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Photo with 2,286 notes
Today’s APOD is especially magnificent. Here’s a close crop of the fully eclipsed Moon to provide better “dashboard” detail. Click the photo for high-res milky-wayness.
Eclipsed Moon in the Milky WayImage Credit & Copyright: Babak Tafreshi (TWAN)
Explanation: On June 15, the totally eclipsed Moon was very dark, with the Moon itself positioned on the sky toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. This simple panorama captures totality from northern Iran in 8 consecutive exposures each 40 seconds long. In the evocative scene, the dark of the eclipsed Moon competes with the Milky Way’s faint glow. The tantalizing red lunar disk lies just above the bowl of the dark Pipe Nebula, to the right of the glowing Lagoon and Trifid nebulae and the central Milky Way dust clouds. At the far right, the wide field is anchored by yellow Antares and the colorful clouds of Rho Ophiuchi. To identify other sights of the central Milky Way just slide your cursor over the image. The total phase of this first lunar eclipse of 2011 lasted an impressive 100 minutes. Parts of the eclipse were visible from most of planet Earth, with notable exceptions of North and Central America.
TWAN Photographer Babak A. Tafreshi
Source: apod.nasa.gov
Video reblogged from Whatever, man. with 28 notes
“I’m not an environmentalist. I’m an Earth warrior.” ~ Darryl Cherney, quoted in Smithsonian, April 1990
Source: vimeo.com
Link reblogged from National Geographic Magazine with 219 notes
National Geographic Magazine: Star Struck →
Star Struck
Astronomers turn their telescopes to the unbounded beauty of the Milky Way.
By Ken Croswell
Panoramic composite photograph by Wally PacholkaIt’s hard to be modest when you live in the Milky Way.
Our galaxy is far larger, brighter, and more massive than most other galaxies….
Source: nationalgeographicmagazine
Video with 12 notes
Milky Way Shadow Reflection
Being far away from man-made lights the place was very dark on a moonless night. The centre our Milky Way Galaxy is the most significant source of light which helped to created peculiar dark reflections on the water in the middle of the frame.
In the time lapse animation below the ocean waves form a beautiful dance-like pattern on the water. About an hour of Earth rotation compressed into 30 seconds of video.
Image Credit and Copyright: Alex Cherney
The image taken during this time-lapse sequence was chosen as the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day for August 23, 2010.
Explanation: Have you ever seen the Milky Way’s glow create shadows? To do so, conditions need to be just right. First and foremost, the sky must be relatively clear of clouds so that the long band of the Milky Way’s central disk can be seen. The surroundings must be very near to completely dark, with no bright artificial lights visible anywhere. Next, the Moon cannot be anywhere above the horizon, or its glow will dominate the landscape. Last, the shadows can best be caught on long camera exposures. In the above image taken in Port Campbell National Park, Victoria, Australia, seven 15-second images of the ground and de-rotated sky were digitally added to bring up the needed light and detail. In the foreground lies Loch Ard Gorge, named after a ship that tragically ran aground in 1878. The two rocks pictured are the remnants of a collapsed arch and are named Tom and Eva after the only two people who survived that Loch Ard ship wreck. A close inspection of the water just before the rocks will show reflections and shadows in light thrown by our Milky Way galaxy. Low clouds are visible moving through the serene scene in this movie.
Source: terrastro.com
Video reblogged from It's Full of Stars with 78 notes
brybell: Watch this video. I think it really would be perfect for this blog. It is a long video, but it is amazing!!!!
——————-YouTube Description ———————
Yes, many of those thinkers to whom I owe my mental freedom were religious, like Newton, a Christian, who believed God made the Earth but who then showed me why the Earth would have formed without a god’s help. Or Plank and Schrodinger, two more Christians, who believed God ruled the Universe but showed me how God could not control a single electron. The discoveries these and many other people made, the laws they are famous for, are the very things that make gods getting humans pregnant, or angels whispering to prophets in caves, look infantile. I could never and would never question their intelligence. Their honesty and intellectual consistency are a different matter.
