This is a photograph — meaning, it’s real — taken from 114 million miles away on the far side of the sun. The brightest little dot in the lower left is the earth. The less bright dot near it is our moon. Click on it: it almost makes you cry.
Astronomy
Abstruse Goose says: The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true. Then he adds: The title text is true. He’s toying with us, isn’t he. Credit: http://abstrusegoose.com/244
On July 28, 2010, nearly 900,000 galaxies were put into a public database, and this is Galaxy #1, or SDSS J000000.41-102225.6, and don’t tell me astronomers don’t know how to name things. Galaxy #1 is probably an elliptical; the rest of the 900,000 are either ellipticals or spirals or something else, and were identified as […]
Remember a month or so ago, when astronomers running NASA’s Kepler satellite announced they’d release the data on 300 possibly earth-like planets but keep the 400 best possibilities proprietary to NASA and announce it all next February? And non-Kepler astronomers, the media, and the internet fussed at the Kepler astronomers for being dogs-in-the-manger? And then […]
BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
As soon as I got over the fainting spell from looking at the Planck satellite’s map – and if you haven’t seen it, look now, faint, and then click – showing the Milky Way, I had a burning question. Okay, true, the Planck satellite wasn’t intended to map the Milky Way. It was supposed to […]
The word, “data” – tables of numbers, incomprehensible graphs — for most of us would make a good sleep aid. For astronomers, though, “data” means a star-sized thing that outshines a galaxy, or a galaxy just being born, or a star that spins in milliseconds. Data for astronomers is a way to survive, a reason […]
Cosmology did it to me again. First it started out by saying that the universe is expanding, but all its mutual gravity pulls against the expansion so the universe is actually slowing down and might just end by being pulled into a cosmic black hole. I thought this sounded a little extreme but it made […]