Amazing. Hubble’s Deep Field Image In Relation To The Rest Of The Night Sky.

Mercury’s transit at Garching

The ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek captured this image on 9 May 2016, the Mercury’s transit day. The little black dot visible in the lower part of the orange Sun disc is indeed the planet while orbiting between the Earth and the Sun. This stunning picture was taken in the surroundings of ESO’s Headquarters, located at Garching, near Munich, in Germany.

Credit: ESO/P. Horálek

“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.” – Stephen Hawking

Stunning capture by Jordan McInally of @undersoulphotography

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 2016 September 6 

The Whirlpool Galaxy and Beyond 

Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper’s bowl, until you get to the handle’s last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier’s famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweep in front of its companion galaxy (left), NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant and officially lie within the angular boundaries of the small constellation Canes Venatici. Though M51 looks faint and fuzzy to the human eye, the above long-exposure, deep-field image taken earlier this year shows much of the faint complexity that actually surrounds the smaller galaxy. Thousands of the faint dots in background of the featured image are actually galaxies far across the universe.

First, a bit of background - I have lived with a girl for 4 years after putting an ad out online. She pays her bills and is never there at the weekends, while I’m rarely there during the week. However - she is unbelievably lazy, selfish and messy (imagine those shock images of student houses and you’re not far off).

I’ve spent 4 years getting petty revenge on my flat mate in the most passive aggressive ways possible. My objective is for her to never realise I’m responsible. Here is story number 1:

The Offence: Christmas 2014. I have bought 6 bottles of wine for my Nan at a cost of around £30/bottle. Before I can gift them, I return home one night to find she and her boyfriend have helped themselves to one of the bottles…

HER: “Oh I had one of your bottles of wine. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll replace it.

ME: "Errr… Ok. Right.”

Bottle is replaced with Sainsbury’s Basics Red Table Wine at approximately £3 in value. Was given the replacement the night before I was due to travel to my Nan’s leaving me with half a present and a disappointed grandmother.

Petty Revenge: For over 2 years now, I have been sealing all of her bottles and jars with gorilla glue before she opens them for the first time. Tomato ketchup? Gorilla glue. Laundry detergent? Gorilla glue. All those bottles of nail polish just left lying around on the hallway floor? Gorilla glue. I’m a regular maestro when it comes to gorilla gluing things without leaving any evidence.

I gorilla glued her light bulb in to its socket so when it blew, she needed to replace the whole lamp. I gorilla glued the windscreen washer fluid cap on to her car. I gorilla glued the caps on to all the pens she bought when she got in to that adult colouring-in phase.

So far she’s invested in 3 automatic jar openers to no avail and thrown away dozens of items. It’s never been mentioned to me and I assume she thinks she’s just weak and this is normal.

In 2004, I was a young comedian in New York City, and I secured an audition at one of the city’s top clubs. Their host would watch a few of us audition before the pros came on, and she’d recommend anyone she liked to become a regular at the club. I was super excited, and spent weeks crafting the set I wanted her to see.

My first joke did okay, but my second was stronger and by the end I was crushing. I finished with a big applause break, and said good night - but the host was nowhere to be found. I called out for her twice and joked that I must have done so well that they gave me more time before she finally came back up. I realized she probably wasn’t watching my set, or she’d have known when I was finished.

Her phony feedback after the show made it worse. “You started strong,” she said. “But you faded at the end.” Why couldn’t she have just told me she got distracted and offered me another audition in the future? Why couldn’t she be an adult about it? I wanted to be sure that she was lying - so despite having done no subway material, I asked her what she thought about my subway material. She told me it was generic. Not only was she lying to me - but now in her lie, I was a bad comic. I was furious - but I politely thanked her for her time, knowing that there was nothing I could do.

Thankfully, other clubs were more responsible with their new talent, and I got the regular stage time I needed to grow. A few years later, I was on the Late Late Show, and things continued to progress.

In 2012, I opened my own comedy club in New York City. During construction, a woman came in to ask if we were hiring a new talent director. I recognized her immediately - but she clearly had no recollection of every meeting me before.

I asked her for her resume, with absolutely no intention of ever reading it - like she’d metaphorically done to me 8 years earlier. And then I politely thanked her for her time, knowing that there was nothing she could do.

TLDR; When you keep your head down and do good work, the universe will get petty revenge for you.

Olympics Meme

Island Point Milky Way

Nikon d5100 - 6 x 25s - ISO 4000 - f2.8 - 16mm

Milky Way

Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, FL

Blood Red Suwannee River.

The water is stained by decaying vegetation (similar to how tea is made), giving it this amazing blood red color (photo not edited) that looks like its out of a horror movie.

Upper Suwannee River, FL

What is so special about Saturn’s moon Titan?

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the only natural satellite in our solar system known to have a dense atmosphere. But there is something much more amazing about the Saturnian orbiter.

Titan has a vast system of oceans, lakes, and huge mountain ranges. How, though, could a body whose average temperature is -290°F (-179°C) contain liquid water on its surface? It doesn’t.

The oceans and lakes on Titan are made of liquid methane (CH₄) and ethane (C₂H₆). The mountains are made of water ice. That’s right. The “waters” of titan are made of not water, but hydrocarbons, and its mountain ranges are made of not minerals like calcium, iron, and cobalt, but ice.

Could, then, there be not water-based, but hydrocarbon-based life on Titan? Astrobiologists (scientists who study possible extraterrestrial life forms) are hoping to send rovers there one day to sample the oceans and answer that question.

If it turned out that there is life somewhere else in the solar system, it would be so much more than just a cool scientific discovery. For two hundred thousand years, we humans have thought that we were alone in the universe. We thought that only our blue and green home harbored life. If life turned up elsewhere, we would know that we were wrong all along.

(pictured: Titan; source: NASA, Cassini spacecraft, 2006)