Tag: space
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What I saw somewhat recently #86: September 11, 2021
I was recently able to jump on a train and photograph the Engineer. Look for that in my portfolio when I develop the film. Speaking of my photography portfolio, I’ve added several portraits including Max, Anthony, Zombie, and Bill. My goal is far more portraits moving forward. I’d love your feedback on them! You can…
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What I saw somewhat recently #73: March 31, 2021
If you can believe it, this is my first WIS post from in 2021. I’ve been keeping a small backlog of links that I’ve wanted to share but mostly I’ve shared links here as separate posts. I think once I get to #75 I’d like to do a retrospective and pull forward all of my…
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Damage at Arecibo Observatory
Arecibo Observatory: One of the auxiliary cables that helps support a metal platform in place above the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, broke on Monday (Aug. 10) causing a 100-foot-long gash on the telescope’s reflector dish. Operations at the UCF-managed observatory are stopped until repairs can be made. Y’all know I’m a big fan of…
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Hubble’s Legacy Field
I don’t cover space nearly enough here on my blog. I miss the days of writing Space Bits with my friend Yaron Schoen. Sometimes announcements of new images of our vast Universe just seem to float by with the deluge of information we’re bombarded with every single day. However, I figured this new image from…
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Capturing Starman from Earth
Rogelio Bernal Andreo: Astrophotography can be applied in many different ways. I utilize technology that allows me to capture ancient photons so that I can later process and create my own interpretation of the data captured, effectively blending art and science like not many other disciplines do, but I don’t usually track “small pixels in…
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Shooting a car at Mars
Space X (watch this video): The first test flight of Falcon Heavy is targeted for Tuesday, Feb. 6th at 1:30 PM ET from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When Falcon Heavy lifts off, it will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two. With the…
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Dynamicland
Dynamicland: We are inventing a new computational medium where people work together with real objects in the real world, not alone with virtual objects on a screen. From Bret Victor and others. Swoon.
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1I/2017 U1 `Oumuamua
ESO: For the first time ever astronomers have studied an asteroid that has entered the Solar System from interstellar space. !!!!!! This created a unique problem for the naming of this object. The IAU also created a new class of objects for interstellar asteroids, with this object being the first to receive this designation. When…
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August’s kilonova in NGC 4993
Robert Naeye for Astronomy magazine, on the instrumentation that detected a 130M year-old kilonova: The LIGO and Virgo instruments detected a crescendo of waves for a whopping 100 seconds — much longer than previous detections. The duration, amplitude, and frequency of the waves had all the characteristics that theorists have expected for a binary system…
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A technology predication time capsule
Readers of my blog will know that I occasionally attempt to predict when certain technologies that I write about will hit the mainstream. While I’m very passionate about a few technologies, I try to temper that excitement with the experiences I’ve had, the wisdom that comes with age, and other factors. Usually, things take a…
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ESO observes kilonovae
European Southern Observatory: ESO’s fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — long-predicted events called kilonovae — disperse heavy elements…
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Kip Thorne wins the Nobel
Nobel Media AB: On 14 September 2015, the universe’s gravitational waves were observed for the very first time. The waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago, came from a collision between two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the LIGO detector in the USA.…
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Cassini dies tomorrow
Lee Billings for Scientific American: All good things must come to an end. For NASA’s Cassini orbiter—its fuel dwindling after 13 years exploring Saturn, along with the planet’s sprawling rings and dozens of icy moons—the end will come Friday at 7:55 A.M. Eastern time. That’s when mission planners project radio communications will be lost with…
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Repost: Emily Lakdawalla on Voyager’s 40th Anniversary
👉 Emily Lakdawalla on The Planetary Society blog: The fact that both Voyager spacecraft are still functioning and doing science, 40 years after their launches, is reason for optimism. We can build robust, adaptable machines capable of surviving unpredicted storms and responding to new discoveries. We can build them, launch them, and stably operate them for…
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Florence’s two moons
Center for NEO Studies PR on Astronomy Now: Radar images of asteroid 3122 Florence obtained at the 70-metre antenna at NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex between August 29 and September 1 have revealed that the asteroid has two small moons, and also confirmed that main asteroid Florence is about 4.5 km (2.8 miles) in…
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Voyager’s 40th Anniversary
East coasters keep your lunchtime open on Tuesday as NASA is celebrating Voyager’s 40th Anniversary. Check out this description from APOD: Launched in 1977 on a tour of the outer planets of the Solar System, Voyager 1 and 2 have become the longest operating and most distant spacecraft from Earth. Nearly 16 light-hours from the…
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Slingshot around the moon, for two
SpaceX: We are excited to announce that SpaceX has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. That sentence makes me immeasurably happy. For most of my life I’ve been very disappointed in the human race’s collective efforts to explore space. I wasn’t even alive when the…
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TRAPPIST-1
The following two sentences encapsulate an incredible feat in the advancement of human discovery: TRAPPIST-1 is a planetary system, located 12 parsecs away from the Solar system (39 light years), near the ecliptic, within the constellation of Aquarius. Around a star which is 12 times less massive than the Sun and only slightly larger than Jupiter,…
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Blue Origin’s New Shepard lands again
This video is absolutely mind-blowing. Everything about this was science fiction a few years ago. In fact, the video looks fake while you watch it because you can’t believe this is happening on Earth. And now with some regularity. Watching this video makes me think that I’ll be alive when people (perhaps even with their…