Space, The Final Frontier.
Posted by mortal
Post your space stuff. 
I'll kick it off with this,
Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party.
and this.
Hubbles final service mission.
[www.boston.com]
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to. [www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Central
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/2009 09:59AM by mortal.
I'll kick it off with this,
Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party.
and this.
Hubbles final service mission.
[www.boston.com]
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to.
[www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 CentralEdited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/2009 09:59AM by mortal.
That first video is beautiful.
quality thread
some tributes i stumbeled upon some time ago, to honour 14 people who paid the ultimate price
[www.chrisvalentines.com] (~10 min)
[www.chrisvalentines.com] (~20 min)
[www.chrisvalentines.com] (~10 min)
warning: very unfunny
used to be GPGSL's Nick Heidfeld
some tributes i stumbeled upon some time ago, to honour 14 people who paid the ultimate price
[www.chrisvalentines.com] (~10 min)
[www.chrisvalentines.com] (~20 min)
[www.chrisvalentines.com] (~10 min)
warning: very unfunny
used to be GPGSL's Nick Heidfeld
Superb thread mortal!
Nobody explains space quite as well as Bill Bryson. An extract from A Short History of Nearly Everything, Chapter II - Welcome to the Solar System
...Space you see, is just enormous - just enormous. Let's imagine, for purposes of edification and entertainment, that we are about to go on a journey by rocketship. We won't go terribly far - just to the edge of our own solar system - but we need to get a fix on how big a place space is and what a small part of it we occupy.
Now the bad news, I'm afraid, is that we won't be home for supper. Even at the speed of light (300,000 kilometres per second) it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But of course we can't travel at anything like that speed. We'll have to go at the speed of a space-ship, and these are rather more lumbering. The best speeds yet achieved by any human object are those of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts, which are flying away from us at about 56,000 kph.
The reason the Voyager craft were launched when they were (in August and September 1977) was that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a 'gravity assist' technique in which the craft were succesively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of crack the whip. Even so, it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto. The good news is that if we wait until January 2006 we can take advantage of favourable Jovian positioning, plus some advances in technology, and get there in only a decade or so - though getting home again will take rather longer, I'm afraid. At all events it's going to be a long trip.
Now, the first thing you are likely to realise is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it - the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets and other miscellaneous drifting detritus - fills less than a trillionth of the available space. You also quickly realise than none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system was drawn remotely to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighbourly intervals - the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations - but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight as Jupiter.
Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of paper, you wouln't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to the size of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away...
...Now, the other thing you will notice as we speed past Pluto is that we are speeding past Pluto. If you check your itinerary, you will see that this is a trip to the edge of our solar system, and I'm afraid we're not there yet. Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom maps, but the system doesn't end there. In fact it isn't even close to ending there. We won't get to the solar system's edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets, and we won't reach the Oort cloud for another - I'm so sorry about this - ten thousand years. Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.
Buy this book!
//Edit: Really should have proof read this for spelling mistakes!
Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2009 01:31AM by The Lopper.
Nobody explains space quite as well as Bill Bryson. An extract from A Short History of Nearly Everything, Chapter II - Welcome to the Solar System
...Space you see, is just enormous - just enormous. Let's imagine, for purposes of edification and entertainment, that we are about to go on a journey by rocketship. We won't go terribly far - just to the edge of our own solar system - but we need to get a fix on how big a place space is and what a small part of it we occupy.
Now the bad news, I'm afraid, is that we won't be home for supper. Even at the speed of light (300,000 kilometres per second) it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But of course we can't travel at anything like that speed. We'll have to go at the speed of a space-ship, and these are rather more lumbering. The best speeds yet achieved by any human object are those of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts, which are flying away from us at about 56,000 kph.
The reason the Voyager craft were launched when they were (in August and September 1977) was that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a 'gravity assist' technique in which the craft were succesively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of crack the whip. Even so, it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto. The good news is that if we wait until January 2006 we can take advantage of favourable Jovian positioning, plus some advances in technology, and get there in only a decade or so - though getting home again will take rather longer, I'm afraid. At all events it's going to be a long trip.
Now, the first thing you are likely to realise is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it - the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets and other miscellaneous drifting detritus - fills less than a trillionth of the available space. You also quickly realise than none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system was drawn remotely to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighbourly intervals - the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations - but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight as Jupiter.
Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of paper, you wouln't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to the size of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away...
