It's the International Year of Astronomy!

If you were in the dark on this, no worries. I overlooked it too, but we still have a little over a month to celebrate. Here is some recommended party decoration:

Official IYA09 poster series

New York Times Magazine featured posters being used for the IYA09 designed by Simon Page. I love them for their retro-textbook feel, simple geometric patterns.

"The result is a beautiful exercise in conceptual minimalism, with a clear geometric bent that betrays Page’s math-nerd origins." Alexandria Symonds, NYTimes Mag

The part that really pisses me off about this Simon Page fellow is that he wasn't even trained in design. His background is in applied mathematics. He just sort of picked up design as a hobby two or three years ago. If I were to guess, he's also a champion fencer, a published novelist, and prefers to spend his free time volunteering at a hospital for children.

But perfection can be bought and is now available for purchase in his store.

love the use of white space in this one

* * *

I took cosmology in college -- the lovechild of astronomy and philosophy. By the end of the semester, I took away a few things:
1) Theoretically, we could be sucked into a black hole and routed to a parallel universe at a different point in the space-time continuum;
2) I thought that would be really cool as long as I was transported to the time of Jane Austen and was part of the landed gentry (requirement), but I don't think it works like that without a DeLorian DMC-12 outfitted with a nuclear reactor;
3) My mental capacity was much smaller than previously thought; and
4) Stephan Hawking has fathered children.