A truly incredible picture, and some GeoDirect updates

Photo: NASA/Thierry Legault

I've written before about one of my favorite pictures, the Pale Blue Dot. Well, during the ongoing shuttle mission, photographer Thierry Legault snapped a couple pictures which help illustrate just how insignificant our greatest accomplishments in science are when compared to the grand scale of space. Click on the above picture and you'll see the shuttle and Hubble space telescope silhouetted against the sun. And below, a cropped image showing just the shuttle against the sun.

Photo: NASA/Thierry Legault

Both images can be clicked to see the larger version. My favorite part about these photos is just how incomprehensible the scale truly is. The Shuttle is in low-Earth orbit, a mere hundred miles in the sky, while the sun is millions of miles away. Yet even with such a great disparity in distance, the Shuttle is still dwarfed by the Sun. Truly an incredible picture, and one that reminds us how fragile our lives are from an astrophysical perspective.


GeoDirect Direct Exchange Heat Pumps

As we continue to work with our engineering team in Worcester, we're starting to see prototypes of the nest generation ESES DeoDirect DX heat pumps. I've had the chance to look over drawings and the prototype units themselves, and I'm pretty excited. In addition to functional improvements, it looks like we're leaving the dull gray box behind and moving to something with bit more color. I'll update with more information as we receive it.