“You know the typical crowd, “Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?” Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves.”
(via galaxyclusters)
Astronomers Catch Amazingly Bright Explosion on the Moon
Our neighboring natural satellite is pock-marked with thousands upon thousands of craters from meteors and asteroids that have been pelting its surface for more than a billion years.
Over the past eight years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon studying impact sites and also looking for new signs of impacts. And by keeping a close watch on the Moon, astronomers have come to the realization that “lunar meteor showers” are much more common that anyone had previously expected, with hundreds of impacts occurring every year.
Many of the impacts that occur have been easily detectable by astronomers with high-tech equipment, and some even by amateur astronomers with backyard telescopes. But one impact that recently occurred on the Moon was so bright that anyone looking up with a naked eye would have had the sighting of a lifetime – the biggest explosion on the moon in at least the past eight years that lunar monitoring has occurred.
“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” said Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office (MEO). “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”
Image: How many rings do you see in this new image of the galaxy Messier 94, also known as NGC 4736? While at first glance one might see a number of them, astronomers believe there is just one. This image was captured in infrared light by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
Historically, Messier 94 was considered to have two strikingly different rings: a brilliant, compact band encircling the galaxy’s core, and a faint, broad, swath of stars falling outside its main disk.
Astronomers have recently discovered that the outer ring, seen here in the deep blue glow of starlight, might actually be more of an optical illusion. A 2009 study combined infrared Spitzer observations with those from other telescopes, including ultraviolet data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, now operated by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; visible data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; and shorter-wavelength infrared light from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). This more complete picture of Messier 94 indicates that we are really seeing two separate spiral arms, which, from our perspective, take on the appearance of a single, unbroken ring.
The bright inner ring of Messier 94 is very real, however. This area is sometimes identified as a “starburst ring” because of the frenetic pace of star formation in the confined area. Starbursts like this can often be triggered by gravitational encounters with other galaxies, but in this case might be caused by the galaxy’s oval shape.
Tucked in between the inner starburst ring and the outer ring-like arms is the galaxy’s disk, striated with greenish filaments of dust. While these dusty arcs look like a collection of rings, they actually follow tightly wound spiral arcs.
Infrared light with wavelengths of 3.6 and 4.5 microns is represented in blue/cyan, and primarily shows the glow from starlight. Light of 8 microns is rendered in green, and 24-micron emission is red, tracing the cooler and warmer components of dust, respectively. The image was taken in 2004, before Spitzer ran out of cryogen.The 2MASS mission was a joint effort between the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., the University of Massachusetts and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Data are archived at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Asteroid Sample Return Mission Moves into Development
NASA’s first mission to sample an asteroid is moving ahead into development and testing in preparation for its launch in 2016.
The Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) passed a confirmation review Wednesday called Key Decision Point (KDP)-C. NASA officials reviewed a series of detailed project assessments and authorized the spacecraft’s continuation into the development phase.OSIRIS-REx will rendezvous with the asteroid Bennu in 2018 and return a sample of it to Earth in 2023.
“Successfully passing KDP-C is a major milestone for the project,” said Mike Donnelly, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This means NASA believes we have an executable plan to return a sample from Bennu. It now falls on the project and its development team members to execute that plan.”
Bennu could hold clues to the origin of the solar system. OSIRIS-REx will map the asteroid’s global properties, measure non-gravitational forces and provide observations that can be compared with data obtained by telescope observations from Earth. OSIRIS-REx will collect a minimum of 2 ounces (60 grams) of surface material.
Cassini Shapes First Global Topographic Map of Titan
Image: Using data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, scientists have created the first global topographic map of Saturn’s moon Titan, giving researchers a 3-D tool for learning more about one of the most Earthlike and interesting worlds in the solar system
Scientists have created the first global topographic map of Saturn’s moon Titan, giving researchers a valuable tool for learning more about one of the most Earth-like and interesting worlds in the solar system. The map was just published as part of a paper in the journal Icarus.
Titan is Saturn’s largest moon - at 1,600 miles (2,574 kilometers) across it’s bigger than planet Mercury - and is the second-largest moon in the solar system. Scientists care about Titan because it’s the only moon in the solar system known to have clouds, surface liquids and a mysterious, thick atmosphere. The cold atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth’s, but the organic compound methane on Titan acts the way water vapor does on Earth, forming clouds and falling as rain and carving the surface with rivers. Organic chemicals, derived from methane, are present in Titan’s atmosphere, lakes and rivers and may offer clues about the origins of life.
“Titan has so much interesting activity - like flowing liquids and moving sand dunes - but to understand these processes it’s useful to know how the terrain slopes,” said Ralph Lorenz, a member of the Cassini radar team based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., who led the map-design team. “It’s especially helpful to those studying hydrology and modeling Titan’s climate and weather, who need to know whether there is high ground or low ground driving their models.”
