 1909 published a reconstruction of the building whose general form, basically holds up today. The Pharos was approximately 110 meters, or about 360 feet tall, comparable to a Saturn V Apollo rocket stack. This tower made such an impression that it had many prolonged echoes in architecture over the centuries, beginning with the form of the shape of minarets in regional Mosques. To this day lighthouses generally have an octagonal upper story as a reference to that in the lighthouse of Alexandria.

When I visit a place famous in the Ancient World I try to visualize what it was like when the place made a name for itself. In Alexandria I visited the site of the Pharos, the great lighthouse. The Qaitbay fort was built over the stump of the fallen tower, here it is in the context of what was.