...Now, the other thing you will notice as we speed past Pluto is that we are speeding past Pluto. If you check your itinerary, you will see that this is a trip to the edge of our solar system, and I'm afraid we're not there yet. Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom maps, but the system doesn't end there. In fact it isn't even close to ending there. We won't get to the solar system's edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets, and we won't reach the Oort cloud for another - I'm so sorry about this - ten thousand years. Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.
Buy this book!
//Edit: Really should have proof read this for spelling mistakes!
Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2009 01:31AM by The Lopper.
The Lopper schrieb:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Buy this book!
+1 , one of the must reads
used to be GPGSL's Nick Heidfeld
-------------------------------------------------------
> Buy this book!
+1 , one of the must reads
used to be GPGSL's Nick Heidfeld
Postcards from Mars:
The Road Less Travelled: NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity climbed out of "Victoria Crater" following the tracks it had made when it descended into the 800-meter-diameter (half-mile-diameter) bowl nearly a year earlier
The interior of a crater surrounding the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity at Meridiani Planum on Mars can be seen in this color image from the rover's panoramic camera. This is the darkest landing site ever visited by a spacecraft on Mars. The rim of the crater is approximately 10 meters (32 feet) from the rover. The crater is estimated to be 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter.
Sweeping View of the "Columbia Hills" and Gusev Crater taken by rover Spirit
This view was taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on the rover's 87th martian day, or sol (April 1, 2004), just after Spirit left "Bonneville Crater." It shows the terrain to be covered in the trek towards the "Columbia Hills" in the background. Barely visible to the right of the hills is the outline of the distant rim of Gusev Crater.
NASA'S Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this westward view from atop a low plateau where Sprit spent the closing months of 2007.
It really, really makes you want to go there!
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2009 11:23PM by The Lopper.
The Road Less Travelled: NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity climbed out of "Victoria Crater" following the tracks it had made when it descended into the 800-meter-diameter (half-mile-diameter) bowl nearly a year earlier
The interior of a crater surrounding the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity at Meridiani Planum on Mars can be seen in this color image from the rover's panoramic camera. This is the darkest landing site ever visited by a spacecraft on Mars. The rim of the crater is approximately 10 meters (32 feet) from the rover. The crater is estimated to be 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter.
Sweeping View of the "Columbia Hills" and Gusev Crater taken by rover Spirit
This view was taken by the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on the rover's 87th martian day, or sol (April 1, 2004), just after Spirit left "Bonneville Crater." It shows the terrain to be covered in the trek towards the "Columbia Hills" in the background. Barely visible to the right of the hills is the outline of the distant rim of Gusev Crater.
NASA'S Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this westward view from atop a low plateau where Sprit spent the closing months of 2007.
It really, really makes you want to go there!
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2009 11:23PM by The Lopper.
awesome pics
a site with a new astronomy related photo every day:
[antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov]
(the pic loaded when clicking the link is my desktop wallpaper atm)
used to be GPGSL's Nick Heidfeld
a site with a new astronomy related photo every day:
[antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov]
(the pic loaded when clicking the link is my desktop wallpaper atm)
used to be GPGSL's Nick Heidfeld
Found 3 copies of the Bryson book on ebay, see if I can snaffle one.
I read somewhere recently that the Mars NASA pics were faked, that in reality the sky was blue. NASA wouldn't lie to us would they? Would they.....?
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to. [www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Central
I read somewhere recently that the Mars NASA pics were faked, that in reality the sky was blue. NASA wouldn't lie to us would they? Would they.....?
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to.
[www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Central
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to.
[www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 CentralAwesome pic, I think I may rob that for an album cover. 
And that ring of fire pic makes me think of Sauron from LoTR.
Deffo snap up one of those Bryson books. Not just a great read, but an education also.
Now then, compare this so-called "False Colour" photo from Mars with the last one I posted above...I think NASA have been rumbled, the sky is clearly blue.
Any of you guys ever see the Aurora Borealis/Australis? About 4-5 years ago it was really clear over our latitudes, the whole sky was shifting hues of greens,reds and purples. Incredible stuff, truly awe-inspiring. And if that was amazing, I can barely imagine how magnificent it is in the high latitudes.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2009 12:09PM by The Lopper.
And that ring of fire pic makes me think of Sauron from LoTR.Deffo snap up one of those Bryson books. Not just a great read, but an education also.
Now then, compare this so-called "False Colour" photo from Mars with the last one I posted above...I think NASA have been rumbled, the sky is clearly blue.
Any of you guys ever see the Aurora Borealis/Australis? About 4-5 years ago it was really clear over our latitudes, the whole sky was shifting hues of greens,reds and purples. Incredible stuff, truly awe-inspiring. And if that was amazing, I can barely imagine how magnificent it is in the high latitudes.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2009 12:09PM by The Lopper.
The Lopper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Awesome pic, I think I may rob that for an album
> cover. And that ring of fire pic makes me think
> of Sauron from LoTR.
> Deffo snap up one of those Bryson books. Not just
> a great read, but an education also.
>
>
>
> [marsrovers.nasa.gov]
> 080103a/1198865273_31824-1_Sol1369A_WestValley_L25
> 7F_br.jpg
>
> Now then, compare this so-called "False Colour"
> photo from Mars with the last one I posted
> above...I think NASA have been rumbled, the sky is
> clearly blue.
>
>
> Any of you guys ever see the Aurora
> Borealis/Australis? About 4-5 years ago it was
> really clear over our latitudes, the whole sky was
> shifting hues of greens,reds and purples.
> Incredible stuff, truly awe-inspiring. And if that
> was amazing, I can barely imagine how magnificent
> it is in the high latitudes.
Tsk, *all* images from Mars are 'false colour' - the landers send back raw data that has to be compiled into an actual image. The colours are always tarnished by an element of artistic licence - therefore, it's just as likely that this pic has been given more blue than necessary
As for the aurorae - we're at too low a latitude for them, which is annoying
-------------------------------------------------------
> Awesome pic, I think I may rob that for an album
> cover.
And that ring of fire pic makes me think> of Sauron from LoTR.
> Deffo snap up one of those Bryson books. Not just
> a great read, but an education also.
>
>
>
> [marsrovers.nasa.gov]
> 080103a/1198865273_31824-1_Sol1369A_WestValley_L25
> 7F_br.jpg
>
> Now then, compare this so-called "False Colour"
> photo from Mars with the last one I posted
> above...I think NASA have been rumbled, the sky is
> clearly blue.
>
>
> Any of you guys ever see the Aurora
> Borealis/Australis? About 4-5 years ago it was
> really clear over our latitudes, the whole sky was
> shifting hues of greens,reds and purples.
> Incredible stuff, truly awe-inspiring. And if that
> was amazing, I can barely imagine how magnificent
> it is in the high latitudes.
Tsk, *all* images from Mars are 'false colour' - the landers send back raw data that has to be compiled into an actual image. The colours are always tarnished by an element of artistic licence - therefore, it's just as likely that this pic has been given more blue than necessary
As for the aurorae - we're at too low a latitude for them, which is annoying
Sim
All Hail The New York Giants - Winners of Superbowl XXI, XXV and XLII!
"I'd love to know what goes on in that crazy head of yours sometimes, Sim..." - Locke Cole
LOL
I lol'd. +1
Check out this site. [www.spaceweather.com]
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to. [www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Central
Check out this site. [www.spaceweather.com]
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to.
[www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Centraln00binio Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> quality thread
>
> some tributes i stumbeled upon some time ago, to
> honour 14 people who paid the ultimate price
>
> [www.chrisvalentines.com]
> .html (~10 min)
>
> [www.chrisvalentines.com]
> ml (~20 min)
>
> [www.chrisvalentines.com]
> lumbia/index.html (~10 min)
>
> warning: very unfunny
He who binds to himself a joy,
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
William Blake
They braved the greatest depth for all of us. Meanwhile, Earth is growing sick of its wildest child.
-------------------------------------------------------
> quality thread
>
> some tributes i stumbeled upon some time ago, to
> honour 14 people who paid the ultimate price
>
> [www.chrisvalentines.com]
> .html (~10 min)
>
> [www.chrisvalentines.com]
> ml (~20 min)
>
> [www.chrisvalentines.com]
> lumbia/index.html (~10 min)
>
> warning: very unfunny
He who binds to himself a joy,
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
William Blake
They braved the greatest depth for all of us. Meanwhile, Earth is growing sick of its wildest child.
A new sunspot?
[spaceweather.com]
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to. [www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Central
[spaceweather.com]
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to.
[www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 CentralGot my Bill Bryson book today. Sixteen bucks on ebay incl P&P. Sweet!
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to. [www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Central
[www.mediafire.com] Some say you should click it, you know you want to.
[www.gp4central.com] <----GP4 Central
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