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  Space Station Supply Ship Out of ControlApr 30, 2015 1:30 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Watch out, a Russian rocket is spinning out of control and will soon come crashing down to Earth!
 
Not to worry though, it probably won't hurt anyone. But it's true: Russian spacecraft Progress M-27M 'out of control' says the BBC. This was an unmanned rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station, but a problem came up when the cargo module tried separating from the booster, or something, and Russian mission control found the module spinning out of control, as you can see in the movie embedded in that article, taken from the module's onboard camera. Unable to control or maintain its orbit, it will inevitably come down, re-entering the atmosphere: "Russian news agency Interfax said it would re-enter between 7 and 11 May."
 
Another Progress module burned up harmlessly in the atmosphere last year—that one intentionally, to get it out of the way along with a cargo of trash from the ISS—so this out-of-control one will probably not end up conking anyone on the head with falling space debris. And the ISS should have enough supplies to hold them until the next supply ship, although they're even lower than they'd usually be, since the American "Cygnus" module, made by Orbital Sciences Corporation (now OrbitalATK, after a merger with Alliant Techsystems in February), that was supposed to take them supplies last October blew up during launch. The next supply ship due to feed the station, on June 19th, is another commercial American model, a SpaceX "Dragon," and hopefully that one will have better luck—or they might have to start breaking out the emergency rations on the space station!
 
 
 
 
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  When is painting like slicing an onion?Apr 29, 2015 12:06 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:When I was preparing to do yesterday's page I had an idea about how to paint it (dark purpley foreground silhouettes first, then wash the light red/blue background over that) that led me to doing some layering and stuff, which resulted in some kind of nifty atmospheric effects, I thought, especially the reddish sort of glow on the ground. So I thought I'd try some more of that kind of layered approach today, even though I knew it would be a lot trickier with a main subject that wasn't simply in silhouette. And one thing I found in doing this was that if you want a nifty radiant glowy layer effect, you'd better be sure your bottom layer is intensely colorful, because that layer determines just how bright all the layers together can possibly be—so if your bottom layer is more of a somewhat subdued reddish purple, you're not gonna be able to get a warm red glow effect out of it in the end. Which I probably would have realized if I'd stopped to think about it beforehand and plan that particular part of it out a little more, but eh well live and (hopefully) learn!
 
 
 
 
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  Do you know what day of the week it is?Apr 27, 2015 11:15 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Today was a Monday! Which is not news to anyone. But it was. : P I'll try to do better tomorrow!
 
 
 
 
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  Big A* Original Art Sale week 2!Apr 25, 2015 2:56 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Oh man, wet on pre-wet (the back of his jacket, pretty much the last thing I painted on today's page)! That's where some fun watercolor stuff happens. I gotta remember to do more of that. Well, there's always next week!
 
Right now, we're a week into the Big A* Original Art Sale! Check my post on it from last week for the full details, but basically, at the moment all the pieces of original A* art—you know, ink sketches and watercolor painted pages and all—that you can buy on this site are just $10 each!
 
There are still a bunch left, too! Although most of the pieces I picked out to highlight in my original post have since been boughten (not a word) by lovely readers, if you flip through the comic you'll find plenty of pages that still have the golden "original art" link at their lower left corner, meaning they're still available for immediate purchase. If you liked the noir-ish inked office scene (sold!) from episode 18 that I posted last week, for instance, you might be interested in the two pages that came before it: both available at the time of this writing, and very much in the same pulpy vein (click-um on these thumbs to go to their art piece pages):
 
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Those and many more unique pieces of A*, including recent-er painted watercolor pages, still available at just $10 a pop! Go go big art sale!
 
 
 
 
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  Hubble's 25th anniversary!Apr 23, 2015 11:52 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:NASA released a colorful new image to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 25th (!) anniversary—this composite visible and near-infrared, false-color image shows the 6 to 13 light year extent of 3,000 star-strong "giant cluster" Westerlund 2, about 20,000 light years from Earth (just a little nearer to us than A*, but in the direction of the constellation Carina rather than Sagittarius), a young cluster at "only about 2 million years old and contains some of our galaxy's hottest, brightest, and most massive stars":
 
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image by NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team (source)
 
^ In the image, red represents hydrogen, and blue-green stands for "predominately oxygen."
 
