This is just something that’s really cool. It’s called LightSail, and is a really amazing idea about moving through space… by light. It’s a video from the Planetary Society (I’m a member). I love this idea so much. Today is gonna be a day for science, I think…
*opens door* *dusts off cobwebs*
Time to get this started back up, too. And I’m doing that with this ridiculously amazing image. Now… I absolutely had to start this series off with that incredible image of Saturn, but this honestly should have been the next one. Not making this the very next picture was a mistake. But I’m making up for that now…
This is it right here. The oldest light we can see. The baby visible universe. The best evidence for, and the afterglow of, the Big Bang. The Cosmic Microwave Background.
This image is compiled from data collected by PLANCK. If you click on it, it will download a high resolution, 20.70mb TIFF of this same image. Here’s a link to see WMAP’s image, compiled from nine years of WMAP Data.
The Cosmic Microwave Background, as seen by PLANCK.
So I recently made three posts about my disappointment in Wikileaks and it’s fans. I am still angry about how they have been acting over this most recent presidential election. As Marcus Ranum noted, what I’m experiencing is the realization that Wikileaks was never an organization for good, but a vanity project by Julian Assange to boost his own ego; and that it was Assange and another hacker, Adrian Lamo, who threw Chelsea Manning under the bus.
Marcus wrote an incredible post about all this, drawing from his own first-hand experience with such hackers. I’ll quote the bit about what happened to Chelsea Manning here. But please, go and read the entire thing. It’s a long read, yes, but it’s very good, and deserves your full attention.
This is just a picture of a really pretty galaxy cluster called MACS J0717. Enjoy!
Galaxy Cluster MACS J0717 in Infrared
Late yet again… sorry…
This one is really cool. It’s currently the most massive known structure in our observable universe, measuring 10 billion lightyears in diameter. Sorry I can’t get y’all a better link than Wikipedia. I can’t find anything at Nasa.gov or Hubblesite.org, which is annoying but… what’re ya’ gonna do?
Hubble image of MACS J0717 with mass overlay (Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall)
Finding a link with a .tiff file for this one has been… hard… but it’s still really cool.
This is NOT an artist’s rendering. This is a direct image of an exoplanet, Beta Pictoris B:
Beta Pictoris B orbiting its star
Beta Pictoris, the star, is the large, blurred out circle in the middle. Beta Pictoris B is the small, light, pixelated circle at the bottom right of the star.
How cool is this?
Woops! Sorry for the late post. Almost forgot about this series… heh…
Anyways… here’s a really cool picture of the galaxy M64. It’s really pretty, IMO…
Dust Band Around the Nucleus of Black Eye Galaxy M64
As promised, here’s Charon. I went with this photo because it’s something interesting to think about.
Pluto’s ‘Hulk-like’ Moon Charon: A Possible Ancient Ocean?
What, you thought I wouldn’t include Pluto? No, it’s not my favorite planet, but New Horizons’ mission there was awesome, and this is one of the many reasons why.
And yes, next week will be Charon.
Pluto’s Colorful Composition
