It’s a hell of a week, so here: have some pretty.
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When you run a blog like this one, you use a lot of Creative Commons and public domain photos — mostly because if I’m not being paid for this (and boy, am I not being paid for this) I can’t afford to pay for photos to make things pretty on here. The annual best photos I’ve had on here post is coming soon, along with the annual “list of lists” post, but for now, I just thought I’d share with you a few Flickr feeds that for varying reasons are both beautiful and free.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Flickr feed is full of beautiful, high-resolution photographs of the Earth from above and the sky from below (and, well, also from above). The photo above is of Sequoia National Park, and was taken in October of 2008 by the Thematic Mapper sensor on the Landsat 5 satellite (which, if you believe it, was launched way the heck back in 1984, and wasn’t decomissioned until 2013!). The GSFC has photos of a whole lot of things on the ground and in space, from Hubble images to JWST assembly images to Hurricane Matthew. You should definitely check it out.
NOAA Photo Library
The photo library of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is another national treasure. If you like underwater photography, everything from coral to sharks to science in action, then this is definitely the Flickr feed for you.
NASA ICE
There is a Flickr stream called “NASA ICE.” That’s literally all you need to know about it. Lots and lots of pictures of ice. At least we’re taking photos of it before it’s all gone.
SpaceX
Even though it’s a private company, SpaceX made the move to push all their Flickr photos into the public domain a couple of years back, and it’s just wonderful to have all these gorgeous rocket launch photos at our fingertips. Can’t wait for next month’s RTF so we can get some more — not to mention when Falcon Heavy gets off the ground!
Those are my favourites (off the top of my head) — what are yours? Let me know over twitter @TWITomorrow or over at the Facebook page!
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Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.