I think you can guess what spurred me to search out astronomy books appropriate for ages 0-2. That’s right, my daughter. Feel free to chime in with your favorites in the comments, but remember we’re talking about 0-2-year-olds here, so board books or simple text. Rhyming or rhythmic text is also good.

I was very unhappy when I found that the selection for 0-2-year-olds was quite limited. I liked several books out of what was available though. I’ve finished my first draft of a board book of my own, but until I find a publisher I’ll stick with recommending other people’s books.

Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me (Classic Board Book)

By Eric Carle — ISBN-13: 978-0689829598, Seattle Public Library, Amazon.

So far this is my daughter’s favorite of the books I got. I’m not surprised, because it’s by Eric Carle! I hesitate very slightly about recommending this one, because at the end it implies that the Moon actually changes size when it changes phase. But imagination is also important.

The board book has large flaps that are prone to being crunched by small hands. It’s a good book, anyway.

The Sun Is My Favorite Star

By Frank Asch — ISBN-13: 978-0152021276, Seattle Public Library, Amazon.

I love this one. The story is good, the pictures are clean and bright. It’s accurate and pretty.

Happy Birthday, Moon

By Frank Asch — ISBN-13: 978-0812448320, Seattle Public Library, Amazon.

Again, it’s an imaginative story, but stays correct in its scientific concepts. Moonbear can’t reach the Moon, but none-the-less is able to get the Moon a birthday present and give it. I think Frank Asch is one of my new favorite author-illustrators.

Curious George and the Rocket (Board Book)

By H.A. Rey — ISBN-13: 978-0618120697, Seattle Public Library, Amazon.

This is edited down from the non-board-book version (Curious George Gets a Medal), but somehow I don’t mind for this story. Monkeys always make a great story. And this one also has a countdown–lots of fun with the little ones.

Countdown! With Milo (The Adventures of Milo and Mouse)

By Mike Austin — ISBN-13: 978-1609052089, Amazon.

I love it! It’s a countdown… I already said those are great, and the pictures have so many things to point at and find, and “buttons” to “push.” (It’s a plain flat board book, no real buttons).

Space Station (Mini House Book)

By Peter Lippman — ISBN-13: 978-0761115755, Amazon, but it’s out of print

I know, it’s out of print, so it isn’t fair for me to suggest it. This is a book and a toy. You open the pages to look through the space station. So far, in our house, it’s been less of a book and more of a toy–which is fine by me. Literacy at this age involves just being comfortable with books as well as spending time reading them. So, even if you can’t find this one, you can look up other Mini House books.

Astronaut (Mini People Shape Book)

By Giovanni Caviezel and C. Mesturini — ISBN-13: 978-0764162169, Amazon.

Another toy-book. I definitely got this one for the shape. The text is a bit advanced for right now, it’s pretty much a collection of factoids. Fun anyway.

There’s No Place Like Space: All About Our Solar System Revised Edition (The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library)

By Tish Rabe and Aristides Ruiz — ISBN-13: 978-0679891154, Seattle Public Library, Amazon.

I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about this book. Much to my surprise I liked it. If you don’t have a 0-2-year-old in your life right now you might think Cat in the Hat is great for young kids. A lot of the Seussian books are actually a bit advanced, and long for the 0-2 crowd. Toddlers are not quite ready for the puns; the rhyming and rhythm are great for them though. This book is good and accurate enough, the rhymes are fun. It is a “tour of the solar system” book, but it doesn’t harp on about getting through basic facts on each planet. It just goes through one or two cute topics for each. You might not read the whole book with your toddler in one sitting, but that’s okay.

~ A l i c e !

Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Lunar New Year, Spirit! Here are some of our imaginings about how you look as a station!

Advanced Entries

Silence at Troy - Spirit's Next Million Years from Emmanuel Gaffard

There are six secrets hidden in this image. Emmanuel says: “Some are Mars exploration related. Kind of. Can you find them?” (I’ve found one so far … he sent me the answers, but I haven’t opened that file yet.) If you want the answers, comment below and I’ll e-mail them to you.

Also of note – as this is pixel-art, the display, zoom, and rendering are important. See below* for extensive detail, or visit PixelJoint.com to increase your exposure to the medium. The original size of Silence at Troy is available here.

Spirit on Mars - Gary Kezele

This entry is from Gary Kezele, accomplished artist and astronomy-visualizer. Bear with us while we get a better scan of this image, but for now you can see a decent version of Gary’s submission! Please click to see it in more detail.

Both these entries show amazing attention to detail – and you can tell they looked closely at the photos of Spirit’s location.

Hobby Entries

From @MamaJoules come two model entries – one from each son. I love them both, and bet that it was a lot of fun to build rovers out of Legos and then try to position them just right in the “sand.” :)

Spirit - by Kerm, 8

The camera mast is great, there are lots of fun details, and the flag is a nice touch too!

Spirit - by Little Brother, 4

Once again, the camera mast is in evidence, and the rover is just like Spirit: it has six wheels (I wonder if all of them work on this model).

Thanks to everyone who submitted – I’ll be sending you all some fun NASA postcards. :) I’ll also pass these along to as much of the Spirit team as I can.

More

These were not submissions, and you’ve seen them before, but I had to include them in this post because I thought you’d enjoy them.

Spirit Embedded at Troy Credit: Keith Enevoldsen

Image from Stuart Atkinson

Go see more of Stuart’s Mars Art.

[*Pixel Art]()

Emmanuel has sent these details about viewing pixel art, which I found fascinating.

Pixel-art makes for small images and files. They should ideally be viewed at 200%, 300% max. You should be able to just see the pixels without them being overwhelming.
Displaying pieces at 100% makes them look very small, and the pixels are lost on good monitors.

