Added 1 new A* page:Speaking of blasts and seismometers, did you know both the US and the Soviets had schemes for nuking the Moon? I didn't until I came across this page while looking around for info on lunar seismology, and besides a nice diagram for a lunar seismometer, there's another nice diagram showing radiation from a nuke detonation filtering down to the lunar surface, and you can even download the pdf file there of the 1959 Air Force Special Weapons Center report on how best to nuke the poor ol' Moon. These schemes were a bit hazy on the exact scientific benefits of doing this, but there were some ideas of having another probe swoop in afterwards to scoop up blasted-up Moon dust and bring it back to Earth, or just having a bright flash visible from Earth and being able to say "we did that first!," although that goal faded quickly once it was realized that, with no atmosphere to support a nice big mushroom cloud, such nuclear glory would quickly fade from view.
Exciting times! And I had one photo of one of these detonations almost exactly two years ago, but anyway before such plans had been given up entirely, there were high altitude nuclear tests, particularly 1962's Starfish Prime, which detonated a 1.4 megaton nuke 250 miles (400 km) above the Pacific, the 11 pm blast being clearly visible in the night sky above Honolulu:
image by US Government (source)
There's a little extra tanning for you! Well it was decided that this type of high-altitude test wasn't the greatest idea after the resulting radiation quickly disabled three orbiting satellites, and eventually formed into man-made radiation belts around the planet that "crippled one-third of all satellites in low earth orbit"--namely, seven satellites, including the first commercial communication satellite, Telstar 1, which just happened to launch the day after the Starfish Prime blast; those artificial radiation belts, you see, lasted at least five years, bolstered by radiation from high-altitude Soviet tests.
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I spent at least an extra hour or so fussing over the nose and eye above it in today's page; it was one of those things where something just bugged me and I couldn't quite figure it out so I just had to take some pokes at it and see what happened (some of this facilitated greatly by stabbing at digital photos of it in Photoshop first). Here are the last three stages:
What I finally realized was that, while I've learned to draw reasonably convincing noses, at least from certain angles >_>, I don't always have to draw the whole schnozz--and didn't used to, you know, and while some of that was skipping over unpleasant and hard-to-draw bits of anatomical detail, another part was streamlining the presentation and focusing on the nicer-looking parts; in other words, the bridge of the nose didn't really need to be there in this drawing, and in fact was kind of getting in the way and not working realistically with the lighting, anyhow. Gotta keep the ol' "less is more" thing in mind more when working in ink. White ink, yay!
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