Strawberry moon last night
Moon and Venus conjunction
Her
My beloved 💜
Rosette Nebula 💫🪐
I’ve been working on editing space images into “space porn”, specifically working with tilt shift. The photos were taken by Hubble but I processed and edited them into what they look like now. I emailed them to my old astro prof who thought they were “ethereal and god damn gorgeous” so I thought I’d post them lol
[triumphant music]
I finally got a picture of Neowise
The victims of the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion likely did not die on initial failure of the rocket, but instead were probably alive and conscious until their fuselage crashed into the ocean some time later. Six astronauts and one civilian schoolteacher died.
The failure was due to malfunctioning O-Rings, a known problem to both NASA and the contractor hired to build the shuttle. Several NASA engineers warned against the launch and were concerned about the integrity of said O-Rings. Several chief engineers, most notably Roger Boisjoly, pleaded for the launch to be rescheduled, but was ignored by the administration.
I’ve been working on editing space images into “space porn”, specifically working with tilt shift. The photos were taken by Hubble but I processed and edited them into what they look like now. I emailed them to my old astro prof who thought they were “ethereal and god damn gorgeous” so I thought I’d post them lol
So some of you asked what kind of videos I would recommend for people who want to just be blown away by how uncomprehendable and weird and amazing the universe is so I made a playlist! It has videos from a bunch of channels and I will add more videos as I find them in the future :)
They’re in no particular order, but the videos that are multi-part videos are organized to play one after another
Photos of Jupiter taken by NASA’s JUNO probe
God I’m so gay for Jupiter
This doesn’t look like much, but these are RR Lyrae variable stars! They’re 10,500 light years way! I took about half of these pictures, and my classmates took the other half. I took the data and ran it through a few Python programs and made them into a gif! The observing period here was unfortunately only about 2 hours, but we got some good data!
The two stars here that are RR Lyrae variable stars are V* BH Peg and V* BG Peg (circled in the image below, BH Peg is the top star and BG Peg is the bottom).
RR Lyrae Variable stars are stars that are nearing the end of their life, and their luminosity changes periodically. There are non-RR Lyrae Variable stars that can have periods of years, or they may fluctuate irregularly.
RR Lyraes are really cool though! RR Lyraes are pulsating aging stars with a mass of around half the Sun’s. They’re thought to have previously shed mass during the Red-Giant Branch phase, and consequently, they were once stars with similar or slightly less mass than the Sun. Because of this, they’re super easy to use to gauge distances in our galaxy and local globular clusters (blobs of stars). But what’s even crazier is that they have periods of between 40 and 0.3 days. That’s super fast, cosmically speaking!
Oh! and the bottom star is an Eclipsing Binary! That means that one blob is actually two stars, and because of our vantage point from earth, they cross in front of each other!
V* BH Peg has a period of 0.6 days, and V* BG Peg has a period of 1.9 days.
It has been over 50 years since we left Earth. We are now almost 14 trillion miles away from home. Out here, where the stars are distant, and faint, is a place no one has ever seen before. The Alpha Centauri system, with its seven planets, the farthest worlds to ever be explored by humankind.
Half a century ago, we left our home in search of another. We had left our planet in waste and ruin. A dark chapter in human history, where we threw away our home. Our only home. We poisoned ourselves, and we drove ourselves to the brink of extinction, over money and resources and power. While some accepted the fate of the human race, a bright young generation of scientists, with the stars in their eyes and the universe in their hearts, led us down the only path we have left. To leave our home. To fight for our right to exist.
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
From an unpublished story of mine by the same name. The basic concept was the story of a generation of kids born on a starship, they never saw Earth, and they won’t live long enough to see their destination. It’s the story of them struggling to find meaning and a purpose. Listen here.
Sometimes I get bored and tilt-shift pictures of space
The Hubble Space telescope just sent back a new photo of the Twin Jet Nebula. Here’s what it looked like in 1997:
And now …
Whoa. But wait, we also got an updated image of the merging galaxies NGC 6240. What it looked like in 2008:
And today:
