It kills me to think that we should already have a research station on the moon; I mean, the space station is cool and all, but we need to start colonizing shit with the quickness. Either that, or we need to start putting contraceptives in the water.
I don't want to embarrass anyone by the fact that my news is more impressive than anything else posted recently, but tonight will be the biggest full moon of 2009. I'll be there with bells on.
I don't want to embarrass anyone by the fact that my news is more impressive than anything else posted recently, but tonight will be the biggest full moon of 2009. I'll be there with bells on.
Good to know. The moon should be up by now, believe I'll bundle up and go for a stroll.
My favorite fact about the moon is that it's bucking for a promotion. A pair of bodies is only classified as a planet/satellite system if the barycenter is within the larger body. If the barycenter outside either body, it's a double planetary system. Since the moon is currently getting about 4 cm further away from us every year, that means eventually it will cease to be a moon and become a planet. Planet Luna. If anyone is reading this on the moon in around ~50 million years, this will be a good time to stage a revolution against your cruel Terran masters.
The history channel show 'the universe' episode on nebulae has a pretty good description of how they do a lot of false colour photos, as I understand it they assign the highest peak of sulfur's emission spectrum to red (it's usually more in infrared), oxygen's to blue, and hydrogen's to green (I have probably got the colours wrong there, but you get the idea)
The history channel show 'the universe' episode on nebulae has a pretty good description of how they do a lot of false colour photos, as I understand it they assign the highest peak of sulfur's emission spectrum to red (it's usually more in infrared), oxygen's to blue, and hydrogen's to green (I have probably got the colours wrong there, but you get the idea)
I'm pretty sure that false color is dependent on where and what is taking the image, I don't think there is any pan-astronomy standard for assigning color values.
Fun fact: neither the Hubble telescope nor the Mars Rovers take "color" photographs. The color images we see are composites assembled through multiple black and white photos taken through color filters.
I don't want to embarrass anyone by the fact that my news is more impressive than anything else posted recently, but tonight will be the biggest full moon of 2009. I'll be there with bells on.
Yeah it was pretty nice looking tonight. It was rather vibrant, which was nice. The details aren't usually that visible, at least from where I see the moon at
Tried taking a photo with my digital camera but the thing is old and a piece of crap. So I took a few shots with my SLR camera which I hope will turn out better. But they probably won't.
Clint EastwoodMy baby's in there someplaceShe crawled right inRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
So there's a guy talking live on CNN's website right now about how they've apparently detected methane in the atmosphere on Mars. Pretty interesting shit.
Clint EastwoodMy baby's in there someplaceShe crawled right inRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
pretty much yeah
I didn't get in at the start of this so I'm not sure exactly what they discovered, they're in a Q/A session at the moment. There's a display that says Mars: An Active Planet on it sooooo
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Clint EastwoodMy baby's in there someplaceShe crawled right inRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
Oh.
They're going to drill under the surface because they suspect there's going to be either a form of water or subsurface life.
Scientists were able to verify the presence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface, find small concentrations of salts that could be nutrients for life, and observe snow descending from the clouds.
That just blows my fucking mind
we are millions of miles away watching it fucking snow on an alien planet
So, science-y question. Back on page 14, a picture of Jupiter was posted that made me curious. What exactly is it that makes the different gas colorations almost completely horizontal, even to the point where there are actually nearly perfect lines all across the atmosphere? You've got a few exceptions in the Eye and its smaller fellows that dot across the "surface," but even these tend to be squeezed horizontally.
My first thought was "duh, it's the rotation, you moron." But then I thought that while Earth's own clouds tend towards being much longer horizontally than vertically, they still don't ever line up nearly as perfect as Jupiter's gaseous makeup can.
You probably can't really compare a solid planet to one made up of gas. I would assume the gas on Jupiter stays around for much longer than Earth's and has more of a chance to be affected by the rotation than our own clouds. But I'm thinking it might also have to do with Jupiter's much larger mass. I was just curious if anyone had more definite facts than just assumptions pulled largely from my ass.
think of them as very powerful and very long term jet streams
edit: Scarab also makes an excellent point
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
Keep in mind that Jupiter is also rotating way, way faster than Earth. The Jovian day is only about ten hours long. Factor in the sheer size of the thing, and the rate of rotation at the equator is nearly thirty times that of Earth. That creates a huge amount of torsion on a very deep atmosphere.