Weird…
I can stand on the shoulders of giants and see what even they seemingly could not.
I’m not against the Creator(s), if they exist, if they ever existed. I’m not against the search for the Creator(s). What blows MY mind is that people think religion has anything to do with it at all.
Found a page where someone transcribed this monologue. Can anyone find/verify its source?
http://zepfanman.com/2010/11/science-saved-my-soul-transcript/
[TEXT ON SCREEN] Warning: Contains flashing images around the 5:30 mark. [MAN’S VOICE] Three summers ago, I was staying in a caravan a long way from the nearest city. It was usually pitch black at night. I had given my word that I would not smoke inside, so at 1 a.m. I stepped outside for a cigarette. After a few minutes of standing in the darkness, I realized that I could see my hand quite clearly—something I’d noticed that I could not do on previous nights—so I looked up, expecting to see the glow of the full moon, but the moon was nowhere in sight. [INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC FROM JOHN MURPHY’S “THE SURFACE OF THE SUN” BEGINS] Instead, there was a long glowing cloud directly overhead. The Romans called it the Via Galactica (the Road of Milk); today we call it the Milky Way. For those who missed the lesson at school that day, the basic facts are these: These numbers are essential to understanding what a galaxy is, but when contemplating them, some part of the human mind protests that it cannot be so. Yet an examination of the evidence brings you to the conclusion that it is. And if you take that conclusion out on a clear dark night and look up, you might see something that will change your life. Science Saved My Soul screenshot (@ 2:26) This is what a galaxy looks like. From the inside. From the suburbs of our Sun. Through binoculars, for every star you can see with your naked eye you can see 100 around it, all suspended in a gray blue mist. But through a modest telescope, if you wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark and get the focus just right… you will see that mist for what it really is: More stars. Like dust, fading into what tastes like infinity. But you’ve got to have the knowledge. Seeing is only half of it. That night three years ago, I knew a small part of what’s out there—the kinds of things, the scale of things, the age of things, the violence and destruction, appalling energy, hopeless gravity, and the despair of distance—but I feel safe, because I know my world is protected by the very distance that others fear. It’s like the universe screams in your face, “Do you know what I am? How grand I am? How old I am? Can you even comprehend what I am? What are you, compared to me?” And when you know enough science, you can just smile up at the universe and reply, “Dude, I am you.” When I looked at the galaxy that night, I knew the faintest twinkle of starlight was a real connection between my comprehending eye along a narrow beam of light to the surface of another sun. The photons my eyes detect (the light I see, the energy with which my nerves interact) came from that star. I thought I could never touch it, yet something from it crosses the void and touches me. I might never have known. My eyes saw only a tiny point of light, but my mind saw so much more. I see the invisible bursts of gamma radiation from giant stars converting into pure energy by their own mass. The flashes that flashed from the far side of the universe long before Earth had even formed. I can see the invisible microwave glow of the background radiation leftover from the Big Bang. I see stars drifting aimlessly at hundreds of kilometers per second, and the space-time curving around them. I can even see millions of years into the future. That blue twinkle will blow up one day, sterilizing any nearby solar systems in an apocalypse that makes the wrath of human gods seem pitiful by comparison—yet it wasfrom such destruction that I was formed. Stars must die so that I can live. I stepped out of a supernova… And so did you. [FADE TO BLACK DURING SIX SECOND PAUSE] In light of this inarguable fact (this hard-earned knowledge, this partial but informative truth), what place then in the 21st century and beyond for the magical claims of organized religion? [“THE SURFACE OF THE SUN” INSTRUMENTAL FADES OUT, TRIBAL DRUM BEAT BEGINS] The first religions were primitive by any definition. For reasons of limited population, communication, and plain old geography, they never grew to be anything other than a local concern. But religions mutate in time and grow in sophistication as each generation of holy men learn what works and what doesn’t. What makes people obedient and what causes rebellion. What ideas people can easily escape and which will haunt them