You’re looking at the first experimental vertical take off & landing (VTOL) jet, and one of the first jet-powered drones known as “Project Firebee”. From the San Diego Air & Space Museum account on Flickr, which makes for a great Apple TV screensaver, if i do say so myself.
Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images:
“My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”
View full set on Flickr
Kahn & Selesnick’s amazing martian-inspired photo series, gluing actual photos of the martian landscape taken by NASA’s Spirit & Opportunity rovers, with WWII bunkers, concrete sculptures, vintage russian space helmets, and landscapes in Nevada and Utah. Mmmm.
Joan is a Vimeo user who likes to download high-resolution image sets taken by crew members of Expeditions 28, 29, 30 and 31, onboard the NASA International Space Station (ISS), and constructs short time-lapse videos.
The images used to construct these, come courtesy of the Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. “The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.”