Titan’s thick haze scatters light in ways that make it very hard for remote cameras to “see” landscape shapes and shadows, the usual approach to measuring topography on planetary bodies. Virtually all the data we have on Titan comes from NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft, which has flown past the moon nearly 100 times over the past decade. On many of those flybys, Cassini has used a radar imager, which can peer through the haze, and the radar data can be used to estimate the surface height.
“With this new topographic map, one of the most fascinating and dynamic worlds in our solar system now pops out in 3-D,” said Steve Wall, the deputy team lead of Cassini’s radar team, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “On Earth, rivers, volcanoes and even weather are closely related to heights of surfaces - we’re now eager to see what we can learn from them on Titan.”
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/JHUAPL/Cornell/Weizmann
Scott Hubbard Plans to Revive Defunct Kepler Space Telescope
NASA announced yesterday that its Kepler space telescope is stuck in standby mode, but one professor is already coming up with ideas to try and revive the observatory.
Scott Hubbard, a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics, helped guide the Kepler mission when he served as director of NASA Ames Research Center. He has devised a few plans for the space agency that could potentially help bring the planet-hunting spacecraft back to life.
NASA said its Kepler spacecraft was sitting in safe mode, possibly putting an end to its mission. The observatory went into a Thruster-Controlled Safe Mode and the space agency hasn’t been too optimistic about being able to bring it back online.
Hubbard said the Kepler spacecraft’s photo-detector array registers more than 100,000 stars at a time, and in order to detect exoplanets, it must remain extremely steady so that the stars do not wander across the optics. At least three of Kepler’s four gyroscope-like reaction wheels need to be functioning to keep Kepler stable, but the spacecraft currently only has two wheels left.
“There are two possible ways to salvage the spacecraft that I’m aware of,” Hubbard said. “One is that they could try turning back on the reaction wheel that they shut off a year ago. It was putting metal on metal, and the friction was interfering with its operation, so you could see if the lubricant that is in there, having sat quietly, has redistributed itself, and maybe it will work.”
He said the other scheme involves using thrusters and the solar pressure exerted on the solar panels to try and act as a third reaction wheel and provide additional pointing stability.
“I haven’t investigated it, but my impression is that it would require sending a lot more operational commands to the spacecraft,” the professor added.
Some believe that if Kepler isn’t brought back to full functionality, there is still a chance it could be used to detect asteroids. Hubbard, however, says that might be jumping the gun.
“Whether or not it could function as a detector for asteroids is something that would have to be studied, but since it wasn’t built as a camera, I would say that I’m skeptical. That said, certainly between Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they’ve got the best people in the world working on it,” he said.
500 Million Year Old Fossil Named After Johnny Depp
David Legg, a scientist who is immortalizing Johnny Depp by naming a fossil after him.
David Legg who carried out his research as part of his PhD in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, named a fossil he discovered in honor of Mr. Depp. The 505-million-year-old fossil called Kooteninchela deppi belonged to a distant ancestor of lobsters and scorpions.
K. deppi is helping researchers find out more about life on Earth during the Cambrian period, which is when the majority of modern animal types emerged.
“When I first saw the pair of isolated claws in the fossil records of this species I could not help but think of Edward Scissorhands,” Legg said. “Even the genus name, Kootenichela, includes the reference to this film as ‘chela’ is Latin for claws or scissors. In truth, I am also a bit of a Depp fan and so what better way to honour the man than to immortalise him as an ancient creature that once roamed the sea?”
The ancient lobster-like creature lived in very shallow seas off the coast of British Columbia in Canada. Sea temperatures in this area would have been much hotter than today, and although coral reefs had not yet been established, Kooteninchela deppi would have lived in a similar environment made up predominantly of sponges.
Legg believes the ancient creature would have been a hunter or scavenger. Its claws may have been used to capture prey, or they could have helped it probe the sea floor looking for sea creatures hiding in sediment.
K. deppi was about 1.5-inches long with an elongated trunk for a body and millipede-like legs. It had large eyes composed of many lenses like the compound eyes of a fly. These eyes were positioned on top of movable stalks called peduncles to help it search for food and keep a look out for predators.
“Just imagine it: the prawns covered in mayonnaise in your sandwich, the spider climbing up your wall and even the fly that has been banging into your window and annoyingly flying into your face are all descendants of Kooteninchela deppi,” Legg said.
‘It’s like when you come off a ride at the CNE’: Chris Hadfield describes the hard return to gravity
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield says his body feels confused and banged-up by the effects of gravity after a five-month stay in space.
After floating around weightlessly for months, suddenly, he needs to keep his own head aloft. He feels dizzy. And because there are no callouses on his feet anymore, he says, he feels like he’s walking on hot coals.
A first trip to the gym was excruciating, he says, because it felt like two people had jumped on him when he was trying to do a situp.
”My neck is sore and my back is sore,” Hadfield told a news conference from Houston on Thursday.
