Space In General

www.bbc.com

8 Ursae Minoris b: Scientists unlock mystery of planet that escaped death

A planet that should have been eaten by a huge star has baffled scientists until now.
www.bbc.com

www.bbc.com

Scientists pick up shock waves from colliding galaxies

Astronomers may have picked up the first signals from giant black holes spiralling in on each other.
www.bbc.com

www.bbc.com

James Webb telescope: Icy moon Enceladus spews massive water plume

Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn, throws a geyser of water 9,000km (6,000 miles) into space.
www.bbc.com

Just a reminder that all kinds of crazy stuff that we should be studying is still happening out in the universe.
 
www.bbc.com

Euclid: Europe's 'dark explorer' telescope launches

The Euclid mission will make an immense 3D map of the cosmos to uncover its biggest secrets.
www.bbc.com

It really is amazing how in my lifetime we've gone from "hey, we can take really good pictures of things in other parts of the solar system" to "we're going to literally map out the universe to better understand this unseeable material that's basically shoving the entire cosmos around".
 
James Webb telescope found a question mark in space.

049f3200-361c-11ee-91d7-02b7b76bf47f.jpg


It is probably a distant galaxy, or potentially interacting galaxies (their interactions may have caused the distorted question mark-shape).

www.space.com

James Webb Space Telescope spies giant cosmic question mark in deep space (photo)

When looking for answers in the cosmos, sometimes more questions appear.
www.space.com www.space.com
 
It's more scary to me to know and think about that our sun alone makes 99,86% of all the mass of our solar system! :D
 
I only just learned about the concept of using the Sun's gravitational lensing as a telescope:

en.wikipedia.org

Solar gravitational lens - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

A telescope of this kind, which is actually feasible to construct, would be able to view distant plants so clearly that you could make out oceans and mountains on the surface.

Edit:
www.nasa.gov

Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravitational Lens Mission - NASA

2020 Phase I, II, and III Selections
www.nasa.gov www.nasa.gov

www.forbes.com

Radical New Space Observatory Would Gravitationally Lens Exoearths

Revolutionary solar sail telescope would use gravitational lensing in a way that could offer astronomers the best possible look at exoearths.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com

That article says $520M. Are you friggin kidding me right now? This mission costs as much as a SINGLE shuttle launch? We launched the shuttle once just to look at the tiles and land it!!! An exoplanet viewing, largest telescope ever made, costs peanuts! Elon is looking at spending many times that just to buy a company because he likes the letter X!
 
Last edited:
Luna 25 has succeeded in landing via lithobraking on the moon. I don't know why people are complaining!
 
Last edited:
This is the closest thread i can find for "Moon Landing"............. yes, that old chestnut. and of course its in the news again, looks like the 60`s version was better, if it did happen. ive seen those youtube vids about wires/no stars/background inconsistencies etc etc . but here's one ive often wondered about .............The Moon has approx 20% of the earths gravity, so how come when the`re driving that buggy around, all the dirt etc falls right back down to the ground ala earth-stylie ?.........and no dust ! .we had a wall plastered some time back & the dust was everywhere & hung in the air like crazy, .......Ok we got an atmosphere, but 20% gravity & no dust & things hanging round more ???

answers on a postcard 🌝
 
Last edited:
Bazool
Ok we got an atmosphere, but 20% gravity & no dust & things hanging round more ???
Click to expand...

Notice how things take longer to fall under water than they do in the air? That's because water is a thousand times thicker than air. The atmosphere on the moon is 10 trillion times thinner than air - things wall fall more slowly on the moon because the acceleration due to gravity is less, but there's almost literally nothing slowing them down when they fall.
 
Bazool
This is the closest thread i can find for "Moon Landing"............. yes, that old chestnut. and of course its in the news again, looks like the 60`s version was better, if it did happen. ive seen those youtube vids about wires/no stars/background inconsistencies etc etc . but here's one ive often wondered about .............The Moon has approx 20% of the earths gravity, so how come when the`re driving that buggy around, all the dirt etc falls right back down to the ground ala earth-stylie ?.........and no dust ! .we had a wall plastered some time back & the dust was everywhere & hung in the air like crazy, .......Ok we got an atmosphere, but 20% gravity & no dust & things hanging round more ???

answers on a postcard 🌝
Click to expand...
OK, I'll bite. The "if it did happen" has already lost you all actual respect on my part, which is the limit of how far I'll take it, keeping the AUP in mind, and the prohibition against actually being offensive in how a user is addressed. Especially since I lived through the event and remember staying up in my room to watch it live.

