Assiduous educator, writer, reader, cook. Slowest walker in Auckland. Adores champagne, stationery. Potential cat lady. She/her. Union for life. #Xdissenter
Long post, but this one is important to me so I hope you stick it out!
In January I reached out to Artemis II Commander @astro_reid with a simple ask- was he open to capturing the moon like I do for my colorful moon photos during the flyby?
He humbly agreed, and we worked out a plan to incorporate into the photos captured as the crew approached the moon. The premise was simple- just capture enough photos in a burst to allow for image stacking to improve image fidelity, potentially to reveal color no human has ever captured.
What he brought back was nothing short of magnificent. When I initially stacked the raw photos, it exceeded my expectations by far. The color came right out of the seemingly gray images, and showed details I've never seen before. It's possible nobody has. The lack of atmosphere meant a lot of color normally absorbed and scattered was present, so even the "near side" features looked exotic and unfamiliar.
This view of the moon from an alien perspective made the usually-familiar lunar surface fresh and exciting, and the color we were able to resolve gave us valuable insight to the complex geological history of it's battered surface.
Then, I faced a bit of a moral dilemma.
I wanted people to be able to own these images in print- but I wouldn't feel right to profit off of them. As an active NASA astronaut, Reid certainly can't. He took these photos as part of a taxpayer-funded mission. If I couldn't split profits with him I didn't see a way to do this ethically, so I decided to release the images initially with no print offering, despite many requests!
Then, it clicked. After doing some research- I decided that I should do a print sale where the profits go 100% to charity. That way I can make prints available, do some good in the world, and it doesn't feel like an ethical conflict.
I'm pleased to share my first EVER entirely-for-charity print release.
At the end of this sale all proceeds with be donated to UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. It feels fitting. I will follow up in a future post with a receipt from the donation, so you know how much we were able to donate. When I released this to my email subscribers only, we were already able to raise around $15k. Amazing!
The limited edition fine art print is now publicly available, you can grab one of them at the link in my bio (also linked further in the thread) for a short time.
Thank you for helping me do something good with my platform. Seriously... it feels amazing.
Look, I know in this age of Trump the fundamental concepts of right and wrong no longer matter, the law no longer matters, the truth no longer matters, and here at home our Constitution no longer matters. So I’m probably just shouting into the wind, but…it doesn’t matter what you think of Maduro, what we just did in Venezuela is immoral, unconstitutional, and illegal. And it makes us no different than any other dictatorial regime that invades another sovereign nation.
The NZ govt must continue to stand with Ukraine. The values they are fighting for are Kiwis values. We should continue to do all we can to support them. Time for our govt to speak up!