Io9 has a fantastic gallery of some concept art that includes detailed futuristic cities, amazing airships, and haunting landscapes. (more…)

We’d have a hell of a tide. Life would likely be unable to exist. Let’s just say, I like our current arrangement.

Head on over to Space.com to check out this gallery of futuristic airplanes. I love the look of those flying wings from Northrop Grumman and that double-wide D8.

“Northrop Grumman’s concept is based on the extremely aerodynamic “flying wing” design. The four Rolls Royce engines are embedded in the upper surface of the wing to achieve maximum noise shielding.”

Space.com has posted a gallery of some awesome interstellar space craft visions by Adrian Mann, an English space illustrator and artist currently living in Hungary. He’s also a graphical engineer for Project Icarus, a foundation dedicated to achieving interstellar flight by 2100.

These images are simply inspiring in their simplicity and utility. Below are a few of my favorites.

Check out more of his illustrations at Adrain’s site, bisbos.com.

Ryan Mcnaught, LEGO Certified Professional (you learn something new every day) just built a replica Saturn V rocket that towers to 19 feet tall. It’s made from 120,000 LEGO bricks and includes liquid fuel tanks, mini-fig engineers and an NASA Astrovan.

The model will be displayed at Brickvention on January 21 and 22 in Australia. Ryan says the project took 250 hours to complete. Check out the full set of photos on Flikr.

To give you an idea of how monumental this is:

I love love love these photos of Laurent Laveder playing games with the moon. Below are a couple of my favorites. But be sure to check out the web site, there are dozens more.

Here’s a handy poster of world rockets and how they compare in size to each other. You can never have too much knowledge of the world’s rockets. Click to enlarge to full size.

This perfectly melds my fascination with steampunk and birds. Jim and Tori Mullan’s creations are a beauty to behold. Check out a sample of my favorites and be sure to see the rest at their site.

Scientific American has got a collection of old space ship drawings for us to peruse in celebration of the ISS 12th year of continuous habitation. Huzzah!

I christen thee "Orb station"!

This cutaway space station image appeared in NASA’s 1959 Space The New Frontier brochure. The station, which could handle a crew of 50, was designed as a laboratory to study the effects of prolonged spaceflight on astronauts.

Following are a series of images of Curiosity being inserted into its aeroshell capsule, which will be cutting through Mars’ atmosphere upon delivery. Curiosity is expected to launch in 32 days, but won’t reach Mars for 9 months, or sometime in August of 2012.

Wrapping it up

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This interacting pair of galaxies is included in Arp’s catalog of peculiar galaxies as number 148. Arp 148 is the staggering aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the center and then caused it to propagate outwards in a ring. The elongated companion perpendicular to the ring suggests that Arp 148 is a unique snapshot of an ongoing collision. Infrared observations reveal a strong obscuration region that appears as a dark dust lane across the nucleus in optical light. Arp 148 is nicknamed Mayall’s object and is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approximately 500 million light-years away.

This image is part of a large collection of 59 images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on April 24, 2008, the observatory’s 18th anniversary.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)

Tony’s note: Astronomers estimate that our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy in about 4.5 billion years, give or take about a million. They’ll eventually merge to become an elliptical galaxy. When that happens, there is a pretty good chance that the solar system will be ejected from the galaxy! But don’t worry; by then the Earth will be an inhospitable wasteland, with all it’s water having been boiled billions of years ago, killing all life on Earth. Have a great day!

Incredible.

The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope is the most complex ground-based observatory and it’s still under construction. But that hasn’t stopped the astronomers working there to release the first image captured from it.

The enormous observatory is located in northern Chile and uses light in the millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelength band, allowing it to observe extremely cold objects in space. the image below is of a pair of galaxies known as the Antennae Galaxies. Click the image to enlarge.

“The Antennae Galaxies are a pair of colliding galaxies with dramatically distorted shapes”, said the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in a statement.

There is a lot of excitement in the astronomy community concerning this new telescope, still under construction. Currently, only 20 out of the 66 antennae are operational, but when fully up and running, it’s image resolving power will be greater than the Hubble. We should expect to see more incredible images from ALMA in the coming months as more antennae come online.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)