Once in a
blue moon. Not only will the full moon on Halloween be the first in 40(i think) and the last for another 19 years, it is also a 'blue moon' which means that the moon is full
twice in the same month. Notwithstanding any MeFi visitors from
Detroit, are you feeling strange yet?
posted by donkeysuck
on Oct 30, 2001 -
25 comments
Reflections on a Mote of Dust "We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."
Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot"
posted by crasspastor
on Sep 11, 2001 -
15 comments
Did the Viking landers find life on Mars 25 years ago? Some scientists think so. I have too much faith in planetary scientists and
the newly minted field of exobiology, to believe this is a just a ploy to
rekindle waning public interest in space exploration. I think this is
genuine 20/20 hindsight coupled with better scientific understandings of life
existing in the extreme hinterlands of possibility. . .
posted by crasspastor
on Jul 30, 2001 -
29 comments
So maybe rolling blackouts are a good thing. "Light pollution" means we don't see the universe today that we saw it when we were kids. What's the balance between being able to see that hazy something we know as the milky way (aka "us") and safe streets, aesthetics and convenience?
posted by dchase
on Jul 14, 2001 -
9 comments
$145 million in a search for evidence of Big Bangs! So far the popular vote indicates most are in favor of the spending--whatever the cnn data is worth. Am I the only one who'd prefer it spent on my undergrad work, or even biosciences research?
posted by greyscale
on Jul 1, 2001 -
21 comments
Barbecue Wings A £900,000 mirror sculpture destined for a square in Nottingham, UK, will have to be shielded to prevent it focusing the Sun's rays and barbecuing passing birds.
Anish Kapoor's highly polished concave steel mirror is six metres in diameter. Direct sunlight hitting the mirror would be focused into a narrow beam of light as hot as the surface of the Sun, says astronomer Michael Merrifield of Nottingham University.
posted by zeoslap
on Mar 7, 2001 -
15 comments
It's official. There was life on Mars!!! "I am convinced that this is supporting evidence for the presence of ancient life on Mars,'' said Kathie Thomas-Keprta, an astrobiologist at the space center and the first author of a study appearing Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
posted by zeoslap
on Feb 26, 2001 -
12 comments
This picture of the Space Shuttle and the ray of "shadow" from the moon is pretty cool. I even think I buy the explanation.
posted by aflakete
on Feb 19, 2001 -
15 comments
NEAR shoemaker lands and survives. The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on a barren space rock called Eros on Monday, in history’s first attempt to land an object on an asteroid. Scientists said the probe still appeared to be sending signals back to Earth after making contact, hinting that the car-sized probe survived the descent. The speed at impact was between 1.5-1.8 m/s. This marks the first time that a US spacecraft was the first to land on another body of the solar system. And, if the server is back up, it's worth checking out
the project's website.
posted by warhol
on Feb 12, 2001 -
11 comments
Space U-Haul Atlantis on its way. Atlantis is climbing orbit to reach Alpha carrying with it the Destiny module for Space Station Freedom. The module only has 2 inches of clearance from the shuttle itself and will take one hell of a can opener to get it out.
posted by Brilliantcrank
on Feb 8, 2001 -
9 comments
New career option! Be slave worker on the Martian surface! This is pretty cool, actually. It's an internet based pilot study run by NASA to identify and classify all of the craters on the surface of Mars. This is a big job. All you need is a IE 5 or Netscape 6 web browser. Since its inception on November 17, web users combined have contributed 111,938 crater-markings and 26,877 crater-classification.
posted by lagado
on Jan 9, 2001 -
2 comments
Water found on Jupiter moon "After months and months of wrestling with the data ... we believe there is very strong evidence of a layer of melted water beneath Ganymede's icy surface," said Margaret Kivelson, a space physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
posted by owillis
on Dec 17, 2000 -
9 comments
The World at Night. This amazing
image (warning 500K) is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures made by the orbiting DMSP satellites over regions of the world at night. You can clearly see the Nile river, Hong Kong, Hawaii and probably, if you look close enough, the town you are in right now. From
Astronomy Picture of the Day
posted by lagado
on Nov 27, 2000 -
18 comments
Astronomers are looking at the
biggest sunspot in nine years, but what's a lay-person to do?
Slashdot posters recommend projecting the sun's image onto cardboard through reversed binoculars, or just looking at the sun in the morning or evening when it doesn't hurt so bad. By clicking anywhere on the screen you agree not to hold me responsible for stupid things you do that damage your eyes.
posted by sudama
on Sep 24, 2000 -
1 comment
This reminded me of one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. Once on vacation in Eastern Oregon, there was a total eclipse of the moon, just like this one. And some people nearby were taking photographs of it.
Flash photographs. The round-trip time to the moon at the speed of light is 3 seconds and I wouldn't even want to calculate the attenuation caused by 320,000 miles of range.
Sometimes it seems as if some people are completely and totally clueless about what they're doing.
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Jul 25, 2000 -
12 comments
It's nice to know that people can still have big dreams. This is not hallucination; these guys are very serious and very practical and their credentials suggest that they know exactly what they're doing. It's the same team which is just finishing the
Very Large Telescope project, which
when complete will be the biggest scope in the world, and will be more sensitive and get better pictures than the Hubble. Scopes #1 and #2 are now online, #3 is in engineering shakeout, and first light for #4 is coming shortly.
All four scopes will work together to generate images using interferometry.
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Jun 17, 2000 -
2 comments
Speaking of retrotech, the latest group of space shuttle jockies just
upgraded the Hubble to a rockin' Intel 486 chip, replacing the apparently inadequate 386 that previously provided the brains to the wobbly eye in the sky.
posted by grant
on Dec 28, 1999 -
0 comments
A Mars Lander is set to touch down on Mars sometime between December 1st and December 20th of this year. Keep your eyes peeled on this mars site, it will be the primary location of new information about the mission. I doubt if they find water on Mars though...
posted by mathowie
on Nov 16, 1999 -
0 comments
We are not alone.... a new planet outside of our solar system was found today. It's only a matter of time before the little green men come down to greet us.
posted by mathowie
on Nov 13, 1999 -
0 comments
