Sidusglacies - ⚡️

Jupiter (filtered) by Judith Schmidt.

1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice visualizes the idea of a Pioneer probe using Jupiter’s gravity to slingshot itself toward the outer planets and beyond.

the moon is a loyal companion

Arecibo Observatory

The Arecibo Observatory is a radio telescope in the municipality of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. This observatory is operated by University of Central Florida, Yang Enterprises and UMET, under cooperative agreement with the US National Science Foundation (NSF). The observatory is the sole facility of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), which is the formal name of the observatory. From its construction in the 1960s until 2011, the observatory was managed by Cornell University.

For more than 50 years, from its completion in 1963 until July 2016 when the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China was completed, the Arecibo Observatory’s 1,000-foot (305-meter) radio telescope was the world’s largest single-aperture telescope. It is used in three major areas of research: radio astronomy, atmospheric science, and radar astronomy.

Many scientific discoveries have been made with the observatory. On April 7, 1964, soon after it began operating, Gordon Pettengill’s team used it to determine that the rotation period of Mercury was not 88 days, as formerly thought, but only 59 days. In 1968, the discovery of the periodicity of the Crab Pulsar (33 milliseconds) by Lovelace and others provided the first solid evidence that neutron stars exist. (Crab pulsar sound by Arecibo Observatory)

In 1974, Hulse and Taylor discovered the first binary pulsar PSR B1913+16, an accomplishment for which they later received the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1982, the first millisecond pulsar, PSR B1937+21, was discovered by Donald C. Backer, Shrinivas Kulkarni, Carl Heiles, Michael Davis, and Miller Goss. This object spins 642 times per second and, until the discovery of PSR J1748-2446ad in 2005, was identified as the fastest-spinning pulsar.

The Arecibo Message

In 1974, the Arecibo Message, an attempt to communicate with potential extraterrestrial life, was transmitted from the radio telescope toward the globular cluster Messier 13, about 25,000 light-years away. The 1,679 bit pattern of 1s and 0s defined a 23 by 73 pixel bitmap image that included numbers, stick figures, chemical formulas and a crude image of the telescope. source

david_shute

Lenticular Clouds

Fiordo Última Esperanza, Magallanes & La Antartica Chilena.

What are Trans-Neptunian object?

A trans-Neptunian object (TNO), also written transneptunian object, is any minor planet or dwarf planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance than Neptune, which has a semi-major axis of 30.1 astronomical units (AU).

The first trans-Neptunian object to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. It took until 1992 to discover a second trans-Neptunian object orbiting the Sun directly, 15760 Albion. The most massive TNO known is Eris, followed by Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Gonggong. source