Guest Editor: Morgan Maassen ☀️
TUESDAY | 2.18.25
Welcome to a special guest-edited edition of the Afternoon Delight. You'll see a version of this newsletter here and there when we happen upon the opportunity to sit down and chat with a few of the better people and organizations out there.
Morgan Maassen is a pretty cool dude for a few reasons. For one, last year, he took the second-best photo at the Olympics. In case you didn’t catch it, you can find that pearl of a picture right here. For two, the guy’s got a knack for pointing his camera in the right direction at the right time and capturing some of the most jaw-dropping views of the ocean blue and the glittering night skies we’ve laid our eyes on. He even had a run as a judge for our Photo Contest way back when — good times. For three, he knows an awful lot about space, which worked out pretty well for us given that The Cosmic Issue should be hitting mailboxes any day now. Anyway, all of these reasons and more are why we knocked on Morgan’s door and asked him to take over this almost-daily newsletter this Tuesday. Take it away, Morgan.
The Cosmic Issue — to the moooon.
Star Trails
In the absence of the moon comes the best shooting opportunities of the night sky. While we as photographers often aspire to capture the stars in stillness, leaving the shutter open for minutes or hours reveals their kaleidoscopic movements, as seen from the rotating earth.
The Most Accurate Ever View of the Milky Way
In 2013, the ESA Gaia mission launched a spacecraft to trace our galaxy's history and evolution, and it's been a total success. Over an 11-year period, it's taken three trillion observations of two billion individual objects in the galaxy, most of them stars that were then measured those same objects repeatedly to produce a non-static 3D map that reveals the Milky Way's kinetic history.
Other Good News & Happenings
The bright future: Fifty innovators, thinkers, and changemakers.
Using AI to explore whale songs.
Something to watch: Kelly Slater x NASA astronaut Christina Koch.
The nerds in lab coats’ version of a “happy accident.” Nice one guys.
