The blue planet

The blue PLANET Late afternoon view of the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean from Discovery, April 1990

Hi - wow! What an awesome view - One that I will never see live! But I read a lot of science fiction which starts to impart that feeling of awe.

This card is part of a set of postcards of astronomy photos of our earth. A collection of these postcards is available inside the book The blue planet authored by Katie Burke and published by Pomegranate Communications Inc in 1999.

I was very happy to receive this postcard as one of the few astronomy postcards in my collection.

The book can also be borrowed via the Internet Archive here.

Additionally, the stamps pasted on this postcards were also very nice. In total there are three stamps, two of them astronomy themed. The first one was created in celebrating the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope on December 25, 2021. The stamp itself was designed by Derry Noyes

The second space themed postcard, illustrated by Alan Dingman, shows a capsule from the OSIRIS-REx mission returning from a seven year long trip to the asteroid Bennu and carrying samples to help scientists learn about the formation of our solar system. The capsule returned on September 24, 2023.

The last stamp depicts a school bus. The iconic yellow color first became a standard for all school buses in 1939. Illustrated by the artist Steve Wolf who funnily enough also illustrated stamps with wolf motifs.

The blue planet

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