About

Motion Blurred Astronaut refers to three images of an astronaut in a photography textbook taken to demonstrate the effect shutter speed can have on motion blur. It began being used in memes in April 2017 due to its aesthetic similarity to other popular memes of the time which use motion-blur and distortion effects.

Origin

On April 2nd, 2017, Tumblr user the-captains-on-shore-leave^[1] uploaded a picture of a photography textbook demonstrating the effects shutter speed has on motion blur by showing three different pictures of an astronaut. They captioned the post, shown below, "i can’t stop laughing like i know it’s supposed to be educating me on shutter speed but it just looks like a fucking meme." The post has gained over 35,000 notes as of April 11th.

Spread

On April 8th, a screenshot of the post was posted to /r/tumblr,^[2] captioned "TFW when the centripetal force kicks in." It gained over 900 upvotes. Two days later, that image was posted to me_irl,^[3] where it gained over 14,000 upvotes (shown below).

This led to the creation of several popular posts on the subreddit that used the Motion Blurred Astronaut in a similar way to Expanding Brain memes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References