The Space Thread

[Big Ig]

 

Needs to viewed in full.

 

Awesome.

 

Similar in video form

 

...some stars and planets in scale

[Uncle_Meat]

Leonids! Don't miss the Leonids!

 

Starting to reach their peak on Sunday night, with the peak being just after midnight. Let's hope the weather plays ball.. I've got the ideal place to spot them here, with sod all light pollution.

 

If you miss them, never mind. There is another unusual astrological phenomenom to look forward to on the 12th of December, this being a full "Supermoon".

 

A supermoon is where the Moon is at its perigee, which means it is at its closest to Earth in its orbit. Given a clear sky you'll never see a bigger moon, barring atmospheric lensing/binocular depth cue illusion (delete where applicable).

[don]

just watched all of 'nasa's greatest missions' on discovery, fantastic stuff

[Red Mist]

Has anyone got any brilliant space screensavers? Some nice animated ones would be most welcome. I'll trade it for a stunning, animated, scenic, countryside one. Cheers.

[Nunavut Patrick]

The whole universe, and all of our exsistence, all of history, all of time, actaully exists in a sphere containing the conscouisness of Red Nick.

 

TLW is nothing more than a portal that has not been closed.

[mars]

Major Breakthrough: First Photos of Planets Around Other Stars | LiveScience

 

First image of an exoplanet.

[jacco maccaco]

3 Months ago this was last added to!

 

NGC2818 Planetary Nebula,

 

 

Saturn, Backlit by the Sun, taken by the Cassini probe,

 

 

M83, The Thousand Ruby Galaxy,

 

 

Annular Eclipse "Ring of Fire"

 

 

NGC4921, "Anaemic Galaxy"

 

 

 

More here,

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

[Section_31]

3 Months ago this was last added to!

 

Annular Eclipse "Ring of Fire"

 

 

That's stunning.

[Section_31]

Awesome, just watching The Sky at Night with Sir Patrick, and apparently 'something' the size of the Earth hit Jupiter recently.

 

 

We'd be so royally fucked without this bad boy in The Terran System drawing all this shit out of our path with its huge gravity well, it's like where Arnie first comes across John Connor in The Galleria and takes all those bullets in the back from the T-1000.

[Redder Lurtz]

Watching this as well. What's slightly worrying is that nobody knows what it was or where it came from or that it was even approaching Jupiter. It was the size of the Earth for fuck sake! Seriously, Bruce wouldn't even have time to don his space vest, grab his drilling equipment and get in a rocket. Nuts.

 

Also, didn't know there was a total solar eclipse due around there parts in 2015. I remember the last one in '99, I think. Amazing.

[philyhamann]

I thought the hole it made was the size of Earth, not that the actual thing that hit was the size of Earth.

 

I was gonna dump some money on some telescoping equipment but I blew it all on gym equipment cause people in the gym are fags who haven't got a clue. Oh well.

[Redder Lurtz]

I thought the hole it made was the size of Earth, not that the actual thing that hit was the size of Earth.

 

He's right you know:

 

PHOTO: Jupiter Impact Creates Huge New Spot

 

Updated July 21, 2009—A new black spot on Jupiter was likely caused by an impact over the weekend that took astronomers by surprise.

 

Slightly smaller across than Earth, the temporary spot was caused by a recent but unobserved comet or asteroid impact, said Glenn Orton, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

 

"It's very clear that this is an impact," Orton said.

 

First spotted in July 19 pictures by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, the blemish appears as a dark gray blob on the gas giant's south pole. (The dark spot is in the upper right of the above picture because the planet appears upside down.)

 

Astronomer Amy Simon-Miller, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, agreed that the spot must have been created by an impact, saying that the evidence "is not consistent with changes in weather patterns."

 

The bombardment that caused the spot would have been very similar to what happened in 1994, when fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter. (See a Hubble picture of comet debris approaching Jupiter.)

 

The impactor's size is still unknown, but it would have exploded like a bomb as it punched a hole through Jupiter's upper atmosphere, Simon-Miller said.

 

"If you could look edge-on at the planet exactly where it happened, you would have seen a fireball," she said. "What we're looking at now is not the hole, but burnt up debris raining back down onto the planet."

 

It's possible more impacts could follow in the next few days, and if so, this time astronomers will be ready to spot the actual explosions.

 

"We're going to be training all the big telescopes on it as soon as we can," Simon-Miller said.

[Stu Monty]

if you want to read about awesome and destructive things you need not look outside the atmosphere. I'm reading some stuff about Yellowstone park at the moment and it's some mindblowing shit.

[jacco maccaco]

In a space mood tonight after posting in the film score thread.

 

T Tauris Star forming Nebulae.

 

 

Titan beyond the rings of Saturn (The small moon is Epimetheus) taken by the Cassini probe.

 

 

Irregular Galaxy!

 

 

M51 Deep field view.

 

 

B44 Dark Nebulae, spooky looking.

 

 

Milky way over the Devils Tower (Close encounters)

 

[DJLJ]

New amazing pictures in from Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3.

 

 

More here: Hubble Is Back! With New Stunning Images | Wired Science | Wired.com

[Guest davelfc]

New amazing pictures in from Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3.

 

 

More here: Hubble Is Back! With New Stunning Images | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

That's just two big space breasts rubbing up against eachother.

 

(hey you posted the filth not me)

[DJLJ]

Fucking hell, atleast you'd have thought they would have been able to find this before...

 

NASA Space Telescope Discovers Largest Ring Around Saturn

NASA Space Telescope Discovers Largest Ring Around Saturn

WEBWIRE – Wednesday, October 07, 2009

 

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet’s many rings.

 

The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). One of Saturn’s farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.

 

Saturn’s newest halo is thick, too -- its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring.

 

"This is one supersized ring" said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. "If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons’ worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn" Verbiscer; Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park; and Michael Skrutskie, of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, are authors of a paper about the discovery to be published online tomorrow by the journal Nature.

 

An artist’s concept of the newfound ring is online at

 

NASA - Saturn's Infrared Ring

 

The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. Spitzer’s infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band’s cool dust. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 107 million kilometers (66 million miles) from Earth in orbit around the sun.

 

The discovery may help solve an age-old riddle of one of Saturn’s moons. Iapetus has a strange appearance -- one side is bright and the other is really dark, in a pattern that resembles the yin-yang symbol. The astronomer Giovanni Cassini first spotted the moon in 1671, and years later figured out it has a dark side, now named Cassini Regio in his honor. A stunning picture of Iapetus taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is online at

 

Catalog Page for PIA08384

 

Saturn’s newest addition could explain how Cassini Regio came to be. The ring is circling in the same direction as Phoebe, while Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn’s moons are all going the opposite way. According to the scientists, some of the dark and dusty material from the outer ring moves inward toward Iapetus, slamming the icy moon like bugs on a windshield.

 

"Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn’s outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus" said Hamilton. "This new ring provides convincing evidence of that relationship"

 

Verbiscer and her colleagues used Spitzer’s longer-wavelength infrared camera, called the multiband imaging photometer, to scan through a patch of sky far from Saturn and a bit inside Phoebe’s orbit. The astronomers had a hunch that Phoebe might be circling around in a belt of dust kicked up from its minor collisions with comets -- a process similar to that around stars with dusty disks of planetary debris. Sure enough, when the scientists took a first look at their Spitzer data, a band of dust jumped out.

 

The ring would be difficult to see with visible-light telescopes. Its particles are diffuse and may even extend beyond the bulk of the ring material all the way in to Saturn and all the way out to interplanetary space. The relatively small numbers of particles in the ring wouldn’t reflect much visible light, especially out at Saturn where sunlight is weak.

 

"The particles are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn’t even know it" said Verbiscer.

 

Spitzer was able to sense the glow of the cool dust, which is only about 80 Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit). Cool objects shine with infrared, or thermal radiation; for example, even a cup of ice cream is blazing with infrared light. "By focusing on the glow of the ring’s cool dust, Spitzer made it easy to find" said Verbiscer.

 

These observations were made before Spitzer ran out of coolant in May and began its "warm" mission.

 

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer was built by Ball Aerospace Corporation, Boulder, Colo., and the University of Arizona, Tucson. Its principal investigator is George Rieke of the University of Arizona.

 

For additional images relating to the ring discovery and more information about Spitzer, visit

 

Spitzer Space Telescope

 

and

 

NASA - SPITZER

 

[Section_31]

Bumphouse, whole lot of bump, prized to be bumped.

[Kobayashi Maru]

Superb thread. Bump again.

[RedinSweden]

If you have an IMAX place anywhere near you and they show this, do it. It is fucking superb.

 

[YOUTUBE]NvlbAItBdK4[/YOUTUBE]

[Fugitive]

BBC 2 has been showing 'The Planets' all this week around 11.30pm. Cracking series from 1999 and really interesting with some great pictures of the planets and their moons.

[Redder Lurtz]

 

Needs to viewed in full.

 

Awesome.

 

The "incredibleness" of this picture hit me on a new level just now. Look at the enormous size of Sirius. Now, Sirius is usually one of the brightest stars in the sky, forms part of Canis Major and sits somewhere off the right foot of Orion. Now look at the size of Betelgeuse (Orion's right shoulder). Sirius isn't even a pinhead in comparison yet Betelgeuse is a duller star than Sirius. It must be, what, a million times the size of Sirius? The reason for this is the incredible distances involved. Betelgeuse is 640 light years away whereas Sirius is a mere 8.6 light years away. That's 1/74 of the distance of Betelgeuse. Put that into understandable terms - I run 2 miles every other day. can I possibly comprehend running 148 miles?

 

Now consider that scientists know that Betelgeuse is about to go supernova and explode. This could happen tomorrow, in five years or in five hundred years. It could happen while you're reading this. When it goes it'll look like something the size of our moon. But 640 light years away. Fucking amazing.

 

Space is fucking awesome.

[Section_31]

Imagine living under a blue sun like Vega? Unreal.

 

[Redder Lurtz]

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgg2tpUVbXQ&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgg2tpUVbXQ&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

 

Both inspiring, and depressing.

 

Gotta love Phily for posting this too. Incredible is too small a word to discribe this.

[Fugitive]

The Metro paper has a weekly article on Space every week. Read todays and it was explaining the distance to other Galaxys and how telescopes get the amazing pictures we see and how long each exposure need to get the pictures.

 

One of my favourite pictures ever is this from the Huuble telescope which took 11 days exposure to capture all these Galaxies. There are over 10,000 galaxies in this picture.