That header photo doesn’t do the dragon justice. (For shame!). Here’s NASA’s own photo:
(Source [Because NASA is funded by taxpayer money, all their images are public domain, BTW])
THE TIME HAS COME
C-can we come back to the hole in the sun bit
nah, imma just enjoy the absinthe in the sky with diamonds
I mean… aurora borealis is caused by solar radiation interacting with the magnetosphere where it bends toward the earth at the poles. The most spectacular displays are caused by a solar mass ejection, which is the sun flinging off a bunch of itself. This process doesn’t exactly leave a hole, per se, but it does come from a sunspot, which looks like a hole.
So, in a way that bends the use of language nearly to the breaking point, yes, the green dragon did come from a “hole” in the sun.
The full rotation of the Moon as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
It’s so beautiful and amazing that we live at a moment in time when we can see the entire moon, and not just the side that’s tidally-locked toward the Earth.
KIRK IS HOLDING A ZINNIA. THE SAME FUCKING FLOWER.
FUCKING NASA MAN
No. Nononono. You don’t understand.
I am so mad about this. Like, not like I wanna kill someone, but mad, as in, hysterical?
They wanted to answer questions about plants in space, right? How biology and botany would work in space. Because then who knows? We could grow crops in space, or fix the atmosphere. Or create the perfect biome for plants that are now extinct. Who fucking knows, right?
They could have taken a food crop. Wheat, maybe. Or rice. Something they could observe to see if it would be possible to solve a food shortage or whatever. Maybe a small apple tree to see if it would bloom, and then see if there could be a way to make it fruit.
Or, you know, go the genetics route and take a sweet pea. See if zero gravity does anything to how genes are passed on. Mendel did it in a shed, why not a tin shed in outer space, right? Oh the possibilities.
Was it so wrong to take the zinnia? No, of course not. In my little horticultural brain, I thought, oh how lovely! A splash of colour in the emptiness of space. Something bright and cheerful, something that gives hope. That must have been it, right?
But no.
SOMEONE went, “Nah, mate, here’s an episode of Star Trek where Kirk is holding a ZINNIA in a SPACE DESERT.”
I could scream. I don’t know if I love or hate these fucking nerds. Oh my gods.
has taught us there are so many planets out there, they outnumber even
the stars. Here is a sample of these wondrous, weird and unexpected worlds (and
other spectacular objects in space) that Kepler has spotted with its “eye” opened to the heavens.
Kepler has found that double sunsets
really do exist.
Yes, Star Wars fans, the double sunset on Tatooine could really exist.
Kepler discovered the first known planet around a double-star system, though
Kepler-16b is probably a gas giant without a solid surface.
Kepler has gotten us closer to finding
planets like Earth.
Nope. Kepler hasn’t found Earth 2.0, and that wasn’t the job it set out
to do. But in its survey of hundreds of thousands of stars, Kepler found planets
near in size to Earth orbiting at a distance where liquid water could pool on
the surface. One of them, Kepler-62f, is about 40 percent bigger than Earth and
is likely rocky. Is there life on any of them? We still have a lot more to
learn.
This sizzling world is so hot iron would
melt!
One of Kepler’s early discoveries was the small, scorched world of
With a year that lasts less than an Earth day and density high enough to
imply it’s probably made of iron and rock, this “lava world” gave us the first
solid evidence of a rocky planet outside our solar system.
If it’s not an alien megastructure, what
is this oddly fluctuating star?
When Kepler detected the oddly fluctuating light from
were born 11 billion years ago when our galaxy was in its youth. Imagine
what these ancient planets look like after all that time?
Kepler found a supernova exploding at
breakneck speed.
This premier planet hunter has also been watching stars explode. Kepler
recorded a sped-up version of a supernova called a
“fast-evolving
luminescent transit” that reached its peak brightness at breakneck
speed. It was caused by a star spewing out a dense shell of gas that lit up
when hit with the shockwave from the blast.
NASA created retro travel posters for different locations in our solar system in hopes of inspiring young people to imagine a future where common space travel is a possibility.
M42: The Great Orion Nebula : Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary structures visible in the featured image are actually shock waves – fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The featured image, taken last month, shows a two-hour exposure of the nebula in three colors. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years. via NASA
