Great Self Portrait

Posted on February 1, 2008  Comments (2)

photo of astronaut's faceplate reflecting earth

Photo by, and of, Astronaut Clay Anderson, Expedition 15 flight engineer. He used a digital camera to expose a photo of his helmet visor during the mission’s third planned session of extravehicular activity (EVA) on the International Space Station (15 August 2007). Also visible in the reflections in the visor are various components of the station and a blue and white portion of Earth. During the 5-hour, 28-minute spacewalk, Anderson and astronaut Rick Mastracchio (out of frame), STS-118 mission specialist, relocated the S-Band Antenna Sub-Assembly from Port 6 (P6) to Port 1 (P1) truss, installed a new transponder on P1 and retrieved the P6 transponder.

NASA provides their content, photos etc. online in an open access spirit. When linking to content (especially images) it is best to provide context (and with the internet the easiest way to do is so is relevant links). You can find many low resolution pictures of the image above around the internet. Trying to find the context around the image is not so easy – it took me quite awhile to do so. I try to provide the context and links. Lately some more sites will link to some original sources but this is still done far to infrequently.

There are also still far too many pointy haired bosses (PHB) making decisions to break the web by killing pages: web pages must live forever. Those PHB’s decisions do reduce the great benefit of linking but it is still worth doing for those cases where web sites are managed by people with the knowledge and ability to manage an internet resource properly.

Photo: NASA – high resolution version

Related: Van Gogh self portraitMars Rovers Getting Ready for Another AdventureNASA Robotics Academy

2 Responses to “Great Self Portrait”

  1. Curious Cat » NASA You Have a Problem
    March 20th, 2008 @ 10:01 am

    It is amazing that an agency that is suppose to know about technology can do such a lame job of coding a web site.

  2. Nicolas Chauveau
    September 27th, 2010 @ 7:32 am

    This is definitely the best self-portrait ever ! Just because it was shot with a nikon, obviously.
    j/k
    Made my day !

Leave a Reply