Amanda Palmer reads “Hubble Photographs: After Sappho” at the third annual Universe in Verse, curated and hosted by Maria Popova at Pioneer Works. 

Animation by Kelli Anderson. Poem text and vital background here. 

More highlights from The Universe in Verse here. 

Happy 99th birthday to the amazing Katherine Johnson, who computed the trajectory that landed Apollo 11 on the moon.

NASA’s Juno releases the first-ever images of Jupiter’s north pole, and it’s a world unlike any other. 

Compare and contrast with Trouvelot’s stunning 19th-century imaginings of Jupiter and other cosmic objects. 

When Katherine began at NASA, she and her cohorts were known as “human computers,” and if you talk to her or read quotes from throughout her long career, you can see that precision, that humming mind, constantly at work. She is a human computer, indeed, but one with a quick wit, a quiet ambition, and a confidence in her talents that rose above her era and her surroundings.

Magnificent Vanity Fair profile of pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, one of science’s trailblazing women. Also see the untold story of the remarkable women who powered space exploration. 

Tracking the Juno spacecraft on its landmark Jupiter feat this week is 79-year-old engineer Susan Finley, NASA’s longest-serving woman and one of the original “rocket girls” – the remarkable and unheralded women who powered space exploration. 

As NASA’s Juno mission approaches its historic arrival on Jupiter tomorrow, a visual timeline of Jupiter exploration by designer Kim Orr for NASA’s JPL. 

Complement with Primo Levi’s timelessly beautiful words on how space exploration brings humanity closer together. 

NASA’s glorious Mars exploration recruitment posters are free to download, with print-quality hi-resolution files available. 

Complement with Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, and Arthur C. Clarke’s magnificent forgotten conversation about the future of Mars exploration. 

The Rise of Rocket Girls — the untold story of the remarkable women who powered space exploration.

From NASA’s public domain photo archive:

Dr. Nancy Roman, one of the nations top scientists in the space program, is shown with a model of the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO).

Roman received her PhD in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1949. In 1959, Dr. Roman joined NASA and in 1960 served as Chief of the Astronomy and Relativity Programs in the Office of Space Science. She was very influential in creating satellites such as the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

She retired from NASA in 1979, but continued working as a contractor at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Throughout her career, Dr. Roman was a spokesperson and advocate of women in the sciences.

Scientists like Dr. Roman owe a whole lot to pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science. Also see trailblazing astronaut and physicist Sally Ride on how lazy media portrayals perpetuate gender stereotypes. 

Feast your eyes and soul on this stunning aurora borealis in the northern hemisphere, captured by the International Space Station on January 20, 2016. 

This drawing of Snoopy celebrating NASA’s Apollo 10 space program comes from this new trove of previously unseen Peanuts art – dive in here.

NASA’s closest-ever views of Saturn’s moon Enceladus are a thing of otherworldly beauty. Complement with this visual history of imaging the cosmos before astrophotography. 

In a groundbreaking finding, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter confirms that liquid water flows on Mars:

Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times.

Forty-four years earlier, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury discussed this very possibility in their fascinating conversation about Mars and the human mind. 

NASA reveals this stunning nightscape of Pluto backlit by the sun, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft around midnight EST on July 15. 

Couple with the illustrated life of Galileo, who made all of this possible. 

NASA releases this progression of images of Pluto since the dawn of space imaging.