Tags:
#space #pretty things #things that make me uncomfortably aware of my apparent inability to feel awe #but then I noticed that the first picture looked like it could easily have a pareidolic cloud-picture-like shape in it #so I stared at it for a bit #contemplating #and it resolved into an emu #and now I feel better #(it *might* also be a goose) #(but I got emu first)
In extreme circumstances they can even be responsible for character development!
Also, coffee.
Tags:
#Anomalies of Doom #Star Trek #Voyager #somebody had to say it
High above the oasis of Earth, your belly reflecting
The dappled azure glow of oceans rolling far below,
You are waiting patiently for your final pilgrims to arrive.
Soon they will climb to you on twin pillars of fire-
Hauling themselves up out of Terra’s gravity well
By their bleeding fingernails – to find you sailing
So serenely through the void, your mighty wings
Outstretched, shining mirror-bright, reflecting
The diamond-dust light of a million distant suns…Then, dressed all in fresh-snow white, the bravest acolyte
Will float to your side in reverent silence struck dumb,
By the heart-stopping sight of you hovering there, silhouetted
Against the hazy, air-brushed band of the Milky Way,
Bathing in the luxurious light of ten times ten billion alien stars,
And with the world watching far below, trembling with fear and love…– Stuart Atkinson, from “The Final Pilgrims”, images from NASA’s gorgeous “Gravity” Flickr gallery
Tags:
#poetry #the power of science #the brightest star in our sky
Mars. In true colour.
Just so you know, a lot of images of Mars which you’ll see have been manipulated. A lot of them have boosted contrast and saturation. So if you’ve ever wondered – images like this one are what Mars actually looks like.
Why does this not have more notes?!?
YOU ARE LITERALLY LOOKING THROUGH THE EYES OF A ROBOT ON ANOTHER FUCKING PLANET
If you don’t think that’s the tightest shit, you can get out of my face.
i wanted to reblog this so that everyone who sees it can realize just how amazing this is. you are looking at a photograph taken on an entirely different planet. an entire world that has been completely untouched by humanity until only recently. no human in the history of mankind has ever look at those rocks, the soil, the mountains, and the sky until now. and until we finally manage to set foot there for the very first time, no human has ever seen mars from this perspective with their own two eyes or feel the texture of the martian soil on the bottom of their boots. this was only possible by creating a robot, an actual robot, and shooting way out of the reaches of earth and with extremely careful calculations, have it safely land and deploy right where they want it. it’s a robot on another planet being controlled 225 million kilometers away, seeing and studying and sending information for us.
this is the sort of thing you would see in science fiction movies that are only a few decades old. what was only imagination and possibilities back then is now all in this photograph. im looking forward to see what happens in the coming decades
There is nothing about this that is not awesome.
Tags:
#Mars #the power of science #awesome #this blog is a Mars appreciation blog #this blog especially appreciates pictures that look like you could reach out and run your fingers through the alien sand
Pictures of Mars : The Empty Quarter
From the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website: “Rover tracks disappear toward the horizon like the wake of a ship across the desolate sea of sand between the craters Endurance and Victoria on the Meridiani Plains. Opportunity took the image while stuck in the sand ripple dubbed Purgatory for over a month. This panorama (only partly shown here) was named Rub Al Khali after the “Empty Quarter” in the Arabian Desert.”
Part of the ”Spirit & Opportunity: 10 Years Roving Across Mars“ exhibit.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University
Tags:
#Mars #the power of science #*actual photograph* of *actual alien world* #proud citizen of The Future
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretch 4 billion light-years from end to end. The structure is a light quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous Galactic Nulcei powered by supermassive central black holes.
So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.
Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.
So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)
Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.
This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be?
Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?
By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.
are you telling us astronomers have discovered something which is literally fucktuple the size of anything else previously estimated to exist
Anything that fucking rewrites all of what we know about the universe needs to get its ass on my blog. It’s giant, glowy, black hole filled ass.
