John Glenn entering the Friendship 7 capsule in which he became the first American to orbit the earth. Image courtesy NASA.

If you like to see photos of astronauts and space missions, check out the new offering from NASA and Flickr! It's called the NASA Commons.

NASA photos have been onlilne for some time, but the Flickr site allows people to add comments and tags. Hopefully this will allow additional information to be added to the historical archives. For instance someone who was present at a launch might add a comment that tells what they thought and felt at that moment. Future historians can learn a bunch from those kinds of comments!

Debbie Rivera is the lead for the NASA Images project. She works at the NASA's headquarters in Washington. She said, "NASA's long-standing partnership with Internet Archive and this new one with Yahoo!'s Flickr provides an opportunity for the public to participate in the process of discovery."

 "In addition, the public can help the agency capture historical knowledge about missions and programs through this new resource and make it available for future generations," she added.

According to the NASA press release, The Commons was launched with the Library of Congress to increase access to publicly-held photography collections and provide a way for the public to contribute information and knowledge. 

"NASA on The Commons is bringing literally out-of-these-world images to Flickr," said Douglas Alexander, general manager of Flickr. "We are thrilled to be working with NASA to offer such a rich archive and provide amazing insight into this country's space program and its early beginnings."  

For even more space goodness, don't forget to visit NASAimages.org for hundreds of thousands of images and thousands of hours of video, HD video and audio content available free to the public for download.

Artist's idea of what this two planet system might look like courtesy NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

When you look into the sky at night you see lots of stars, right? You also see a few planets that orbit the sun. Planets like Mars and Venus.

When you look at stars, you can't see if they have planets orbiting them can you? No, you can't because they are SO far away that even the super gigantic stars look like little dots of light. 

If you use binoculars or even a telescope you still just see little dots of light.

Planets are MUCH smaller than stars, so there is NO chance you can see them.

Until about 20 years ago there was simply no way to tell if a star had planets.

The first planets detected weren't seen, but the effect they had on their stars was detected.

Imagine if you had a heavy ball on the end of a rope and you swung it around and around. It would tug at you and keep you from spinning in one spot. You'd wiggle around a little, wouldn't you?

The same is true of a star with a planet. As the planet goes around the star the gravity makes the planet tug at the star just like the rope and ball would tug at you. That makes the star waggle around a little. Even if you can't see the tiny little planets, you can see the star waggle!

That was the first way people detected planets, but then someone had another idea!

If the planet is big enough and your telescope is good enough, you might be able to see the amount of light coming from the star dim just a little when the planet goes between the star and you. 

One REALLY big problem with telescopes on earth is that they all have to look up through the atmosphere to see stars. That's almost like looking through the water in a swimming pool at something on the bottom. It looks like it is moving when it isn't! The waves and ripples in the water make it hard to see something small. The same is true of the atmosphere.

If a telescope is put into space where there is no atmosphere, it doesn't have this problem.

The Kepler space telescope is just that kind of telescope! It's main mission is to find planets the size of earth around other stars.

Kepler spacecraft image courtesy NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Several planets have been found using this method, but now the Kepler spacecraft has found two planets for the first time!

Even though we can't directly see the planets, we can make several good guesses based on what we do see. Scientists believe that the two planets are almost as big as the planet Saturn. The one closest to the star goes around the star in just 19 days! That just over two weeks here on earth! It takes earth 365 days to go around our sun! The second planet is farther from the star, but still only takes about 38 days. 

Scientists aren't completely sure, but they think they may see signs of a third, smaller planet!

You can read more about this discovery at the NASA website here.

If you want to know when a new Funzietown comic is up, just follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jeffa00.

I'm trying to get one or two out each week, but not on a specific publish-on-this-day schedule.

When I post a new comic, I tweet about it.

Want to see more than one comic on a page?

Try the Archive button.

It will show the entire comic in a pageable format with multiple comics per page.

If you want to catch up on the story so far, this is the way to go.

Just remember that it is in order from newest to oldest, so you want to go the page with the highest number and work your way back.

I had hoped to get the new website and comic up over the holidays, but it took me longer than expected.

I hope you like the new website. I'm learning a new stack of web development from Microsoft called MVC (Model View Controller). I'm a programmer, so I decided to write my own blog and comic software rather than use Wordpress and Comicpress like everyone else. If I were just doing the comic, I would use that too, but I need to learn new technologies. Eventually I will release the engine as an open source project so anyone can use it if they want.

I've also tried some new things with the drawing style. You can see that the professor's hair looks different now. I try to be consistent with the look, but as I learn new things I like to try to improve the style.

I have no idea how frequently I'll be able to update the comic, but I'll try for a weekly schedule.

Happy New Year!