Smithsonian.com

Last week we asked for help identifying a picture.

Let’s call it a Slight of Flight, space flight that is. The mystery image is of the heat shield from the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia.

In 1969, Columbia carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back for their historic mission. The epoxy-resin ablative heat shield protected Columbia from the 5,000 °F temperatures during its reentry through Earth’s atmosphere.

The photograph was taken by the National Air and Space Museum’s photographer Carolyn Russo. Her new book and upcoming exhibition, In Plane View: Abstractions of Flight.

Russo uses fine art photography to bring out new visual dimensions of the iconic aircraft and spacecraft of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Her unconventional approach reveals new layers of meaning from the whimsical to the profound in some of history’s most revered flying machines. The publication by powerHouse Books features a foreword by Patty Wagstaff and introduction and essays by Anne Collins Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery who specializes in the relationship of art, science, and technology.

OK sports fans. It’s time to play another round of Guess What This Picture Is!

We’re convinced you’ll never guess. But go ahead, take a shot. Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? Is it a close-up of grandma’s handbag? Skin from an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey? Or some reptilian remnant?

Here’s a hint: It is one of the Smithsonian’s 137 million artifacts.

I never really understood how colossal that behemoth plane, the 747, is until I stood next to the front landing gear and looked up. I was at the press conference for the opening of “America by Air,” a new exhibition opening Saturday at the National Air and Space Museum.

Hanging on the wall is some 36 feet of the front fuselage of a 747; the entire airplane is 231 feet long. You can also climb up several flights of stairs and take a peek into the cockpit. You can see the controls and the hundreds of instruments.

For such an incredibly huge airplane, it’s odd that it’s so cramped in there–smaller than my cubicle! Seating for the pilot, co-pilot and navigator is really tight. Sitting hour after hour in that tiny cockpit can’t be much of a joy ride.

So what’s up with that camelback hump on a 747?

Pan Am head Juan Trippe, a key customer for the 747, told Boeing, the manufacturer, that he doubted the aircraft would be commercially viable as a passenger plane. So he insisted that it be easily convertible to a cargo plane. That meant a nose that could be opened and closed on a top hinge. And a nose that would open and close would be an impossible place for the cockpit.

For one thing, having all the wiring and control cables between the cockpit and the plane bending back and forth as the nose opened and closed would have been a very bad idea. So the cockpit was put up behind the nose. To make room for the cockpit, and to keep the plane maximally aerodynamic, there had to be a hump. Later versions of the 747 extended the hump farther back and made room for more first-class seats.

As for why the camel has a hump? That’s another story.

(Courtesy of Eric Long/National Air and Space Museum)

Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit. Translation: God created, Linnaeus organized.

This was Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s mantra. Considered the father of modern taxonomy, Linnaeus created a system that classified about 4,400 animals and 7,700 plants into an increasingly specific framework of kingdom, class, order, genus and species, tagging each with a two-part Latin name. His naming system, known as binomial nomenclature, became the standard scientific lingo and is still used today.

In honor of Linnaeus’s birth, 300 years ago this past May (check out our homage, “Organization Man,” by Kennedy Warne, in our May issue), Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is displaying the botanist’s personal copy of his seminal book, Systema Naturae. Published in 1735, the book is the first attempt to describe his classification system. This author’s edition is the first 11 pages of what became 3,000 by the time of Linnaeus’s death.

Check out the two-day exhibit, which also includes eight animal and plant specimens named by or for Linnaeus, this Tuesday and Wednesday, November 13-14. On Tuesday, scientists and historian speak on “Three Hundred Years of Linnaean Taxonomy” in an all-day symposium at the Natural History museum.

(Systema Naturae, by Carolus Linnaeus published in 1735. Courtesy of the Embassy of Sweden.)

A black hole that trumps all others in size was detected by two NASA satellites and announced by researchers, led by Andrea Prestwich at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The black hole is a hefty 24 to 33 times larger than the Sun (the previous best was 16 times larger).

Sitting 1.8 million light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, this new record-breaker is a black hole of the stellar-mass variety, meaning it was formed when a massive star died and collapsed inward upon itself.

The team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was able to estimate the black hole’s mass because it orbits another star that ejects gas, which spirals toward the black hole (above), heats up and emits revealing X-rays before being gobbled up by the hole.

Some suspected that the black hole bulked up as a result of an insatiable appetite, slurping up whatever was within its vicinity. But the study found that it has only gained one or two solar masses since its metamorphosis from star to black hole. Instead of shedding pounds, as most stars do before imploding, this one carried its mass into its black hole afterlife. Experts say the black hole was “born fat, it didn’t grow fat.”