The BBC's article on Hubble's 25th anniversary highlights the amazing contributions the telescope has made to the sciences, and describes some of the technical hurdles overcome to get the extremely sensitive telescope working, and to keep it operational for an unexpected two-and-a-half decades; indeed, although it will receive no more repair missions, and did lose one of its six new gyroscopes last year, Hubble is in surprisingly good shape, and engineers think they may even be able to keep it operating for another five years, more than enough to last us until the scheduled 2018 launch its successor, the gigantic James Webb Space Telescope. (This is a relief, because originally, with a less optimistic prognosis for Hubble's lifespan, it was thought there would be a gap of several years between the two, during which we would have had no top-notch space telescope!)
 
Among the other discoveries and achievements mentioned in the article—most, notably, perhaps, helping to narrow down the estimate of our universe's age from 10-20 billion years to a much more precise 13.8—is Hubble's contribution to the science of supermassive black holes: Hubble "provided the definitive evidence for the existence of super-massive black holes at the centre of galaxies."
 
And let's not forget that it has treated us to the most spectacular photos of our universe ever seen by humankind!
 
Huzzah for Hubble!
 
 
 
 
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  Now let's sculpt those calvesApr 22, 2015 10:25 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I mailed to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign:
 
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Jazzercise!
 
 
 
 
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  You know, that long-haired guyApr 22, 2015 2:02 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A whole lot of scrubbing off and re-painting today. We haven't seen Thierry in so long I guess I almost forgot how to draw him! : P
 
 
 
 
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  You can be my wingman any timeApr 20, 2015 10:59 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Hey if you missed the big announcement in the previous blog entry, I'm currently having a big sale of all the A* original art on this site! Every single watercolor painting, ink drawing, or pencil illustration you'll find here can be yours for just $10 each! Thank to those folks who've already snapped up a bunch of them, and although only three of the eight that I showed thumbnails of in the original post are still up for grabs, there are a good deal more still available that I didn't call out specifically—just flip back through the comic and look for the gold "original art" link at the lower left corner of the comic images! See the original post for more details an' stuff. ^_^
 
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Here's a somewhat sassy (and Top Gun? : o) sketch I sent off to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign:
 
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Thanks for reading A*! : ))
 
 
 
 
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  The Big A* Original Art Sale!Apr 18, 2015 12:32 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Okay let's have a big art sale! As of right now, all pieces of original, hand-drawn A* art for sale through this site are just $10 each! Yep! There's only one of each, so get your favorites before they're gone: while browsing the comic, just look for a gold "original art" link at the lower left corner of each comic image—if it's there, that piece is for sale, and clicking the gold link will take you to its sale page, with more details on the piece and a big gold button you click to add the piece to your virtual shopping cart, from which point you can purchase it with credit card or PayPal. Quite a bit of A*'s archive of hand-penciled, inked, or watercolored pages has already been snapped up by readers, and the most recent week of pages is always up for auction on eBay before the survivors come back for sale through this site, but at the moment anyway there's still a pretty good selection left for you to choose from; for instance, here are some watercolor paintings from recent episodes that are still available as I write this—click the thumbnails below to take a look at 'em:
 
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All just $10 each! And those are just a few examples! Also, I've just made two classic ink pieces available for the first time in ages—they're a couple of my favorites, and they've been on tour at my little art shows here in Seattle for quite some time, but they're finally back up for sale through the site:
 
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Those are also just $10 each! The hand-drawn pieces go all the way back to episode 13, page 136—and even all that way back, the ones that are left are just $10 each! Also, don't forget to check out the additional pieces of hand-drawn A* art, in all sizes and shapes, found in the episode galleries on the episodes & e-books page (the hand-drawn ones start the episode 13 gallery)—those are all on sale for just $10 each, too!
 
If you're buying multiple pieces, just add them to your cart one-by-one, then check out with all of them together and it will combine the shipping into just one shipping charge for the lot—but keep in mind that until you complete your purchase, the pieces of original art in your cart will still be available for others to snap up, so don't delay too long!
 
This sale will last until... Well, let's see how it goes! I'll give at least a week's notice before it ends, how's that? ^_^ Questions, comments, etc, shoot 'em to me at smbhax@gmail.com, @smbhax on Twitter, or oh all the other usual social media places (links on the about page!).
 
