The Big Think

It’s nice when a great man also ends up being a good man.

Cool shot of Earth and Jupiter in the same frame. (h/t Scott)

The particular setup for this was sound activated. The lens was destroyed (worth it of course) but the camera survived this one despite being severed from its ratchet straps and thrown to the ground, and the sound device used for this one disconnected from the camera and thrown about 200 feet backwards into the pad perimeter fence (still worked!). All settings are preset manually. No one is allowed closer than several miles from a launch.

Unbelievably Awesome. Via Launch Photography.

How to Truck 66 200,000-Pound Antennas to 16,000 Feet: “”

(Via .)

Saturn has mountains in its rings.

For years, the moon-landing deniers have said that they’d believe we landed on the moon if only NASA would post pictures of the landing sites. Well, I guess the stupid argument is finally over. Now they’ll say that those pictures are faked. Sigh.

Powerful telescopes in Hawaii and Spain are using ‘light echoes’ from the original supernova explosion that have bounced off dust in the surrounding interstellar clouds to identify the precise type of supernova that Tycho Brahe saw 436 years ago. Although the echoed light from Tycho’s supernova is around 20 billion times fainter than the original light observed in 1572, the team took identical images of the sky a few months apart and then digitally subtracted one from the other to find evidence for several sets of light echoes rippling across patches of dust in the northern Milky Way. ‘Using light echoes in supernova remnants is time-travelling in a way, in that it allows us to go back hundreds of years to observe the first light from a supernova event. We got to relive a significant historical moment and see it as the famed astronomer Tycho Brahe did hundreds of years ago,’ said Tomonori Usuda, of the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Tycho’s original observations were particularly important as he immediately concluded that the new star, visible even by day, could not be closer than the Moon challenging the Aristotelian view of the cosmos, widely accepted since ancient times, which held that the sky beyond the Moon never changed.

Via Slashdot

Let me see… detecting a light reflection that’s 20 billion times fainter than the already faint light that hit the earth 436 years ago? That’s why I love astronomers.

How about this for a nerd-tastic vacation?

And it’s pulling us in.

That’s no moon….

The sun (you know, our sun) has just finished its very first spotless month in a whole century. To solar watchers this is… disturbing.

But not this far! How long would it take you to walk a light-year?

Set your watches for August 21st, 2017. That’s the date of the next total solar eclipse that will take place in North America. More info here.