The finding expands researchers’ understanding of just how massive a black hole can be. “We now know that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized,” Prestwich says.

(This artist’s conception shows the biggest stellar-mass black hole, upper left, which weighs 24 to 33 times as much as the Sun. It is pulling gas from a companion Wolf-Rayet star lower right. Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA.)

Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre invented the black and white daguerreotype, one of the earliest forms of photography, in 1839. No one questioned the French artist’s claim to fame.

But when Levi Hill, a Baptist minister from the remote town of West Kill in the New York Catskills, claimed to have added technicolor to the art form, critics did begin to ask questions.

It didn’t help Hill’s case that he refused to disclose his methods.

People suspected he had just dabbed color onto a black and white image. Hill published a book, A Treatise on Heliochromy, on his process in 1856. When still no one could mimic the method, Hill curiously blamed their failures on missteps in the complicated procedure, which required rare and dangerous chemicals. The process never became commercially viable.

The color-hungry public had to wait for that until 1907 when the Lumière brothers developed a way to shoot and develop color photographs. (Check out “In Living Color” by Robert Poole in our September issue.)

Was Hill a fraud? Were his multi-hued Hillotypes–62 of which were donated to the National Museum of American History’s collections in 1933–fakes?

The 156-year-old cold case was recently re-opened by the the American History museum and the Getty Conservation Institute. Using new portable X-ray and infrared equipment, the Hill images were recently re-examined.

So, imposter or inventor?

Ironically, the analysis proved him to be a bit of both. Turns out Hill produced a photograph that picked up the first colors known to photography, some reds and blues, but he added enhancements in white, yellow and green, casting them off as naturally occurring.

(Hillotype of a print depicting a man fallen from a horse, color pigments applied, Courtesy of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History)

Last week, we asked for help identifying a picture.

You were all wrong. No, it wasn’t a specimen from the moon. Or Anne Coulter’s pet, or a portrait of Nixon, or, um, a baby panda embryo.

Paleontologist Brian T. Huber from the National Museum of Natural History’s department of paleobiology reveals the creature’s true identity:

“It is a trilobite, which belong to a group of arthropods that became extinct about 251 million years ago. The species shown is Walliserops trifurcatus, and it was collected from ocean sediments in Morocco that date to the Devonian Age, some 385 to 359 million years ago.

“The compound eyes of trilobites were important in predator detection and spines probably evolved to keep the predators from attacking. The projecting rod on the right of this specimen actually connects to a long, forked ‘trident,’ which looks like three leaves on a stem (above).

“Since many arthropods are ‘dimorphic,’ that is, male specimens have a different appearance than females of the same species, it is thought that the trident was used for sexual display.

“Does anybody have a guess what other purpose this strange feature may have served?

“This specimen is one of many that will be featured in a trilobite evolution exhibit within the new Ocean Hall, which will open in the Museum of Natural History in September 2008. This and many other spectacularly preserved specimens were donated from Dr. Robert M. Hazen of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.”

(Courtesy of Chip Clark)

Monday night, the National Portrait Gallery gave the retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor the chance to do her own self-portrait—in words, that is.

The portrait O’Connor painted for her audience was less the judicial scholar that one might expect. Her salt-of-the-earth story includes some surprising details. Did you know:

• O’Connor is in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame;
• She grew up on her family’s Lazy B Ranch, straddling the New Mexico-Arizona border. “At the ranch, it didn’t matter if you were a man or woman,” she says. “There was work to be done”;
• She played poker with cowboys, drove a truck and shot a .22. “I didn’t know lawyers or judges. I knew cattle people”;
• She was accepted to Stanford University at age 16 without taking a college entrance exam;
• She once took a creative writing class taught by Wallace Stegner;
• As an undergrad, she wanted to be a rancher and had no intention of becoming a judge;
• When she attended law school, the class was 1 percent female. “[Ronald Reagan] opened doors.” Reagan, she says, deserves some of the credit for the increase of female law students—now roughly 50 percent;
• She bargained for her first job as a deputy attorney for California’s San Mateo County, offering to work for free.

Last October, O’Connor sat for 25 artists. The works, from realistically rendered busts to loosely sketched profiles, were recently on view at the National Portrait Gallery.

(Portrait of Sandra Day O’Connor by Aaron Shikler, Pastel, 2006, Courtesy The Painting Group, New York City, © Aaron Shikler, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.)