Elephants Trunk Nebula IC1396

You aren't getting away Scott free after pissing on my car

This story takes place at 1am today.

I’d just gotten home from working my 5th 12 hour work day and started to unwind with a bottle of wine and a show (the Eric Andre show) in the living room with my girlfriend. (I should note the door to the patio is about 10 feet directly in front of the sofa. And I live on the 4th floor in an apartment building.)

I begin to hear loud voices but it’s 1am on a Saturday night on a busy street, not out of place. However I decided to go on to the porch to people watch. I see five drunk 16/17 year old kids getting out of a truck parked directly in front of my car. There appears to be maybe 4-5 inches of space between my car and theirs.

Everyone seems to crowd around my front bumper laughing and are staring at my car, at first I thought they’d hit it, but then I notice the driver of the truck is pissing on my car. I hear him say to his friends “sucks for whoever owns this car” and pisses on the handle. So I shout back “that’d be me” they didnt look my way so I assumed they didn’t hear me. Then he quickly finishes and they start running toward the lobby so I yell “cheers mate” and he yells back a “cheers bud.”

I decided I needed to have revenge. So I grabbed a condom and filled it with conditioner. I then wrote a note that said “piss on my car? Enjoy my cum :)”

I delicately placed the note under their blade and took the condom and threw it full force at the windshield causing a glorious splatter. I then moved my car underground to make sure they couldn’t retaliate.

I woke up bright and early this morning and drank tea on my porch for an hour and a half just to be there to witness them see my work. The driver audibly yelled “what the fuck” and looked up to my porch. I raised my mug and yelled back a “cheers bud”. And then returned inside to watch The Eric Andre Show (the show is fucking awesome)

An EPIC View of Earth

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” 

Carl Sagan wrote those words in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision For The Human Future In Space. His now-famous ode to our home planet (listen to the full passage here, in animated form) is perhaps our most poignant and humble reminder of the exquisite beauty and shared fragility of this planet we call home. 

NASA is now bringing us a daily reminder of that message, thanks to the EPIC camera (a very appropriately named camera, in my opinion) on board NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. You can see some of its handiwork in the image sequence above.

DSCOVR’s official space job is to observe weather on and around the sun, to extend its mechanical finger into the solar wind and measure how strongly that stream of charged particles is gusting toward Earth. It does this job from a special spot in space called the L1 Lagrange point. If you were to draw a line between us and the sun, DSCOVR would be sitting along it, like so (not to scale):

That’s a convenient place to put a spacecraft, especially one whose job it is to stare at the sun. See, DSCOVR is nestled inside a pocket where it’s tugged equally by the Earth’s and Sun’s gravity, like a stalemate in an orbital game of tug-o-war. Gravity does all the work, and the spacecraft doesn’t need to maneuver much to stay in position. There’s a few of these gravity-neutral Lagrange points out there, as you can tell in the image above, and we’ve got spacecraft residing at all of them. 

As a side effect of its sun-staring mission, DSCOVR’s backside happens to be looking back at Earth full-time. In a way, I think that makes it a different sort of moon. 

NASA doesn’t like to let any opportunity go un-scienced, of course, so they decided to slap a camera on DSCOVR’s rear, the one named EPIC, and use their stable perch to keep a regular eye on us. Good lookin’ out, NASA.

A little change in perspective can do a planet good. In 1990, from a vantage point beyond Pluto, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward home to take one last look, giving us the image that inspired Carl Sagan’s ode to ol’ Dotty Blue:

This was not an easy shot to take. Voyager’s camera wasn’t the fancy digital type like most of us have in our phones. It was essentially an old-fashioned black and white tube TV in reverse, relying on colored filters held in front of the camera to highlight different wavelengths of light. Voyager stored its image data on magnetic tape, and each of the shots took more than five hours to reach Earth. Sagan and NASA’s planetary science team had to practically move the heavens (since they were unable to move the Earth) in order to take that picture. 

Now consider the effect this picture has had. That’s home. That’s us. Even if you weren’t born in 1990, everyone and everything that made you is in and on that hazy blue speck. I hope you never lose sight of how amazing it is to view our planet from this perspective. 

Luckily, you can get a reminder every day. The DSCOVR satellite is now sending roughly a picture an hour back to Earth, 24/7/365. That’s a near real-time view of our home. Go take a look. It’s pretty epic.

To see a daily look at what a day on Earth looks like, check out EPIC’s daily updates here.

A nebulous sky

The incredibly dark and transparent sky of Paranal, in the Atacama Desert, Chile, is the perfect place to see the bright emission of various nebulae. The white dome of the Residencia occupies the bottom of the image. La Residencia hosts those working at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The hotel represents an oasis in the dry and harsh conditions of the Chilean Atacama desert.

Credit: ESO/M. Claro

Milky Way from Lake Cuyamaca js

Black Skimmer (Rynchops niger)

Lido Key Beach, FL

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” ― Marcus Aurelius Aurora over Kirkjufell, Iceland captured by the always awe-inspiring Sean Parker.

Where the land, the sky, and the ocean meet. 

Anastasia State Park, FL

Artist’s impression of the exotic binary star system AR Scorpii

This artist’s impression shows the strange object AR Scorpii. In this unique double star a rapidly spinning white dwarf star (right) powers electrons up to almost the speed of light. These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the companion red dwarf star (left) and cause the entire system to pulse dramatically every 1.97 minutes with radiation ranging from the ultraviolet to radio.

Credit: M. Garlick/University of Warwick, ESA/Hubble

Bedroom view from Paranal Residencia

The view from one of the Paranal Residencia bedroom balconies reveals the magnificent view afforded by the remote location in the Chilean Atacama desert. Numerous rust-tinted peaks give way to the sea and, eventually, dark skies that host the unmistakable glow and dust lanes of the Milky Way.

Credit: Jean-Marc Lecleire/PNA/ESO

VLT Snaps An Exotic Exoplanet “First”

Astronomers hunt for planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets) using a variety of methods. One successful method is direct imaging; this is particularly effective for planets on wide orbits around young stars, because the light from the planet is not overwhelmed by light from the host star and is thus easier to spot. This image demonstrates this technique. It shows a T-Tauri star named CVSO 30, located approximately 1200 light-years away from Earth in the 25 Orionis group (slightly northwest of Orion’s famous Belt). In 2012, astronomers found that CVSO 30 hosted one exoplanet (CVSO 30b) using a detection method known as transit photometry, where the light from a star observably dips as a planet travels in front of it. Using the data astronomers have imaged what is likely to be a second planet! To produce the image, astronomers exploited the astrometry provided by VLT’s NACO and SINFONI instruments. This new exoplanet, named CVSO 30c, is the small dot to the upper left of the frame (the large blob is the star itself). While the previously-detected planet, CVSO 30b, orbits very close to the star, whirling around CVSO 30 in just under 11 hours at an orbital distance of 0.008 astronomical units, CVSO 30c orbits significantly further out, at a distance of 660 au, taking a staggering 27 000 years to complete a single orbit. (For reference, the planet Mercury orbits the Sun at an average distance of 0.39 au, while Neptune sits at just over 30 au.) If it is confirmed that CVSO 30c orbits CVSO 30, this would be the first star system to host both a close-in exoplanet detected by the transit method and a far-out exoplanet detected by direct imaging. Astronomers are still exploring how such an exotic system came to form in such a short timeframe, as the star is only 2.5 million years old; it is possible that the two planets interacted at some point in the past, scattering off one another and settling in their current extreme orbits.

Credit: ESO/Schmidt et al.