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I know we had a thread that is currently sitting on page 4 with a few posts about one of our probes that has had a few posts, but I figured that NASA (and ESA & others) is probing around so much that maybe we can have a general "cool pictures/videos from space" thread. I thought that we might have had one already at some point, but I couldn't find it.
But to start us off here is a collection of 5-years worth of pictures from the probe monitoring our sun:
It's pretty awesome to live in this age. I used to wonder as a child what the sun actually looked like under that light. I remember how shocked I was when they first released pictures from that probe.
Nasa's New Horizon Probe is still a few month away from Pluto (closest approach in mid July) and while not as detailed as the stunning images of our sun it did send home some cool pictures:
where you can see the movement of both Pluto and Charon around their combined center of mass. Those images were taken around 200 million km away from Pluto and i expect porn quality pictures in the coming months
d, you have some killer night time photos you took out in the deserts of Arizona if I remember correctly. This would be a good thread to share them anew, I think.
It would be a good contrast to what we see here on the surface and what the probes are giving us
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"...he could never understand the sense of a contest in which the two adversaries agreed upon the rules." Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Now that I started this thread I will have to create a news alert for space pictures to keep it updated
NASA used a new processing tool to release clearer pictures of Titan from the Cassini space probe:
Relapse wrote: d, you have some killer night time photos you took out in the deserts of Arizona if I remember correctly. This would be a good thread to share them anew, I think.
It would be a good contrast to what we see here on the surface and what the probes are giving us
Most my stuff is just stars (and sometimes the moon) streaking across the sky, so I don't want to drag the thread off-topic with that. They do remind me that we are sitting on a chunk of rock that is spinning around itself while spinning around in circles while being hurled through space.
But here is one picture for the demanding audience just so people can see what Relapse was referring to:
Spoiler:
(which reminds me that I need to update the website, add new pictures that I have shot, and get of my rear and shoot some more )
Ratius wrote: No "real" images in this one but I posted it before for a real wtf moment in terms of our universe and its differing scales.
Cant recommend it enough
Ratius wrote: No "real" images in this one but I posted it before for a real wtf moment in terms of our universe and its differing scales.
Cant recommend it enough
That is really cool. Kind of surprised that the human scale stuff was closer to the size of the observable universe than to the size of the smallest objects physically possible. Also the many orders of magnitude between "smallest stuff" and "actual stuff we know about" was pretty surprising. I guess I got more impressed by the - side of that scale.
Anyway, here's my contribution to the thread. It's not so recent, but I always find the surface of the Sun to be a source of some of the more interesting space pictures.
Like watching other people play video games (badly) while blathering about nothing in particular? Check out my Youtube channel: joemamaUSA!
BrianDavion wrote: Between the two of us... I think GW is assuming we the players are not complete idiots.
Rapidly on path to becoming the world's youngest bitter old man.
Ratius wrote: No "real" images in this one but I posted it before for a real wtf moment in terms of our universe and its differing scales.
Cant recommend it enough
That was beautiful! I think most people don't realize just how mind bogglingly vast the Universe is. Hell, I can't really internalize the concept.
Thought for the day: Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
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1500 pts
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This is the picture I use as the background on my work computer. It's an old picture from the hubble telescope and shows the moon Io crossing Jupiter and casting an eclipse.
Ratius wrote: No "real" images in this one but I posted it before for a real wtf moment in terms of our universe and its differing scales.
Cant recommend it enough
That was beautiful! I think most people don't realize just how mind bogglingly vast the Universe is. Hell, I can't really internalize the concept.
Those videos are definitely pretty cool, but they over-emphasize how large some of the largest stars and galaxies are compared to the Sun and the Galaxy.
There certainly are stars far larger than the Sun, but our star is larger than 80% of the stars in the universe and not really "average" in any sense of the word. The same goes with the Galaxy: sure, we know of ones that are larger (even one in the Local Group), but the Milky Way is still one of the largest known galaxies and easily in the top 10% as far as size goes.
d-usa wrote: "When the Internet sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending posters that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing strawmen. They're bringing spam. They're trolls. And some, I assume, are good people."
To get to the good part you need to click on "Enter Orion arm" and then "Enter sector 000". But then you get a 3D map of all surrounding stars for about 800 parsecs (at least known stars). I have seen these kind of maps before, but this one just feels way more immersive. Perhaps because of the "real sized objects" feature, which oddly isn't anything like real sized, but it gives you a much better feeling as to which stars are the most prominent in each sector. You can find many of the well known bright stars in nearby sectors. Vega, Capella Arcturus and Aldebaran are all hanging out quite near and are all like "woah!". You have to use the search feature to find more distant stars. I recommend taking a trip to sector -10,-6, 6, after you've had a look around the local sectors. Stars like Rigel and Betelgeuse are a long way out, but they are seriously beasts.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/02/24 05:55:40
d-usa wrote: "When the Internet sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending posters that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing strawmen. They're bringing spam. They're trolls. And some, I assume, are good people."
Expedition 42 Astronaut Terry Virts aboard the ISS while passing over Leonard Nimoy's hometown of Boston, MA.
d-usa wrote: "When the Internet sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending posters that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing strawmen. They're bringing spam. They're trolls. And some, I assume, are good people."
)
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