The truth is, though, that we really don't know much about Jupiter. We're pretty sure that the belts we see are the result of alternating high-level and low-level systems that feed into one another, but the fact that we still haven't developed a really good turbulence model mathematically means that we don't have any way to model Jupiter's atmosphere short of dropping scads of probes into the mix and seeing what happens. And that's going to be expensive and probably an unpopular idea until we're really sure that there's no life in the atmosphere that we're going to be contaminating.
I'd be really surprised if a significant number of scientists or the public expressed concerns about contaminating/harming possible life forms on Jupiter simply from sending in probes
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
:winky:
tDru: Yeah, you're probably right. After all, we just burned a probe in Jupiter's atmosphere to avoid contaminating possible life on Europa. Still, a boy can dream.
If every picture tells a story, this one might make a novel. The six month long exposure compresses the time from December 17, 2007 to June 21, 2008 into a single point of view. Dubbed a solargraph, the remarkable image was recorded with a simple pinhole camera made from a drink can lined with a piece of photographic paper.
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It kills me to think that we should already have a research station on the moon; I mean, the space station is cool and all, but we need to start colonizing shit with the quickness. Either that, or we need to start putting contraceptives in the water.
It was only the planet Venus.
Our sunsets are better, take that Mars!
the paranoid lunatic in me says no
no we do not
See, some light, uh, reflected off... offa Venus
into some swamp gas
using that as my cell phone background since forever, just love it
Good to know. The moon should be up by now, believe I'll bundle up and go for a stroll.
My favorite fact about the moon is that it's bucking for a promotion. A pair of bodies is only classified as a planet/satellite system if the barycenter is within the larger body. If the barycenter outside either body, it's a double planetary system. Since the moon is currently getting about 4 cm further away from us every year, that means eventually it will cease to be a moon and become a planet. Planet Luna. If anyone is reading this on the moon in around ~50 million years, this will be a good time to stage a revolution against your cruel Terran masters.
eventually writers looking for inspiration will go to mars instead of alaska
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
I'm pretty sure that false color is dependent on where and what is taking the image, I don't think there is any pan-astronomy standard for assigning color values.
Fun fact: neither the Hubble telescope nor the Mars Rovers take "color" photographs. The color images we see are composites assembled through multiple black and white photos taken through color filters.
steam
Yeah it was pretty nice looking tonight. It was rather vibrant, which was nice. The details aren't usually that visible, at least from where I see the moon at
steam
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
I didn't get in at the start of this so I'm not sure exactly what they discovered, they're in a Q/A session at the moment. There's a display that says Mars: An Active Planet on it sooooo
They're going to drill under the surface because they suspect there's going to be either a form of water or subsurface life.
Several kilometers.
All the way down.
That's... mind-buggering.
That just blows my fucking mind
we are millions of miles away watching it fucking snow on an alien planet
...or is it :winky:
My first thought was "duh, it's the rotation, you moron." But then I thought that while Earth's own clouds tend towards being much longer horizontally than vertically, they still don't ever line up nearly as perfect as Jupiter's gaseous makeup can.
You probably can't really compare a solid planet to one made up of gas. I would assume the gas on Jupiter stays around for much longer than Earth's and has more of a chance to be affected by the rotation than our own clouds. But I'm thinking it might also have to do with Jupiter's much larger mass. I was just curious if anyone had more definite facts than just assumptions pulled largely from my ass.
edit: Scarab also makes an excellent point
The truth is, though, that we really don't know much about Jupiter. We're pretty sure that the belts we see are the result of alternating high-level and low-level systems that feed into one another, but the fact that we still haven't developed a really good turbulence model mathematically means that we don't have any way to model Jupiter's atmosphere short of dropping scads of probes into the mix and seeing what happens. And that's going to be expensive and probably an unpopular idea until we're really sure that there's no life in the atmosphere that we're going to be contaminating.
tDru: Yeah, you're probably right. After all, we just burned a probe in Jupiter's atmosphere to avoid contaminating possible life on Europa. Still, a boy can dream.