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Cometary Globules

Had this been 2002, this moment would have been mind blowing!

Mostly because I would be posting a photo on a website that wasn’t around, from a phone technology that didn’t exist yet! I wish I had means of seeing what was on their VHS tapes…

“The images we see can only be “beautiful” or “real-looking” because they have been heavily processed, either by neural machinery or by code (in which case, both), operating below our threshold of consciousness. In the case of the software, this processing relies on norms and aesthetic judgments on the part of software engineers, so they are also unacknowledged collaborators in the image-making. There’s no such thing as a natural image; perhaps, too, there’s nothing especially artificial about the camera.” art in the age of machine intelligence — Artists and Machine Intelligence — Medium https://medium.com/artists-and-machine-intelligence/what-is-ami-ccd936394a83

(via mikerugnetta)

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager 1 

At about 89,000 miles in diameter, Jupiter could swallow 1,000 Earths. It is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet’s atmosphere. Such winds sustain spinning anticyclones like the Great Red Spot – a raging storm three and a half times the size of Earth at the time of this photo, located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. In January and February 1979, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft zoomed toward Jupiter, capturing hundreds of images during its approach, including this close-up of swirling clouds around Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

great concept art piece by Neil Blevins

People forget that “within the habitable zone” means habitable for us and ‘life as we know it.’

Being that we are completely unfamiliar with life and science outside of what we’ve encountered, it is entirely possible for 'life as we don’t yet know it’ to exist outside of what we personally consider a habitable zone.

Nasa astronomers discover new solar system of seven planets called TRAPPIST-1 where life may have evolved on three of them

Life may have evolved on at least three planets in a newly discovered solar system just 39 light years from Earth, Nasa has announced.​

Astronomers have detected no less than seven Earth-sized worlds orbiting a cool dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1.

TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star that is approximately 8 per cent the mass of and 11 per cent the radius of our  Sun.

It has a temperature of 2550K and is at least 500 million years old. In comparison, the Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and has a temperature of 5778K.

The six inner planets lie in a temperate zone where surface temperatures range from zero to 100C.

Of these, at least three are thought to be capable of having oceans, increasing the likelihood of life.

No other star system known contains such a large number of Earth-sized and probably rocky planets.

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Ham Radio and Equipment Operator at Short Creek

New day, new series of photos. I’m going to try to blog about the planets of the Solar System; First up is Mercury, which is the smallest and innermost planet. With a diameter ~4878km, it is smaller than some of the moons in the Solar System. The small planet in a 3:2 resonance with the sun, giving it a unique position where a single day takes 2 Mercurian years. It has the smallest tilt of any planet in the Solar System at just 1/30 of a degree.

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