By "no dust" I assume you mean no clouds of dust, like you'd see behind a dirt bike out on the Baja or somewhere. Then you almost answered it yourself. With no atmosphere, there's nothing to suspend the dust. The dust cloud you see behind vehicles on a dirt road hangs in the air, precisely because there is air; with no air, the dust from the moon buggy's wheels simply responds to gravity and falls right back down. There can be no cloud of dust because there is no medium in which it can be suspended.

For no stars, that's actually 100% expected. Not just for pictures from the moon or from orbit. Take your phone outside tonight and take a picture of a well-lit street. Then look in the sky of that picture and see how many stars appear. The stars simply aren't bright enough to show in photographs, unless they are the only thing in the photograph. The Apollo space suits had those gold visors because the surface of the sunlit moon is brighter than anyplace you could find on Earth; brighter than a day at the beach, brighter than a day in the mountains with snow on the ground all around you. There is no possible way to capture the dim light of the stars against that field of full sunlight, even though the sky is black. The points of light simply aren't bright enough to register in the fraction of a second that the camera's shutter is open.

Aw, heck, I'll just show you with one of my own pictures. This is from a night air show, lots of pyrotechnics, under an absolutely clear sky, very flashy. But OMG, no STARS!!!! So it's obviously 100% fake. There was never any air show, this must be CGI. :rolleyes:
53134884351_4db7343402_b.jpg


Do a Google search for "fireworks," click on the Images button. Look at ANY image that comes up and count the stars you can see. So every fireworks photo that comes up on Google is fake, because the stars don't show in the night sky? Obviously not. The answer is much simpler than that. The stars simply aren't bright enough to register against any other light source in a photograph.

To photograph a sky full of stars, you have to expose the image for 15 or 20 seconds, but to photograph a sunlit scene, you can only expose the image for something like a thousandths of a second, maybe even less. that 15 to 20 THOUSAND times more exposure to make the stars show up in a camera!

But the moon scenes are fake because the stars aren't there... really?
 
Last edited:
wfooshee
OK, I'll bite. The "if it did happen" has already lost you all actual respect on my part, which is the limit of how far I'll take it, keeping the AUP in mind, and the prohibition against actually being offensive in how a user is addressed. Especially since I lived through the event and remember staying up in my room to watch it live.

By "no dust" I assume you mean no clouds of dust, like you'd see behind a dirt bike out on the Baja or somewhere. The you almost answered it yourself. With no atmosphere, there's nothing to suspend the dust. The dust cloud you see behind vehicles on a dirt road hangs in the air, precisely because there is air; with no air, the dust from the moon buggy's wheels simply responds to gravity and falls right back down. There can be no cloud of dust because there is no medium in which it can be suspended.

For no stars, that's actually 100% expected. Not just for pictures from the moon or from orbit. Take your phone outside tonight and take a picture of a well-lit street. Then look in the sky of that picture and see how many stars appear. The stars simply aren't bright enough to show in photographs, unless they are the only thing in the photograph. The Apollo space suits had those gold visors because the surface of the sunlit moon is brighter than anyplace you could find on Earth; brighter than a day at the beach, brighter than a day in the mountains with snow on the ground all around you. There is no possible way to capture the dim light of the stars against that field of full sunlight, even though the sky is black. The points of light simply aren't bright enough to register in the fraction of a second that the camera's shutter is open.

Aw, heck, I'll just show you with one of my own pictures. This is from a night air show, lots of pyrotechnics, under an absolutely clear sky, very flashy. But OMG, no STARS!!!! So it's obviously 100% fake. There was never any air show, this must be CGI. :rolleyes:
53134884351_4db7343402_b.jpg


Do a Google search for "fireworks," click on the Images button. Look at ANY image that comes up and count the stars you can see. So every fireworks photo that comes up on Google is fake, because the stars don't show in the night sky? Obviously not. The answer is much simpler than that. The stars simply aren't bright enough to register against any other light source in a photograph.