 
 
 
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  Not today, tomorrow!Apr 17, 2015 4:07 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Tomorrow I will have a big announcement that you may want to tune in for if you're interested in getting some cool A* stuff! Want a hint? Okay, it starts with "Art" and ends with "Sale." Wait, it might actually start with "Huge"...still ending with "Sale." Something like that. 'Tis a mystery wrapped in a tasty baconigma that surely only tomorrow can reveal!!
 
 
 
 
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  SpaceX nearly lands; New Horizons near PlutoApr 16, 2015 1:50 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Two fresh space news items:
 
- SpaceX very nearly recovers rocket after launch (BBC) describes the commercial space agency's latest attempt to land (and thus recover for re-use) one of their rocket stages: after boosting its "Dragon" capsule of supplies for the ISS into orbit (among them: a microgravity Italian espresso maker), the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage attempted a landing on SpaceX's ocean landing platform; coming down in slightly wobbly fashion, the unmanned rocket did manage to touch down on the relatively small platform, but it was off-balance and quickly toppled over and exploded, as you can see in the video.
 
This was considered something of a success though, as it was better than their attempt in January, where the rocket in that incident, tilted to diagonal, slammed sideways into the platform before exploding, as dramatically captured by a camera on the platform itself in this video.
 

- NASA's New Horizons Nears Historic Encounter with Pluto (NASA) showcases the "preliminary reconstruction" of the New Horizons probe's first color photo of the dwarf planet—and its largest moon, Charon:
 
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image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (source)
 
Taken at a distance of 71 million miles / 115 million kilometers away from Pluto—by comparison, the Earth is about 150 million km away from the Sun—the photo is nearly as good as what Hubble has been able to gather from Earth orbit—and the photos should continue to improve in detail as the probe approaches Pluto; after nine years and three billion miles of cruising through space toward mankind's furthest-ever primary space exploration target, it is expected to make its closest approach to Pluto and the dwarf planet's five (known) moons in mid-July of this year.
 
Back in January, NASA compiled a sequence of very low-detail photos taken by the probe from 200 million km out into an animation showing Charon orbiting the dwarf planet; if they look kind of close together, that's because they are: Charon orbits 18,000 km / 11,000 miles above Pluto (versus the Earth-Moon distance of about 384,000 km / 239,000 miles).
 
In February, they put together a little animation that included orbiting views of Pluto's next two smaller moons, Hydra and Nix, as bright/blobby points of light, and added "each moon is probably between 25-95 miles (approximately 40- 150 kilometers) in diameter, but scientists won’t know their sizes more precisely until New Horizons obtains close-up pictures of both of them in July. Pluto’s two other small moons, Styx and Kerberos, are still smaller and too faint to be seen by New Horizons at its current range to Pluto."
 
 
 
 
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  The fruit is getting away againApr 15, 2015 3:29 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I need to stop being way too obsessed with the possibility of cobbling together an arcade-like joystick specifically for playing Ms. Pac-Man, and spend more time writing actual informative blog entries.
 
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I'm not even very *good* at Ms. Pac-Man! = P
 
 
 
 
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  Shipping art is super excitingApr 14, 2015 12:12 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Put four sketches for Patreon supporters in the mail over the weekend. : ) It would have been five, but uh well if you are at the pencil sketch reward level and happen to live in the fine state of California, please check your email (from a week or so back), I've run into a snag mailing you stuff!
 
Also shipped off the original art watercolor paintings from five recent A* pages this morning, to readers who won them on eBay : ))
 
 
 
 
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  The biggest A* Patreon art reward yet!Apr 11, 2015 3:32 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This is the big kahuna burger of my monthly Patreon art rewards, sent to a supporter of the comic at the highest level of the A* Patreon campaign for their support in December: a full-on 17.75" x 11.75" watercolor painting!
 
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This is probably the last of these we'll see for a while, since that supporter has requested I do future ones at the smaller 16" x 6.75" size of the daily A* comics, so they'll fit in nicely with the A* original art they've already won through eBay. That's all right by me, although it is kind of fun to work bigger, even if it does take a ton of watercolor!
 