Using the browser zoom is not an option! All current browsers use ‘bilinear filtering’ for zooming images (and most image viewing software too), the result is horribly blurry on pixel-art (you might have noticed this if you browsed the Pixeljoint gallery and used the zoom function. However, from Firefox 3.6, websites can opt for an old-fashioned unfiltered zoom function. This is not something the user can do, it’s only a website-side option. So if you visited Pixeljoint using Fx 3.6, you didn’t notice any problem.

You should note, I did not do anything website-side to enable this function in Firefox. All his images are displayed exactly at the resolution I got from him though. Clicking the main image takes you to his 300% zoom version.

Want More?

The Mars Exploration Program at JPL

Thanks all! Let’s do it again sometime. Thanks to the NASA Solar System Ambassadors Program for the support.

~ A l i c e !

Update: This is the first event I’m officially hosting as one of NASA’s volunteer Solar System Ambassadors!

Well, Spirit is now a station at Troy rather than a rover somewhere south of Mars’ equator. Time to have some fun, while the drivers try to back her into the perfect parked position to get Sun on those solar panels!

Spirit Embedded at Troy

I know there’s lots of you artists out there itching to do some science illustration. We don’t have cameras that can show us what it looks like for Spirit to be stuck. Odd, isn’t it? There are what 6? 7? cameras onboard Spirit, and yet, that’s just the problem, they are all ON BOARD Spirit. We can see bits of her, but not the her whole body.

So, draw, photoshop, paint, contstruct a picture of Sprit at her new home and send it on over here.

Skill Level

This competition is for kids and adults. Entries will be divided by me into “professionalish artists” and “doodling around and having fun artists.” There will be winners in both categories. For instance, if you’re really good at photoshop, but you just do it on your own time you’ll probably get put in the “professionalish” category. If you’re 3 and just learning to hold a pencil (hopefully your parents will help you label your drawing so everyone knows what’s what) you’ll be in the “doodling around” category.

Rules

Submit digitally in a web-ready format to my e-mail address alices astro info at gmail dot com (all one word, make that at an @ etc). File should be high enough quality to print. If you’d like to submit on paper e-mail me and I’ll give you an address.

I’m making the choices. I’ll be fair.

Deadline: February 13 – Let’s put them up on Valentine’s day and show Spirit’s rover team that we love them!

Prizes?

Everyone

1. A copy of your picture will be displayed somewhere interesting, where lots of people can see it!
2. (Until i run out) – Lenticular postcards from NASA (oooh! pretty)
3. A digital copy will be shared with NASA to show the Spirit drivers how much we appreciate their hard work.

Featured “Winners”

(You are all winners, just for participating) but there will be one chosen from each category

1. A very awesome  lenticular postcard from NASA.
2. A copy of your picture will be displayed on this blog.
3. Got a suggestion that would be meaningful to you and wouldn’t cost me much? I’m listening!

Liability

If you are under 18, please sign your piece with your first name only, and have your parents send me a message saying it is okay for me to post your picture and your first name.

~ A l i c e !

My Dad!

Yay! She’s so cute!

And if you look closely – those planets are pretty darn cool!

The deadline is approaching for my icon competition! In fact … it’s tomorrow!

Hey y’all!

See that 8-bit blond girl behind the “AstroInfo” desk that adorns much of my AstroInfo correspondence? Well, she’s cute, but she’s a little generic, and she doesn’t fit in some places (like my banner). I generated her with one of those avatar makers. She’s got glasses, she’s blond-ish, she clearly likes stars, and she’s clearly the author of AstroInfo – but … she lacks something.

Alice

So, it’s time for a competition! I need a new AstroInfo logo/avatar. I know at least six of you out there are great artists and logo-designers, and I’m sure there’s more I don’t know so well.

Guidelines:

– Must scale well to 128px by 128px
– Must be family appropriate
– Preferably it’ll scale up to ~400px by 400px for printing
– If you use fonts, convert them to outlines, so I don’t lose them (and tell me which font you used so I can perhaps use it in other titles and such)
– File formats: .jpg, .ai (CS3 or earlier), .psd, .pdf (if you must, but I’d like some flexibility), ask about others … oh, I’d prefer it submitted digitally, but paper submissions will be entertained.
– CC license it, at least to me. (I need to be able to make alterations, such as text stuff)
– Not an actual photo of me.
– If you give the name of the blog it is correctly referred to as “Alice’s Astro Info” (two spaces) or “AstroInfo” (no spaces)

Suggestions:

– I like the fact that she’s a person, and a girl who vaguely resembles me.
– She and I both LOVE STARS!
– Blue is an awesome color – but then again, all colors are pretty. (P.S. There’s blue in my hair)
– I’m open to all media – photos, drawings, comic-style, realism, clay … as long as you take a picture of it and I can use that … whatever.
– I’m usually not much of a fan of abstract, unless it’s full of triangles.

Extra Credit: A related banner!

– Aspect ratio of 770px by 200px

What You Win

– The competition
– My gratitude and excitement
– International recognition (hey, I have at least one reader in Portugal!)
– $0.00
– I’m willing to entertain reasonable suggestions for other compensation, but no guarantees.
– If you want them, I can arrange for free tickets to Pacific Science Center, but you have to tell me you want them. If you want tickets to see Lucy’s Legacy you’ll have to also tell me a compelling reason why I should give my comps to you and not to my parents … but we’ll see what we can do.

Judging

– Solely by me. I get to pick, and I don’t guarantee I’ll be fair.
– I promise I’ll look at anything that’s sent to be before November 10th, 2008.

Email me at [the name of this blog] with no spaces, apostrophes, or punctuation {at} gmail

Thank you!! :-)