To photograph a sky full of stars, you have to expose the image for 15 or 20 seconds, but to photograph a sunlit scene, you can only expose the image for something like a thousandths of a second, maybe even less. that 15 to 20 THOUSAND times more exposure to make the stars show up in a camera!

But the moon scenes are fake because the stars aren't there... really?
Click to expand...
yeah like i said, i seen all those youtube star vids etc etc ( i think you read that in the wrong context or my apologies if id written it a tad iffy)..........i was merely looking for answers on the "20% gravity" v "no atmosphere", in the way things fall in the moon films. & i get whats been said, but do they kinda cancel or maybe equal things up to give an earth like appearance in movement ? & if so its a bit of a weird coincidence but also does this extend to stones being projected from the tyres of the buggy in the same manner ? as id expect them to travel further ??
 
Last edited:
Okay, so here's a quick one.

I took the attached photo at night, with a polarising filter on the lens, camera on it's back just pointed upwards, it's about 160mm so, not wide angle angle at all, and about a 10 minute exposure.

What am I looking at.

If I just put the picture in the post I think it'll just look like a black square, you'll need to open it and zoom in a bit.

edit: ah the forum's resized it anyway...

Here's something cropped out at 1:1

1692734100958.png
 

Attachments

  • IMG_6180.JPG
    IMG_6180.JPG
    10.8 KB · Views: 9
Last edited:
TexRex
Okay, that's funny.
Click to expand...
the question is going to be asked more & more due to what seems like modern day space exploration`s inability to do something that happened in the 60s all those years ago......could it be said with that in mind, contrary to all our computers technology, gadgets & navel gazing, we as humans have gone backward. the evidence/example being this particular case ?

if someone wants to give me some clever answers, then please tell me - why are all-comers struggling to get back to the moon ?
 
Last edited:
Bazool
yeah like i said, i seen all those youtube star vids etc etc ..........i was merely looking for answers on the "20% gravity" v "no atmosphere", in the way things fall in the moon films. & i get whats been said, but do they kinda cancel or maybe equal things up to give an earth like appearance in movement ? & if so its a bit of a weird coincidence but also does this extend to stones being projected from the tyres of the buggy in the same manner ? as id expect them to travel further ??
Click to expand...
I think your brain tricks you into believing that the LRV was more powerful than it actually was. In reality, its four motors produced 0.19 kW each for a total of 0.76 kW. The fact that you can see stones fly at all is an indicator of the low gravity on the lunar surface.
 
Bazool
please tell me - why are all-comers struggling to get back to the moon ?
Click to expand...
Nobody's struggling, it's just nobody wants to.

We did the Moon. It needed the most powerful rockets ever made to get a dozen people to set foot there (and come back alive) over three years at the cost of billions. They retrieved a bunch of rocks that held some mild scientific interest for a few years, but ultimately the six missions didn't result in any major discoveries. Well, at least to normal people; we found out some cool stuff about the Moon's composition and formation.

It wasn't that it was difficult, but that it was expensive and didn't truly generate much of value; the first one sparked genuine scientific interest among the general population, and the third one captured a lot of hearts and minds (due to extreme, but survived, failure), but even the rovers did little to recapture that spirit and by the time of Apollo 17 people just weren't interested in it any more - not helped by the dragging of Vietnam - and NASA wanted to start building a space station with the Space Shuttle project, which was cheaper as a staging point for manned missions elsewhere than putting a base on the Moon.

But while we haven't sent people back, we have sent stuff back. There's been over 70 successful missions to the Moon - some fly-bys, some landers, some rovers, some land-and-return sample probes - in the last 50 years, none of which have required the expense of lifting people and fuel and return capsule up there (and the risk assessments and red tape involved in doing so).

Of course there's also been a few failures as well (or "successes" as SpaceX would call them). China, India, Israel, Japan, Russia and the USA have all had missions presumed crashed into the Moon. Japan had one which missed the Moon entirely.


The Moon has only really entered the conversation again now because there's more people that can build the honking great rockets required to get there - including SpaceX - so it's viable again... but not as a destination, rather a staging point for manned missions out to Mars.
 

Latest Posts

Back