The Space Thread

[William_Ulsterman]

The Yakubu of planets.

 

brilliant

[neko]

[Section_31]

Awesome stuff, Death Star esque

[KinskiRage]

Views from space.

 

There's a 'socialist paradise' somewhere beneath those clouds.

 

 

Rogue iceberg on the loose:

 

 

Atlantis

 

 

'Ello

 

[The Great Jacko]

True Story:

 

My Dad used to be a lighting electrician working on films. He was working on The Man Who Fell To Earth and Buzz Aldrin was on set as a consultant. My Dad had quite a few chats with Buzz which included some heavy hints about "weird stuff" they'd seen...anyway he gave me Dad some photos of the moon and space that had been taken on his mission as a present for me.

 

Some cunt nicked them.

 

As an aside my Dad whose in his 70's now casually mentioned to me the other day that he nearly bought David Bowie's motor home whilst making the film but they couldn't get the insurance right or something.

 

My Dad's got some great stories about films and actors from the 60's and 70's.

 

Oh and at the risk of sounding like a cunt - he also worked on Star Wars for a bit. He basically did the Cantina scene. On the super duper extended optimised version in one of the making of extras he literally walks across the scene - I kid you fucking not.

 

He said "it was a load of shit". I like my Dad.

Edited August 22, 2011 by The Great Jacko
I forgot to add the Star Wars bit

[Funkasy]

Because the game/movie about Doom was in space, and this is the space thread, im just gonna put this nice video of a father and son having fun to the doom theme.

 

[YOUTUBE]-sQFx_e_0jc&feature=player_embedded[/YOUTUBE]

[William_Ulsterman]

One of the strange things i saw on the new Horizon Series was the fact that astronauts continually saw whisps of light, like tiny orbs of light dancing through their vision when they were far enough away from the earth's magnetic field, the Apollo missions reported the phenomena of these sparkles of light even when their eyes were closed trying to sleep.

 

it happened to be cosmic particles passing through the vitreous humor (liquid filling the eye ball) and releasing energy as photons as they collided with the molecules in the fluid. I'd be freaked out if i was seeing that shit day and night.

 

The earths magnetic fields deflects all sorts of nasty shit away from us.

[neko]

[neko]

ooooh.

 

[Anubis]

I've probably mentioned this before, but on the 8th March 2001 I was fortunate enough to be in Florida to see Discovery launch, albeit from about 4 miles away. It is still one of the most awesome sights I've ever seen in my life.

[neko]

I've probably mentioned this before, but on the 8th March 2001 I was fortunate enough to be in Florida to see Discovery launch, albeit from about 4 miles away. It is still one of the most awesome sights I've ever seen in my life.

 

better than being 50 yards from two spitfires, an ME 109 and a b-17 taxiing down the runway, and then flying overhead for 30+ minutes ?

 

I still remember exactly where I was when the Challenger blew up in 1986 (?)

[Trumo]

Bump for Magic Sponge.

[Magic Sponge]

Driving home a few hours ago and noticed the moon bright orange. Its called a harvest moon.

 

 

It looked exactly like this.

[Antynwa]

[YOUTUBE]xeKMS62GrTIP[/YOUTUBE]

[Trumo]

Driving home a few hours ago and noticed the moon bright orange. Its called a harvest moon.

 

Was watching the Red Sox game on ESPN a couple of nights ago, and the cameras panned over to it a few times, saying the same thing.

[DJLJ]

Wasn't sure whether to put it in here or in the Star Wars thread, but here you go.

 

Astronomers hail extraordinary discovery of Kepler-16b, 'Star Wars' planet with two suns | Mail Online

 

'Science fiction has turned into reality': Astronomers hail extraordinary discovery of 'Star Wars' planet with two suns

 

It is one of the most memorable images from Star Wars, Luke Skywalker gazing into the distance while walking on Tatooine, a planet with two suns.

 

And more than three decades after the movies came out the real life version has been discovered - a freezing cold planet named Kepler-16b, which is about the size of Saturn and 200 light years away.

 

American researchers using observations from NASA's Kepler spacecraft detected the distant planet, which is treated to a double sunset every evening.

 

'This discovery is stunning,' Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Terrestrial Magnetism said.

 

'Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality.'

 

Binary stars -- two suns turning around each other -- have been seen before, and astronomers have suspected planets exist around them, but Kepler's observations are the first to confirm it.

