Mongolian cosmonauts in space

This week marks the first year blogoversary of "I heart post"! Who knew that stamps could keep me entertained and propel a blog for a whole year?! In my second post on the blog, where I was really testing out the concept, I wrote about some stamps I bought in Mongolia as souvenirs during a trip back in 2004.

Well, this week we have come full circle, and I am returning to the country where I started, with space stamps from Mongolia.

The above stamps feature the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was the first person to travel into space. Mongolia was the first former communist country I had ever visited, and I loved it. I chose quite a few space themed stamps as souvenirs, because I felt they had a real "soviet feel" about them.

In 1981 a Mongolian aerospace engineer/cosmonaut, J. Gürragchaa (Ж. Гүррагчаа),  went into space on March 22 1981, with the Soviet Interkosmos space program. He is a national hero, and the following stamp celebrates his journey into space (he is the dude on the right):

Gürragchaa spent 7 days, 20 hours and 42 minutes in space and docked with Salyut 6, a Soviet orbital space station. I also have another set of stamps with the symbol for the Interkosmos program on them, which also seem to celebrate Gürragchaa's mission. The stamps feature images of Mongolian and Russian co-operation, with the flags of both nations featuring on the stamps.

I love my Mongolian space stamps - I think they make a pretty gorgeous little collection.  I also love the look of the cyrillic alphabet, and I love the word 'cosmonaut'... so really there is a lot to love in these stamps.

I hope you have enjoyed this entry into Viridian's Sunday Stamps, and check out the link below for some more space stamps.

Life, the Universe and Everything: Sunday Stamps.

This week saw Venus make its transit across the sun, an astronomical event which will not occur again until 2117. I didn't view the event, but I feel like this week there was all sorts of big things going on in my personal universe, so I feel like I felt it - if that makes sense. Basically the transit coincided with my housemate telling me she was moving out... and an old high school friend advertising a room for rent. In 24 hours I became effectively homeless, and then suddenly with a new postcode on the hipster side of town. I am very excited. Anyhow. Onto the topic at hand.

In honour of this twice-in-a-lifetime event (the transit cycle means it passes by twice in eight years, and then not again for another 105 or 121), the theme for Viridian's Sunday Stamps is astronomy. So from my stamp collection I dug out the above two really lovely stamps that were issued for "International Space Year 1992". Unfortunately I don't yet own the third stamp in the series, which depicts the Pleiades... but I think I will definitely have to add it to my collection:

Sitting in my album alongside the above really beautiful astronomical photographic stamps, I have the following stamps which depict milestones in space exploration.

The series was released in 2007 and was titled "Blast Off! 50 years in Space". Although they kind of look like they have been drawn to illustrate a B-grade children's sci-fi show, upon much consideration I have decided that I do in fact quite like them (perhaps because I have a predilection for anything sci-fi).

For fun, here is the NASA video of the Transit of Venus, which is quite spectacular. Enjoy.

This has been an entry into Viridian's Sunday Stamps. Check out other entries here: