The idea for this site came from my postings to a popular forum known as yayhooray. I had managed 3 separate threads on there concerning current missions to Mars, Saturn and a page of other space articles of interest. A number of people on there started to ask that I make my own real blog of this material rather than just a few threads on the yayhooray forum.

The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular places in space that a person might theoretically be able to one day visit. So for the most part, nebula, galaxies and the like are not a part of this forum. I tend to focus on “terrestrial” places or places that host such places. I suppose that I like to find out more about these places that we may one day inhabit or simply visit (although during my lifetime this seems unlikely). So those kinds of places tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home.

The second theme is imagery. I will rarely post anything to this blog that does not have accompanying imagery. I think that the science community, or in particular those people at NASA, forget how important imagery is to the average person. Through the image you can better inspire the public to actually care and support the idea of exploring these exotic worlds. So often images are released to the public in false-color that are misleading or worse, make the average person suspicious of most images they see from these missions. On that note, there are issues with true-colors and some missions in particular that make true-color images hard to determine. Additionally, images are also saturated for release or they are compiled from other data such as ultraviolet, infrared, etc which is retuned from the spacecraft. So without being a scientist myself I try to filter out misleading images of these places that show more science than true appearance.

Lastly, i do some retouching of images when needed. if an image is incomplete or sometimes even only in black and white, I will attempt to correct the situation based upon other images or assumed details. Occasionally I will also combine images to make one composition that offers these multiple details in one image. When I do this, I will make note of what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way nobody should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.

In other words, what you see in even these altered images may not be what was happening when the spacecraft shot the photo, but could very well happen at any other given moment in that body’s history. The ultimate point here is to show beautiful places that really exist in our celestial neighborhood, not to provide images for scientific scrutiny.

I also have to mention that I in no way am taking ANY CREDIT for any images used in this forum other than the page designs that surround them. There are some freelance researchers that take spacecraft data and rework it or figure out better color results and the work they do is amazing (see links at right under “imager portfolios”). I am not doing that work here. I am a designer who loves the end result images and loves working with them. That’s all.