 
 
 
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  BlahggetryApr 10, 2015 12:00 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Well I'm maybe not doing so well on the bloggetry today but I *have* at least started catching up a bit on reward sketches for my Patreon supporters, so that's something. With a bit of luck, but this time next week I'll only be *1* month behind! : D
 
 
 
 
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  Mars rover fights memory loss, sets recordsApr 08, 2015 11:50 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has been having amnesia! That's what NASA calls trouble with the rover's flash memory, anyway, because with the flash memory going on the blink for some mysterious reason, the rover reverts to using its standard, volatile RAM to store the information it collects in its travels each day—but standard RAM loses all its information when the rover powers down at night, so it "forgets" the day's work. Back around New Year's, NASA decided to "hack" the robot's programming to try to fix the problem; they thought this would take a couple weeks, but they were still working on it in late March; they thought they'd isolated the problem to the seventh of the rover's seven memory banks, so they reformatted the RAM to use just the first six banks, hoping this would solve the memory outages; meanwhile, they'd programmed the rover to beam back its information every day before going to sleep, which wasn't very efficient, but at least got the data to NASA before it was lost each night. But less than a week later, Opportunity experienced another bout of memory loss, so the amnesia problem is still there. On the plus side, the rover hasn't been resetting itself, which it had been doing multiple times a day when it was using all its flash RAM banks, so they may have solved THAT problem, at least.
 
Despite all these memory problems outages the rover in its advanced 11 year and two months age, it continues to explore the red planet at its leisurely pace, and NASA just celebrated it having passed a total land travel distance equal to an Earthly marathon: 26.219 miles, or 42.195 kilometers. Not too shabby, considering that Opportunity's original mission only called for it to operate for a total of 90 days! And it finally beat the rover distance record of 39 km set by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 on the Moon back in 1973—Lunokhod 2 ("lunokhod" means "moon walker" in Russian) covered that distance in a mere four months, mind you.
 
 
 
 
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  Sketching on the weekends? Pshaw!Apr 07, 2015 10:32 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I sent to a reader as their reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign in the month of January:
 
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I had switched to doing sketches on the weekends to save time during the week, but then a lot of weekend stuff came up and I got behind. : P But I think I'll be catching up starting tomorrow (I still have to get people sketches for February and now also March!), because a) I have to wait around for a package since a certain delivery agency has had an uncanny knack of showing up in the brief window of time in which I wasn't at home for each of the past two days, and b) I'm switching back to sketching during the week since the weekend thing wasn't working so well. ; ) I *am* trying to improve the quality of the sketches each month so we'll see how I do at keeping up with the clock! : o
 
 
 
 
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  Heroically did some stuff I was putting off!Apr 06, 2015 10:49 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Got caught up on some stuff! I got the latest e-book monthly rewards sent out to those at the single e-book reward level on Patreon over the weekend, and this afternoon I got some new prints ordered and some promo stuff prepared for the next show of A* art here in Seattle, which will be at a large, yet-to-be-disclosed coffee shop here in May. : )
 
 
 
 
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  There's something about a nice suitApr 04, 2015 3:24 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I sent to a reader for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign in the month of December!
 
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:D
 
 
 
 
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  Totally lava tubularApr 03, 2015 1:33 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:In Hawaii and elsewhere under the Earth, long tunnels and large caverns called "lava tubes" have formed underground when molten lava crusts over, and then the still liquid lava beneath flows away. Based on surface observations and theories of planetary formation, many scientists conjecture that the Moon had a volcanic past—and if this was the case, there could very well be extensive lava tubes beneath the lunar surface! Photos of the Moon show what might be entrances to such networks of tunnels, but as of yet none have been explored. But if lunar lava tubes *do* exist, computer modeling, as discussed in a recent BBC article, has predicted that, thanks to the relatively low gravity on the Moon, caverns left on the Moon by lava could be much larger than their counterparts on Earth—up to 5 km across! Might make a pretty handy place to live up there, even, once it was dusted off and sealed up—free from asteroid impacts and other hazards that would threaten less well-housed astronauts on the surface.
 
Heck, maybe this city Selenis is in right now is in a lava tube : oo
 
 
 
 
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  Maxed outApr 02, 2015 1:05 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This is as big as guns are going to get in this episode, if you were wondering. : P
 
 
 
 
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