You Aren't Getting Away Scott Free After Pissing On My Car

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Amazing. Hubble’s Deep Field image in relation to the rest of the night sky.

Black Skimmer (Rynchops niger)

Lido Key Beach, FL

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.

Milky Way from Lake Cuyamaca js

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)

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.

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.

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

Years ago, I worked at a large chain grocery store in the Southeast US, you can probably guess which one. I had a manager that just did not like me. For example my car broke down on my way to work on my birthday, and when I finally made it there she chewed me out in front of the store for coworkers and customers alike to spectate. 

She often pushed me to quit school and work full time because she was so certain I would fail, and she needed the shifts covered. Well Saturday before Easter(a busy day for them) I was back in my old city, now gainfully employed and quite happy. I stopped in that store to pick up a few things. It was so busy that she was relegated to bagging groceries. Perfect. I made my way to her line with a huge grin on my face. She recognized me. Perfect.

This particular chain makes baggers ask guests if they would like help taking their groceries to the car. She must have forgotten, so I specifically asked her for help. She would have been reprimanded for refusing, and thus obliged. She’s an old woman, the uniforms are conservative, the parking lot is huge, we are in South Florida and the employees can’t accept tips. I relished in walking her to my new car, a car that would have been far out of my reach on a grocery clerk’s salary. As she finished loading my groceries, she said “Come back and see us again!” and I said “Yeah, I guess you’ll still be here.”

Left a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

A room with a view

Taken near the entrance to Paranal site’s Residencia hotel, ESO’s motivation behind building advanced telescopes in such remote and challenging locations could not be clearer. The spectacular sky, free from light pollution, reveals the secrets usually hidden in areas populated by humans. Strict regulations are in place to maintain these conditions, and the lights on the left are needed to mark the sides of the road (known as the stairway to heaven), because cars are not allowed to use their headlights. Palm fronds are not a typical part of the desert skyline, but this particular one was replanted outside after it grew too large to remain inside la Residencia. Unfortunately, the harsh conditions of the Atacama desert prooved too much, and it did not survive long.

The splash of the Milky Way to the left dwarfs the little blotches of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds to the right.

Credit: H. Sommer/ESO