This is a blog post on the post — on postage, specifically, from the US Postal Service!
At a US Post Office, you might be able to pick up a copy of the USPS Philatelic magazine. The fourth quarter, 2023 issue of Philatelic features three sets of stamps that are science-oriented. Two of those three are astronomy-oriented!
Let’s look at the less interesting science stamps first. (This is not to say that they are not interesting… it’s just that, by definition, they must be less interesting than stamps dealing with astronomy.) These are the USPS “Life Magnified” stamps. Philatelic says, “Explore life as few have seen it with these stamps capturing microscopic images of life undetectable by the human eye.” A sheet of these features twenty different stamps. That variety helps make up for the fact that the stamps are not about astronomy. All twenty of the stamps are cool and colorful. My favorite is the “Flame Lily Pollen” stamp. It calls to mind a bowl of jellybeans. The “Arranged Diatoms” stamp is eye-catching, too. It looks a lot like a stained glass “rose window”.
Then there are the “James Webb Space Telescope” stamps. “Celebrate the phenomenal success of the largest and most sensitive telescope in history,” Philatelic says. Gee, I did not know the 6.6-meter Webb was bigger than the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias or the 10-meter Keck telescopes. Something is not right there. But the stamp is cool. A sheet features twenty of the same stamp. The real astro-nerds on the Graney Christmas card list got Webb stamps on their Christmas cards.
Finally, there are the “OSIRIS-REx” stamps. Philatelic has a lot to say about these. “This stamp celebrates NASA’s seven-year mission to study the asteroid Bennu and return a sample of its surface to Earth. The collected material will help scientists learn how our solar system formed.” Philatelic goes on to say that you can get not only the stamps, but extra OSIRIS-REx stamp goodies, from USPS. The stamp sheet itself (twenty identical stamps) includes extra information about the mission, featuring artwork representing the OSIRIS-REx probe heading out from Earth, mapping Bennu, descending to Bennu, and nabbing a sample.
Unlike the “Life” and “Webb” stamp sheets, this sheet has printing on the back. This gives basic information about the mission, its timeline, and asteroids (they are “time capsules that preserve the earliest history of our solar system and may contain chemical signatures of the ancestral building blocks of life”). Someone at the postal service wanted people to have extra information about OSIRIS-REx.
Astronomy (and other science) in postage stamps. Is that great or what? So, put aside the e-mail and the texts. Go mail someone a card with a cool stamp on it!
