astronomy

conditional_soup, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu) w Friday Night Stargazing 2025-03-07

Follow up:

Got moved to tonight at my spouse’s request, didn’t get out until 2100.

Seeing was good, not the clearest I’ve seen, but not bad. The stars seemed overall dimmer than usual, but not shimmering or twinkling. Light pollution was definitely slapping though

What I managed (using 12" f5 dob, 30mm wide field eyepiece in 2x Barlow):

M65 and M66. Took me two or three tries to starhop to them. I did not manage to visualize NGC 3628, but m65 and M66 appeared as vague foggy shadows, oval in shape, both tilted to point upper left and lower right, the right above the left. Very difficult to visualize directly, almost had to visualize exclusively via averted gaze.

Bode’s Galaxy: this involved more dumb luck than I’d like to admit. I tried to starhop here by using the bear’s neck stars to form a pointer to a dimmer bunching of stars that would point to the galaxy. I tried probably four different times until I got on the same group of stars and slewed a bit right and maybe a degree down. Bode’s Galaxy has a more circular appearance than 65 and 66, the core is brighter, and it’s beefy enough to tolerate direct gaze. Still a faint fuzzy, but it left me in less doubt about whether I was just imagining it.

What I missed:

• Jupiter, Rosette Nebula, everything in Canis Major, Orion, Gemini, and Monoceros: just didn’t get out in time and my views got blocked =(
• NGC 2419: The moon stole the show here, unfortunately. It wasn’t directly blocking my view, but it was bright enough to wash out my view in this area
• M97 and M108: Tried maybe six different times and got nowhere fast. Not sure why, but trying to star hop here just showed me a bunch of fairly unremarkable stars and that’s all. Maybe I needed higher magnification?

remotelove, 9 miesięcy temu w Juno reveals dozens of lava lakes on Jupiter’s moon Io

Factorio players rejoice.

PixTupy, 9 miesięcy temu w Juno reveals dozens of lava lakes on Jupiter’s moon Io

I read lava cakes and was very confused for a second.

neuracnu, 9 miesięcy temu w Juno reveals dozens of lava lakes on Jupiter’s moon Io

I’d love to have been in the room when Galileo sent back its first images of Io back in the day. The collective “wtf am I looking at?” reaction would be priceless.

mindbleach, 9 miesięcy temu w White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent

Get rid of Elmo.

muhyb, 9 miesięcy temu w White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent

That should help to put a flag on Mars.

gravitas_deficiency, 9 miesięcy temu w White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent

Wow, the government agency with literally the best long term ROI by an order of magnitude is getting its budget cut. Cool cool cool.

derzeppo, 9 miesięcy temu

Well the IRS is about the same at $7 revenue per $1 spent, but yeah.

disguy_ovahea, 9 miesięcy temu

National parks have a 10:1 ROI.

npca.org/…/832-background-the-economics-of-nation…

BigMacHole, 9 miesięcy temu w White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent

Woah! We just found a FREE half of Nasa’s Budget not being used! We should GIVE IT to President Elon Musk!

Rhaedas, 9 miesięcy temu w NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument, More Power Cuts Ahead to Keep Both Probes Going

Flyby: The Interplanetary Odyssey of Voyager 2 - Joel Davis (1987)

Lots of behind the scenes stuff of innovation, discovery, and making adjustments for things that went wrong.

HylicManoeuvre, 9 miesięcy temu w NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument, More Power Cuts Ahead to Keep Both Probes Going

Oh noo I’m literally using Voyager to browse Lemmy

dmtalon, 9 miesięcy temu w NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument, More Power Cuts Ahead to Keep Both Probes Going

everything about these two spacecraft is just amazing. It’s going to be quite a sad day when they transmit their last byte of data to our little planet. Reading about all the things we’ve done to keep talking to them. The redundancies that they’re running on etc… Fascinating stuff

earphone843, 9 miesięcy temu w NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument, More Power Cuts Ahead to Keep Both Probes Going

It’s really fucking wild that they can still operate at all.

Olgratin_Magmatoe, 9 miesięcy temu

And there’s a second layer of it being wild that we can even communicate with them, despite being outside of the solar system.

MrFappy, 9 miesięcy temu w X-ray Signal Points to Destroyed Planet, Chandra Finds

What if the planet used to have intelligent life but they blew themselves up accidentally.

Enkers, 9 miesięcy temu

It would be interesting if the answer to the Fermi paradox was that every advanced lifeform accidentally blows themselves up.

chowdertailz, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s the Great Filter. Basically, no intelligent life can survive past a certain point because they end up offing themselves. Pretty much what we’re about to do ourselves.

LordTrychon, 9 miesięcy temu

It doesn’t HAVE to be that intelligent life is its own doom, but it does seem increasingly likely.

Enkers, 9 miesięcy temu

There are other explanations, ofc. Maybe there’s a galactic moratorium on contacting new space faring civilisations.

If you’re willing to discard the conclusion that we’re an early civilisation, then it’s reasonable to think that old civilisations have had plenty of time to decide whether or not to contact us.

There are quite a few different takeaways you could draw from that. My personal favourite is that they want to recreate the “early universe” experience for us because it’s an important process for civilisations to go through.

rimu, 9 miesięcy temu w The Telescope Images Scientists Have Been Waiting 12 Years For | Euclid

Holy shit that Horsehead nebula shot 15:00 is insane

CluckN, 9 miesięcy temu w Controllers getting no response from Lunar Trailblazer orbiter or Odin asteroid mining probe

Let them enjoy their lunch break in peace.