Wondering how many times I can use the word “fucktuple” today without arousing suspicion. :)
much pretty so big fucktuple wow
Tags:
#the power of science #pretty things #that artist’s conception looks like the Prophets’ wormhole
The ISS’s solar arrays glistening in the Sun with a breathtaking view of Earth’s limb.
Photo Credit : CSA
Tags:
#the brightest star in our sky #shinyyyy #I feel a sudden urge to research how solar panels are made #(and that’s just the *left* half of the picture)
In the early years of space flight, both Russians and Americans used pencils in space. Unfortunately, pencil lead is made of graphite, a highly conductive material. Snapped graphite leads and particles in zero gravity are hugely problematic, as they will get sucked into the air ventilation or electronic equipment, easily causing shorts or fires in the pure oxygen environment of a capsule.
After the fire in Apollo 1 which killed all the astronauts on board, NASA required a writing instrument that wasn’t a fire hazard. Fisher spent over a million dollars (of his own money) creating a pressurized ball point pen, which NASA bought at $2.95 each. The Russian space program also switched over from pencils shortly after.
40 years later snide morons on the internet still snigger about it, because snide morons on the internet never know what they are talking about.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU YOU WONDERFUL HUMAN
I’VE HEARD SO MANY PEOPLE GIVE AMERICA SHIT ABOUT THIS AND LAUGH BECAUSE THEY THINK AMERICA IS SO FUCKING STUPID FOR SPENDING A MILLION DOLLARS ON A PEN WHEN THEY COULD’VE USED A PENCIL, LIKE THEY WERE TOO STUPID TO THINK OF THAT CONCEPT
THAT PEN WAS AN IDEA THAT PROBABLY LITERALLY SAVED LIVES AND THIS DAMN POST HAS BEEN CIRCULATING WITH PEOPLE LAUGHING AT NASA AND TREATING THEM LIKE IDIOTS
SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SHIT THE FUCK DOWN
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#because you know there had to be more to it than that #history #the power of science
Looking in the mirror from 898,410,414 miles away…
NASA has just released a raw edition of Friday’s photo of Earth and the moon, as seen from the Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn.
From out there, we look like stars.
Just a tip, NASA: We’re gonna have to give it a better name than “N00213959.jpg”. Maybe “Pale Blue Sparkle”?
(hi-res at NASA website, a more processed version is sure to come… stay tuned)
Tags:
#the power of science #I wanted to go outside and wave #but there was a sudden downpour and it was raining sheets at 5:30 #so I waved out the window #anyway this is #awesome
nonicakesss:
I am so glad someone made this cuz I’ve always wondered how the movement of the solar system might look as a whole….
BUT LOOK HOW EPIC THE SOLAR SYSTEM IS GUYS
PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY WE’RE NEVER IN THE SAME PLACE ONCE.
I WASN’T FUCKING KIDDING.
…
Dairine’s frame of reference suddenly became huger than the whole Earth and the space that contained it, so that her planet seemed only one moving, whirling point plunging along its path through a terrible complexity of forces, among which gravity was a puny local thing and not to be regarded. …Earth spins at seventeen thousand miles an hour, plows along its orbital path at a hundred seventy-five thousand; and the Sun takes it and the whole Solar System off toward the constellation Hercules at a hundred fifteen thousand miles an hour. Then the Sun’s motion as one of innumerable stars in the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy sweeps it along at some two million miles an hour, and all the while relationships between individual stars, and those of stars to their planets, shift and change.
It all meant that any one person standing still on any planet was in fact traveling a crazed, corkscrewing path through space, at high speed: and the disorientation and sickness [of personal worldgating travel] were apparently the cause of suddenly, and for the first time, going in a straight line, in a universe where space itself and everything in it is curved….
(High Wizardry, 1990)
Oh right, it’s that thing that people were tearing apart recently.
It is pretty, I must admit.
Tags:
#space #lying bastards #the more you know
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 