Made it from a bunch of handheld iPhone shots that I stitched together with the Giffer! app. @sgillane was kind enough to fire up After Effects and stabilize it.

(If I’m not mistaken, you can even see Jupiter and the Moon move in relation to one another, thought it wouldn’t surprise me if that were a processing artifact.)

If you feel brave, view the unstabilized version here:

And the ISS above Pi Bar:

At 75 mph, it would take you 4 months to drive to the 238,857 miles to the moon.

Also, for some perspective, the Space Shuttle and International Space Station orbit just 190 miles up. The moon, so far away from me.

So where’s my damn space elevator? Or better yet my sling-on-a-ring – imagine an ring of tethered satellites orbiting the earth, with modules that drop a line down *vertically*, pluck a ton or cargo from planes at 40,000 feet and jerk it into low earth orbit. I don’t know how many Gs that would be, but GODDAMN I want that.

A flight taking off from Bernal Airport (moonlit 60 second exposure at 11 pm)

Totally blind shot holding my iPhone in front of a telescope.

If I didn’t know any better, I think I caught someone and their dog – two extremely zoomed and grainy shots. See the arms?

(Or maybe it’s a centaur. Or a 25 to 30 foot snake. I can’t quite tell.)

Anyway, other gratuitous Bernal shots from my backyard:

Moon rising through Bernal trees:

Previous Bernal-Moon shots here.

I love my little Lumix. Taken from La Lengua.

Click through for a wider view. One in a series.

Via our favorite astronaut, Astro_Soichi.

(Meanwhile, the moon is thinking, “that’s no space station.”)

And since we’re on the theme:

(via somethingawful)

And of course a Star Wars occupied SF:

Wait, what’s in that gap between the branches?

Zoom in a little more…

Good day, moon.

Gratuitous shot of wispy clouds that were in front of the moon but passed by before I could get my camera. Damned wind.

Moon, molding.  Molding, moon.

I must be honest here — the above is poor man’s HDR (aka I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing when I’m taking photos at night as proven by about twenty shots with increasingly desperate exposure settings).  I basically cut the corner of the picture of the short exposure on the left, and pasted it into the corner of the picture of the longer exposure on the right. Such is the short-lived reign of photorealism here at Burrito Justice. But it’s pretty much what my eyes saw.

This one was a 15 second exposure:

Sadly, I missed the opportunity for a dramatic moon-behind-tree shot by about 5 minutes.

Shots from NASA’s Galileo space probe as it swung by the Earth and the Moon in 1992.

(May take a minute to get going – click image for a larger version. Animation by Gordan Ugarkovic, via The Planetary Society.)

Since the Mission is not actually visible in the above video, I will reuse this awesome shot of the earth rising over the horizon of the moon from Japan’s late Kaguya orbiter.

Hopefully this puts some things in perspective. That earth is beautiful, no?

Next to the space program, infrastructure (specifically water and sewer systems) is likely our civilization’s crowning achievement. (Think about it — if you only could have one, would you choose running water/sewers, or electricity?)

All of this is an excuse for me to publish this absolutely disgusting picture of what happens when you dump unnecessary crap down your drain, from our friends at the SF Sewers blog:

So don’t bitch when you can’t make your usual left turn on your commute home for a couple of weeks in order for the hundred-plus year old infrastructure that your great-great-grandfather installed to be replaced so you can continue to dump old bacon grease down the garberator. And don’t bitch if taxes go up a little — as you may have noticed all sorts of infrastructure around here is COLLAPSING IN ON ITSELF.

You only appreciate this shit when it’s gone. And I don’t want that to happen on my watch. Time to get proactive, people. (Analogies may also be made for the global environment.)

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

Via The Planetary Society, via NASA’s LCROSS.

More Awesome:

via Japan’s Kaguya – more HD YouTube moon horizon low-angle shots here.

(Um, so why don’t we have a bunch of low earth orbit satellites beaming down shots like this of our lovely planet? I’d pay for a dedicated cable channel with an HD feed of that.)

And then we have the Earth and our Moon. And Jupiter and its moons.  As seen from Mars.

via the Mars Global Surveyor, via JPL and NASA.

Please review your tax dollars at work – 50 years of space exploration.

Via Laughing Squid, via National Geographic.