”It feels like I played a hard game of rugby yesterday or played full-contact hockey yesterday and I haven’t played in a while.” (THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Mikhail Metzel)
Reblogged from nationalpost
tedx:
I used to think I couldn’t get out of hell: Chicago public school students react to TEDxYouth@Midwest
Earlier this month, 450 Chicago public school sophomores and juniors, plus 120 of their teachers, crowded into the city’s Harris Theater for TEDxYouth@Midwest, an event all about inspiring, motivating and empowering the young people of a city known for youth gun violence, but full of so much more — culture, history, educators and students dedicated to helping their city thrive.
Chicago’s public schools have been a fixture in the news lately. 54 schools in the city are slated to close in 2013, and according to reports in The Chicago Tribune, the 2011-12 school year brought the highest number of public school students affected by gunfire since 2008. Twenty-four students were killed; 319 students shot.
At TEDxYouth@Midwest, organizers strove to turn the focus from problems, and keep it focused on the potential. 17 speakers addressed the audience, including people like guerrilla gardener Ron Finley, who is planting gardens in South Central LA; Dr. Benjamin Harrison, a researcher working on growing replacement tissue for patients who have lost their own; and Chicago native Zoe Damacela, who started her own apparel line as a high school student in the city.
This year, TEDxYouth@Midwest launched their TEDxMidwest Youth Connections Program, a project pairing TEDxYouth@Midwest students with career experiences designed to open the doors to potential careers — from job shadowing to summer internships to discussions with local entrepreneurs. Through the program, 35 TEDxYouth@Midwest student attendees found summer internships and, next year, the team at TEDxYouth@Midwest hopes to raise that number to 100.
“The event was levels better because of the students’ infectious energy, and its potential to really have a life-changing effect on hundreds of kids and teachers,” said organizer Mike Hettwer. “The speakers were so motivated to speak there.”
The immediate effects of the event shone in students’ responses to comment cards asking how their thinking changed throughout the event. Some of their responses are truly incredible. A sampling:
I used to think… “That once you made a bad decision, that was it for you. People say you write your life’s story in ink — if you make a mistake there is no way to erase it. You are done!”
Now I think… “That I should no longer aim for perfection, but rather strive for success. Success is not measured by how many times you fall, but actually choosing to get up once more then you fall.”I used to think…”That you have to use violence in order to make peace.”
Now I think… “But I realize that I can use peace to make peace.”I used to think… “That because I am considered a minority, I would not be able to do amazing things I really want to do.”
Now I think… “That I can do anything I set my mind to if I do not let anything hold me back. Only I can prevent myself from achieving my goals and my passion.”I used to think… “I couldn’t get out of Hell.”
Now I think… “I can with Mellody Hobson’s speech.”I used to think… “I was one of the few teenagers passionate about science.”
Now I think… “TED is all about diversity of ideas and other people are as passionate about science as I am.”I used to think… “If you come from a broken home, would live in a broken future.”
Now I think… “You can shape your own future and get away from the brokeness.”I used to think… “This was going to be a long boring program with weird snacks.”
Now I think… “This experience has been the best experience in my whole entire life.”
I am a product of Chicago public schooling
(via inspirement)
Yeah exactly haha uggh I knew I had to reveal my terribly crude system someday. I am as amatuer as it gets haha . So I made a little camera rig that sits on top of an eyepiece. My new ETX-80 has a threaded port on the back for cameras but I use the rig because my dslr lens can’t screw off. I use my phone or a 16mp nikon or my Canon dslr
I took these a few weeks ago. Trying out editing and watermarks now. Suggestions? Really need some editing help. Astrophotography is hard people.
“Astrophotography is hard”, understatement of the year award goes to you.
When I do moon shots I either go straight to Gimp and go with the unsharp mask, change levels and curves if I have horrible light pollution, or stitch my frames together. For the halos around the moon I just paint over the background and fill in anything I need to on the moon.
I also ignore the “rule of thumb” that you should keep a certain exposure/f-stop/ISO for different phases. If I decide to stitch that night I’ll use some over exposed, under exposed, and the set moon-phase exposures to add contrast during the stacking.
You can get some really amazing moon shots if you shoot it through a webcam and then stack everything in Registax, though. But who has time for that…
Your watermark could be a schminkitywink bigger, but not colossal like my freaks of nature.
Hah! Thank you! Im honored by your suggestion Miss Druyan. (Don’t worry) No but thanks a lot and I know, my previous posts in the past year have explained to people how steep a learning curve astrophotography has. I post a lot of moon shots because my Canon dslr does only 15 sec exposures :( and my shots end up out of focus if I zoom in on (lets say Orion nebula) So I practice on the Moon. Which I think is the best place to start
Source electricspacekoolaid
Reblogged from electricspacekoolaid
I took these a few weeks ago. Trying out editing and watermarks now. Suggestions? Really need some editing help. Astrophotography is hard people.
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