 

The gravitational pull of two stars, even stars like the relatively small ones at the heart of this stellar system, would be quite different from the gravity exerted by just one star, Mr Boss said.

 

Kepler's mission is to scour our section of the Milky Way galaxy for Earth-like planets in the so-called 'habitable zone' that is not too close and not too far away from the stars they orbit.

 

The spacecraft does this by finding stars whose light periodically gets dimmer, which means there is a planet passing between the star and Kepler's instruments. This is known as a planetary transit.

Science fiction: The notion of a planet wth two suns may seem familiar - because Luke Skywalker lived on one in Star Wars

 

Science fiction: The notion of a planet wth two suns may seem familiar - because Luke Skywalker lived on one in Star Wars

 

What made this find so eye-popping was that the stars were eclipsing each other as first one and then the other got in the way. And then a third eclipse indicated a planet was part of the system.

 

If the notion of a planet with two suns was displayed in the earliest Star Wars film on the fictional planet Tatooine, home of Luke Skywalker.

 

Tatooine was a rocky, desert planet, but Kepler-16b is a cool gas giant, Boss and other researchers said.

 

Because both of its suns are smaller and cooler than our sun, Kepler-16b would be quite cold, with a surface temperature of around minus 100 to minus 150F (minus 73 to minus 101C).

Extraordinary: An artist's illustration of Kepler-16b, the first planet known to orbit two stars

 

Extraordinary: An artist's illustration of Kepler-16b, the first planet known to orbit two stars

 

Kepler-16b is similar to Saturn in size and mass, a cold gas giant that orbits its two suns every 229 days at a distance of 65 million miles (104.6 million km).

 

That is roughly the same distance as Venus's orbit, compared to Earth's 365-day orbit around the sun at a distance of about 93 million miles (149.7 million km).

 

The newly detected planet is 200 light-years from Earth and is not thought to harbour life. A light-year is about six trillion miles (10 trillion km).

 

'Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet - a planet orbiting not one, but two stars,' said co-author Josh Carter.

 

'Once again, we're finding that our solar system is only one example of the variety of planetary systems nature can create.'

 

Read more: Astronomers hail extraordinary discovery of Kepler-16b, 'Star Wars' planet with two suns | Mail Online

[Remmie]

I gave this it's own thread on the GF that no-one replied to, fucking bastard-faced shitwizards.

 

SolarBeat

[melons]

I gave this it's own thread on the GF that no-one replied to, fucking bastard-faced shitwizards.

 

SolarBeat

 

I had that playing in the back ground for hours after you'd posted it. Better?

[Section_31]

Wasn't sure whether to put it in here or in the Star Wars thread, but here you go.

 

Astronomers hail extraordinary discovery of Kepler-16b, 'Star Wars' planet with two suns | Mail Online

 

Imagine the view from one of its moons? A giant saturn and two suns? Unreal.

[Cliff T. Beast]

Awe inspiring thread, i always wondered, if there is other life out there and if they have the ability to observe this planet, the just laugh at us and the way we treat each other and our planet

[brucespanner]

From the new Alma Telescope.

 

Alma's view of the Antennae galaxies, created using measurements from 16 of the dishes installed on the Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama desert, Chile. The Antennae are a pair of distorted spiral galaxies that are colliding about 70m light-years from Earth

 

composite of Alma and Hubble observations of the Antennae galaxies. The blue colours represent the best-quality optical image taken of this region of space so far – by Hubble. The red, pink and yellow show previously unseen wavelengths of light emanating from the vast carbon monoxide clouds that float in and between the galaxies, imaged by Alma for the first time. The clouds contain gases with a total mass several billion times that of our sun

[Duff Man]

[Redder Lurtz]

Times like these I wish I had a good telescope. Look up to the South West - that massively bright thing is Jupiter.

[The Flâneur]

Surely, surely, it all has to be bollocks. Just what the fuck? The limits of our own spoken language. Is an understanding of maths like a language? does it's comprehension give a handle on all that apparent massiveness? Just what is illusory and how is its content defined?

 

Space is ace, but good lord it's a melon twister.

[Section_31]

Surely, surely, it all has to be bollocks. Just what the fuck? The limits of our own spoken language. Is an understanding of maths like a language? does it's comprehension give a handle on all that apparent massiveness? Just what is illusory and how is its content defined?

 

Space is ace, but good lord it's a melon twister.

 

The question 'if space is expanding, what is it expanding into' always fucks me up.