NASA Month: Astronauts & Cartoons

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

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Astronauts & Cartoons

I've mentioned several times before how much I love Zen Pencils. Artist Gavin Than takes famous quotes and illustrates them, adding a new dimension to the inspirational quotes. Today, I'd like to feature the ones he's illustrated by astronauts, scientists, and more. 

Carl Sagan famously said that we all have star-stuff inside us--the same elements that make up humans are also used to make up stars. This is a quote that I bring up in Shades of Earth, when Amy and Elder are trying to comprehend what it means to die.

Carl Sagan is also responsible for the famous "Pale Blue Dot" speech, when NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft turned around on it's journey in the universe to take a picture of Earth, a pale blue dot floating in the vastness of space. 

Part of a quote by Carl Sagan.
For full comic & quote, click here.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one of my favorite scientists alive today. This quote illustrated in Zen Pencils gracefully shows one of the reasons I admire this astrophysicist. I think it has a nice parallelism to Carl Sagan's "star-stuff," and Gavin's illustration of the quote is among my favorites of his work. 

Part of a quote by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
For full comic & quote, click here.

 Chris Hadfield isn't an astronaut for NASA--he was a part of Canada's space program, CSA. He's also one of the most accessible astronauts. He has a Twitter, a YouTube channel, and is very open about his life aboard the International Space Station (including amazing pictures!). This quote is inspirational no matter what you want out of your life: be the person you want to be. 

Part of a quote by Chris Hadfield.
For full comic & quote, click here.

 And, finally, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't point out this quote by Neil Armstrong, a NASA astronaut. Another of my favorites, Neil said this quote about his trip to the moon--being, of course, the first man on the moon's surface. I find it fascinating that this man, who is literally making history and forging into the future, had a reaction of humility rather than egoism. (PS: make sure you read Gavin's biography of Neil at the end of his post!)

Part of a quote by Neil Armstrong.
For full comic & quote, click here.

I hope you do take a moment to explore Zen Pencils--not just the quotes about astronauts and more, but all his work. And take a moment to look up your favorite astronauts, and see what they have to say. 

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This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway