The Astronomy Tower

[swerve]

What an AWESOME post!!!

I am ALSO in AWE over our space pioneers...

[JournDude18]

i remember wanting to be an astraunat when i was little.

[medic1]

wow some of those stills just take your breath away,i find it amazing that with all
the crap happening all around us we just seem to forget the pure awsome beuty
that is going on above our heads

[braex27]

Great story, and some fantastic pictures!!

[NineOfClubs]

Thanks for posting! Wonderful stuff.

[star-warrior]

Spectacular photos. Reminds me of looking out the plane window over southern Scandinavia.

[nbluth]

The pictures in this thread are just breathtaking.

I wonder what it's like out there, seeing all that in real life rather than pictures...

[barnbuddy]

wag wag - your sense of wonder is inspirational -

[iiiset]

Wow, are we ever the light-pollutingest buggers.

[Edward Twinkletoes]

They've got no business up there. This shit needs to be defunded and shut down.

[AussieGuy91]

Those are some absolutely amazing photo's!

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

Oy space station YA FIND CURE fa da whack jobs below?

ans ya bill fa 10 years parkin

thankyou

[RaKroma]

Couple photos look like recently publishes satellite photos of India-Pakistan border with long stretch of flood lights installed from Indian side to make night smuggling harder.

[mark1111]

Thank you for this. What I don't understand is that it took so long to build (is it complete?) the ISS, now there is talk of scrapping it!!! WTF??? I would think it would stay up there for quite some time, but what do I know.

[RaKroma]

ISS took a global effort to develop and build. It takes a lot of resources and global brain power. The cost ran up as much as 160 billion dollars. It's expensive to man and maintain and with global economy in decline, countries struggling with debts, NASA fading away as an agency, there is no interest to keep maintaining it beyond the projected operational years.

[Asenath]

This thread made me think of this song composed by autotune-altered Sagan Quotes. It's a pretty cool song on its own, though.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc[/ame]

[Daximus]

Awesome thread. Bump all you want.

You could always ask a mod to rename it for you too.

[Daximus]

WaGWaG's house of porrrr.........errrrrr, big huge pee....errrrr, space place or something gay like that.

[star-warrior]

Space the Final Front Ear.

[ashonfire]

I read the title as '10 Years of Human Centipede', the actual topic is far better and the pics are stunning rather than being arse-facey! Thanks.

[Daximus]

Can you imagine how awesome it would be if we could all freely observe such an object?

The size of our known universe baffles me.

[Kulindahr]

I love this last one, it's like standing on the edge of oblivion.

A shuttle astronaut who'd stood on the end of that arm gave a lecture at a university science class I attended. Someone asked him how it felt to stand up there, and he said that once he got set and looked around, he was over the Pacific Ocean, and it was like standing on the world's highest diving board, and the urge to just bounce and dive was overwhelming.

They've got no business up there. This shit needs to be defunded and shut down.

Absolutely. And Columbus had no business sailing across that ocean to a new world. And the British had absolutely no business settling another continent, or the Spanish or Portuguese, for that matter.

Saw this image, just had to share it:

Explanation: The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn drifted in the giant planet's shadow for about 12 hours in 2006 and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun.
. . . .
Far in the distance, at the left, just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

Talk about perspective...

It brings to mind a Bible verse that I've associated with space exploration for a long time: "What is man, that You care about him?" We live on such a tiny little place!

ISS took a global effort to develop and build. It takes a lot of resources and global brain power. The cost ran up as much as 160 billion dollars. It's expensive to man and maintain and with global economy in decline, countries struggling with debts, NASA fading away as an agency, there is no interest to keep maintaining it beyond the projected operational years.

If I were as rich as the Koch brothers, I'd make an offer on it.

[Kulindahr]

I can only imagine. What class was it for? Do you remember the astronaut's name? Thanks so much for sharing that story Kulindahr, I'm always wanting to hear some personal insight from the men and women who have actually been up there. What a cool experience!

The class was called "Rocks and Stars", a kind of physical science overview course aimed at fraternity and sorority people who needed a science course. I took it because it had a reputation for being fun. Less than half the sessions were taught by the professor; we got visiting professors, two different guys from JPL, a British Petroleum geologist, a geologist from the Mt. Saint Helens monitoring group, an earthquake guy from U Cal, a minerals geologist from somewhere, that astronaut, and more.

I can't remember his name, but he packed the place -- the auditorium was definitely far over legal occupancy.

[Kulindahr]

A bit of a follow-up of the sun post at the top of this page:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOHWE9nHzzw

This video shows how the sun's surface changes over just an hour's time. This was taken in 2006 by the Vacuum Tower Telescope in the Canary Islands of Spain.

Kool.

I remember studying the physics of solar prominences. Wish we'd had movies like this to make it easier to visualize!

We even got assigned a sci-fi story -- it was about energy beings that lived in the sun's surface, where they were subject to the violence driven by the magnetic fields. It ended with one making a suicidal leap to escape a rising flare that would have torn him to oblivion. It gave a different perspective.

[Daximus]

I LOVE THIS THREAD!! And nice title change btw. Perfect. I'll see if I can come up with something original to offer up and post. <3 WaGWaG!!

[Kulindahr]

I can't wait till we can go up and see some of this for ourselves...

[ChickenGuy]

The Sun

The link to the magnified image is as much detail as I've EVER seen in a solar photograph. It's quite amazing.

You can almost feel the swirls of the convection currents and the sheer intense heat and the energy and power of the thing. It's like a gigantic furnace.

The sunspots are interesting too - I know they're like 1000°C cooler or something, but I wonder if they are 'level' with the surface around them or 'elevated' or 'sunken' if you know what I mean.

Keep up the good work WaGWaG!

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

there telescope lookin at humans ans their ways lot conetrys

stronga then any telescope man made

it a good thang

thankyou

[Kulindahr]

That is astounding!

I LOVE it.

[Kulindahr]

I missed the eclipse -- we got fogged in and then clouds came over. I would have had to drive an hour and a half to see it, which would have meant almost no sleep that night.

But those pics bring back memories of an eclipse party by a pool, where two of us decided we'd tread water all through totality -- and we ditched our shorts for the event.
Treading water naked is a very unique thing. Treading water naked with a drink in one hand while watching the moon turn its angry red shade. Its mood was ominous, ours was frivolous.

[Kulindahr]

Ha ha, great story. There's nothing like a lunar eclipse and there's nothing like skinny dipping. I haven't had the pleasure of combining those two things, it sounds like quite an experience.

The real 'experience' was keeping the drink out of the water and actually drinking it while treading water. I don't remember how long totality was, but it seemed like hours.

[Yves Grey]

I'm bumping this again, to share this sweet video of the sun's surface:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jciUYQHa6-0

The Monday before last (12/6/10), this long filament--which is the darker strand you can see at the beginning of the video--exploded. The filament had formed a week before the eruption. A coronal mass ejection occurred as a result of this explosion, throwing plasma into the solar system.

You see the ejection of plasma at about the 0:08 mark. If that ejected body of plasma hit our atmosphere, auroras would have occurred, which wasn't the case with this event. I just thought I'd share it with those interested, it's so fascinating to me.

All of this was observed by SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory), which is an Earth orbiting spacecraft that was launched only this past February. The images were collected in the spectrum of ultraviolet.

Fun fact: The red elements seen in the video are the "cool" solar plasma ranging in temperature from 60,000-80,000K while the yellow/orange elements on the surface are the nearly 1 million K "hot" plasma. Maybe not such a fun fact, depending on who you are, but interesting nonetheless.

OMG! I thought it farted...

I can't believe I haven't seen this thread before. Thank you, WagWag!

[Yves Grey]

Random thought, but some of your beautiful photographs reminded me of a visual concept I recently saw applied to the song Jupiter:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fXrkralsAQ&list=FLVSzAlcjI6gJAXn02CRtliw& index=6&feature=plpp_video[/ame]



The song has an interesting history, has been transliterated many times. A pretty good translation can be found:

http://www.animelyrics.com/jpop/hirahara/jupiter.htm



I wasn't sure whether you'd like it; but having seen your blog I thought I'd give it a whirl. Not quite as grand as the jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring majesty captured by some of the still-frames here!

[Kulindahr]

Here's something I couldn't link the pictures from -- it's worth the click... astronomy up close and personal:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-16678405

[Legionair]

Just imagine what's out there that we haven't seen yet. Personally I can't wait until we fire up the space race again.

[teadrinker]

Oh but these pictures are magnificent. Here's a couple more for you.

First, the deservedly famous (but which not everyone may have seen): "Pale Blue Dot":



Of this image Carl Sagan said:

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. [...] On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

(However, the "beams" are not sunbeams, but artifacts of the imaging process which required a long exposure.)

And secondly, this desert-like place, which could be in the Australian outback:



is in fact the surface of Mars. Think about it - you are looking right now, at the surface of another planet. If that doesn't fill you with a shiver of wonder, then nothing will.

-T.

[chrisrobin]

I still remember Adlai Stevenson's designation - "space ship earth". The pictures of Earth
here renew that idea!

[Kulindahr]

Cygnus-X

Cygnus-X is the largest star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy. This is a deep infrared image of that region. What's visible are bubbles of gas that are inflated by the winds created from stars soon after they've been formed. It's theorized that these bubbles can collide with others and create enough density to gravitationally collapse into more stars. It should be noted that the hottest regions in this image are in blue. You can see a full resolution image of Cygnus-X here. It's beautiful.

I saw that on the wall of a church once during Christmas. With the reds and greens and whites, they called it "God's Christmas display".

I liked it better than the usual Nativity display.

[mark1111]

WagWag, thank you for keeping this going. The images are amazing.

[teadrinker]

Right, last picture for me before I head off to work (it's morning in Australia). This is a picture of the "Sloan Great Wall", so far the largest structure found in the observable universe, and is 1.37 billion light years across. It's a "filament" of galaxies; that is, every tiny dot in this picture represents a galaxy (like our own Milky Way):



The extraordinarily huge size and scale of this structure can be described in numbers, but it's almost impossible to understand something of this magnitude because we have no frames of reference for it. Anyway, it's staggering.

-T.

[Kulindahr]

Right, last picture for me before I head off to work (it's morning in Australia). This is a picture of the "Sloan Great Wall", so far the largest structure found in the observable universe, and is 1.37 billion light years across. It's a "filament" of galaxies; that is, every tiny dot in this picture represents a galaxy (like our own Milky Way):



The extraordinarily huge size and scale of this structure can be described in numbers, but it's almost impossible to understand something of this magnitude because we have no frames of reference for it. Anyway, it's staggering.

-T.

Can you imagine what the night sky would look like in one of those galaxies where they're all clustered? Pinwheels and spiral everywhere!

[Saybrooke]

I'm not afraid of anything....

Except outer space... I'm not sure why, but thinking about it gives me the heebie jeebies!

[star-warrior]

If you folks have been paying notice to the night sky, then you'll probably have see two very bright objects very close by. Venus and Jupiter. The closer Venus outshines the more distant Jupiter, in the West in the evening sky. I've had some glorious views of this conjunction.

(Photo from here)



More here

[Kulindahr]

I'm not afraid of anything....

Except outer space... I'm not sure why, but thinking about it gives me the heebie jeebies!

I would love to be there -- get into lunar orbit, step out in a space suit, and tell them to loop around the moon once and come back for me.

Though I'd like it more if we could build an elevator to orbit, or skyhook, or orbital tower -- whatever you want to call it. Getting to orbit would be like riding a train, and the view...!!!

[Kulindahr]

If you folks have been paying notice to the night sky, then you'll probably have see two very bright objects very close by. Venus and Jupiter. The closer Venus outshines the more distant Jupiter, in the West in the evening sky. I've had some glorious views of this conjunction.

(Photo from here)



More here

I've been watching. One night, if I stood in just the right place, they looked like two bright ornaments on a neighbor's tree. Another night, they "sat" as bright spots on a hilltop. But most awesome was a night when they hung together between two glowing cloud layers.

I SO wish I had a camera!

[star-warrior]

If folks haven't already discovered the Stellarium, then get this wonderful free piece of software and enjoy the night sky at any time.

Moreover, you can set the view from your own longitude and latitude, as well as change the date to see past and future sky appearances. It's open source, free software, available Linux, Macs and Windows.

[Kulindahr]

If folks haven't already discovered the Stellarium, then get this wonderful free piece of software and enjoy the night sky at any time.

Moreover, you can set the view from your own longitude and latitude, as well as change the date to see past and future sky appearances. It's open source, free software, available Linux, Macs and Windows.

I like it because on nights when there's cloud cover (one in five nights being clear is a treat at this time of year) I can see what the sky would look like if the clouds went away.

It makes me appreciate an old native American prayer my sister turned into a small poster with calligraphy:


Oh you
you there up in the sky
don't you ever get tired
of having cloud
between you and us?

[palbert]

Beautiful. Thank all of you.

[Kulindahr]

^ OMG, a gargantuan monster is rising out of Jupiter to eat Io!

[Kulindahr]

Hey! I think I have a star system under my bed!