Beauty Abounds

  An illustration of Jupiter's Clouds.NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin Gill

GLORIOUS JUPITER: Earlier this week, I have marveled at Jupiter, shining so big and brightly in the early morning sky. 

Today, we marveled at the latest photos NASA's Juno space probe has returned from our gigantic neighbor. Flying at around 130,000 miles per hour, the orbiter snapped these photos of Jupiter's clouds on February 7. The raw data images were received back on Earth on Valentine's Day. Interestingly, the photos we see online "rarely come from NASA, though: The data gets posted to a special website where a community of science and art enthusiasts can take the black-and-white files and tweak them into stunning color pictures, which they upload back to the site," reports International Space Academy.

The photo below is another one of the latest images. Is it wrong that when I saw it, my first thought was, "I'd love to do that in buttercream. ..."

SPARKLE PLENTY: We continue to spend some time volunteering at a transitional home for women. Though it's home to about 35 women, its looks more like an institution than a home. So, we're doing little things here and there to try to change that. 

They have to use payphones to call friends and family and potential employers. They are scattered throughout the facility and are super dated.

So, we decided to have a little fun with them by adding a designer vinyl wrap to their outsides.

We use contrasting washi tape as trim, and added pencil cups and little cork boards for notes, complete with custom made button-topped thumb tacks.

A friend donated a nice little desk or book case lamp to the cause. It had good bones, but Annabelle and I decided to give it some bling.  

We added about 50 cents' worth of ribbon, and used our Cricut machine to make some lettering. The lamp literally sparkles now. :)

MORNING STROLL: We started the day tuned in to NASA TV to see some of today's spacewalk.

NASA Photo: NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei's “space-selfie” during U.S. EVA-47, the first spacewalk of 2018.

This morning's six-hour space walk was the second one in 2018. Vande Hei and Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai completed work upgrading the robotic Canadarm2. They also shuffled the locations of the two old latching end effectors (LEEs) that were replaced on earlier spacewalks.