Smithsonian.com

Last week we asked for help identifying a picture.

Let’s call it a Slight of Flight, space flight that is. The mystery image is of the heat shield from the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia.

In 1969, Columbia carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back for their historic mission. The epoxy-resin ablative heat shield protected Columbia from the 5,000 °F temperatures during its reentry through Earth’s atmosphere.

The photograph was taken by the National Air and Space Museum’s photographer Carolyn Russo. Her new book and upcoming exhibition, In Plane View: Abstractions of Flight.

Russo uses fine art photography to bring out new visual dimensions of the iconic aircraft and spacecraft of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Her unconventional approach reveals new layers of meaning from the whimsical to the profound in some of history’s most revered flying machines. The publication by powerHouse Books features a foreword by Patty Wagstaff and introduction and essays by Anne Collins Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery who specializes in the relationship of art, science, and technology.

OK sports fans. It’s time to play another round of Guess What This Picture Is!

We’re convinced you’ll never guess. But go ahead, take a shot. Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? Is it a close-up of grandma’s handbag? Skin from an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey? Or some reptilian remnant?

Here’s a hint: It is one of the Smithsonian’s 137 million artifacts.

I never really understood how colossal that behemoth plane, the 747, is until I stood next to the front landing gear and looked up. I was at the press conference for the opening of “America by Air,” a new exhibition opening Saturday at the National Air and Space Museum.

Hanging on the wall is some 36 feet of the front fuselage of a 747; the entire airplane is 231 feet long. You can also climb up several flights of stairs and take a peek into the cockpit. You can see the controls and the hundreds of instruments.

For such an incredibly huge airplane, it’s odd that it’s so cramped in there–smaller than my cubicle! Seating for the pilot, co-pilot and navigator is really tight. Sitting hour after hour in that tiny cockpit can’t be much of a joy ride.

So what’s up with that camelback hump on a 747?

Pan Am head Juan Trippe, a key customer for the 747, told Boeing, the manufacturer, that he doubted the aircraft would be commercially viable as a passenger plane. So he insisted that it be easily convertible to a cargo plane. That meant a nose that could be opened and closed on a top hinge. And a nose that would open and close would be an impossible place for the cockpit.

For one thing, having all the wiring and control cables between the cockpit and the plane bending back and forth as the nose opened and closed would have been a very bad idea. So the cockpit was put up behind the nose. To make room for the cockpit, and to keep the plane maximally aerodynamic, there had to be a hump. Later versions of the 747 extended the hump farther back and made room for more first-class seats.

As for why the camel has a hump? That’s another story.

(Courtesy of Eric Long/National Air and Space Museum)

Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit. Translation: God created, Linnaeus organized.

This was Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s mantra. Considered the father of modern taxonomy, Linnaeus created a system that classified about 4,400 animals and 7,700 plants into an increasingly specific framework of kingdom, class, order, genus and species, tagging each with a two-part Latin name. His naming system, known as binomial nomenclature, became the standard scientific lingo and is still used today.

In honor of Linnaeus’s birth, 300 years ago this past May (check out our homage, “Organization Man,” by Kennedy Warne, in our May issue), Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is displaying the botanist’s personal copy of his seminal book, Systema Naturae. Published in 1735, the book is the first attempt to describe his classification system. This author’s edition is the first 11 pages of what became 3,000 by the time of Linnaeus’s death.

Check out the two-day exhibit, which also includes eight animal and plant specimens named by or for Linnaeus, this Tuesday and Wednesday, November 13-14. On Tuesday, scientists and historian speak on “Three Hundred Years of Linnaean Taxonomy” in an all-day symposium at the Natural History museum.

(Systema Naturae, by Carolus Linnaeus published in 1735. Courtesy of the Embassy of Sweden.)

A black hole that trumps all others in size was detected by two NASA satellites and announced by researchers, led by Andrea Prestwich at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The black hole is a hefty 24 to 33 times larger than the Sun (the previous best was 16 times larger).

Sitting 1.8 million light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, this new record-breaker is a black hole of the stellar-mass variety, meaning it was formed when a massive star died and collapsed inward upon itself.

The team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was able to estimate the black hole’s mass because it orbits another star that ejects gas, which spirals toward the black hole (above), heats up and emits revealing X-rays before being gobbled up by the hole.

Some suspected that the black hole bulked up as a result of an insatiable appetite, slurping up whatever was within its vicinity. But the study found that it has only gained one or two solar masses since its metamorphosis from star to black hole. Instead of shedding pounds, as most stars do before imploding, this one carried its mass into its black hole afterlife. Experts say the black hole was “born fat, it didn’t grow fat.”

The finding expands researchers’ understanding of just how massive a black hole can be. “We now know that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized,” Prestwich says.

(This artist’s conception shows the biggest stellar-mass black hole, upper left, which weighs 24 to 33 times as much as the Sun. It is pulling gas from a companion Wolf-Rayet star lower right. Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA.)