until they have to pray just to stop the nagging fear. When populations grew due to the slow but steady growth of knowledge, as if confronted by a bumper harvest, the religions went into an arms race with each other. From gods of wind and thunder and sea, the threats, incentives, and claims of power escalate until every dominant organized religion has a god that is all-powerful, all-loving, all-seeing, and words like “infinity” and “eternity” are deployed cheaply while all other words are open to abuse until they mean exactly what the religions want them to mean. That night under the Milky Way, I who experienced it cannot call the experience a religious experience, for I know it was not religious in any way. I was thinking about facts and physics, trying to visualize what is, not what I would like there to be. There’s no word for such experiences that come through scientific and not mystical revelation. The reason for that is that every time someone has such a “mindgasm”, religion steals it simply by saying, “Ahh, you had a religious experience.” And spiritualists will pull the same shit. And both camps get angry when an atheist like me tells you that I only ever had these experiences after rejecting everything supernatural. But I do admit that after such experiences (the moments when reality hits me like a winning lottery ticket) I often think about religion… and how lucky I am that I am not religious. You want to learn something about God? Okay, this is one galaxy. [IMAGE OF A GALAXY IN OUTER SPACE] If God exists, God made this. Look at it. Face it. Accept it. Adjust to it, because this is the truth and it’s probably not going to change very much. This is how God works. God would probably want you to look at it. To learn about it. To try to understand it. But if you can’t look—if you won’t even try to understand—what does that say about your religion? As Bishop Lancelot Andrewes once said, “The nearer the church, the further from God.” [TRIBAL DRUM BEAT ENDS] Maybe you need to run. Away from the mosque. Away from the church. Away from the priests and the Imams. Away from the Books to have any chance of finding God. Squeeze a fraction of a galaxy into your mind and then you’ll have a better idea of what you’re looking for. To even partially comprehend the scale of a single galaxy is to almost disappear. And when you remember all the other galaxies, you shrink 100 billion times smaller still—but then you remember what you are. The same facts that made you feel so insignificant also tell you how you got here. It’s like you become more real—or maybe the universe becomes more real. You suddenly fit. You suddenly belong. You do not have to bow down. You do not have to look away. In such moments, all you have to do is remember to keep breathing. [MUSIC FROM JOHN MURPHY’S “KANADA’S DEATH, PT. 2 (ADAGIO IN D MINOR” BEGINS] The body of a newborn baby is as old as the cosmos. The form is new and unique, but the materials are 13.7 billion years old, processed by nuclear fusion in stars, fashioned by electromagnetism. Cold words for amazing processes. And that baby was you. Is you.You’re amazing. Not only alive, but with a mind. What fool would exchange this for everywinning lottery ticket ever drawn? When I compare what scientific knowledge has done for me and what religion tried to do to me, I sometimes literally shiver. Religions tell children they might go to hell and they must believe, while science tells children they came from the stars and presents reasoning they can believe. I’ve told plenty of young kids about stars and atoms and galaxies and the Big Bang and I have never seen fear in their eyes—only amazement and curiosity. They want more. Why do kids swim in it and adults drown in it? What happens to reality between our youngest years and adulthood? Could it be that someone promised us something so beautiful that our universe seems dull, empty, even frightening by comparison? It might still be made by a Creator of some kind but religion has made it look ugly. Religion paints everything not of itself as unholy and sinful while it beautifies and dignifies its areas, lies, and bigotry (like a pig wearing the finest robes). In its efforts to stop us facing reality, religion has become the reality we cannot face. Look at what religion has made us do, to ourselves and to each other. Religion stole our love and our loyalty and gave it to a book—to a telepathic father that tells his children that love means kneeling before him. Now I’m not a parent, but I say that those kids are gonna turn out messed up—it cannot be healthy for a child or a species. We were told long ago and for a long time that there was only the Earth—that we were the center of everything. That turned out to be wrong. We still haven’t fully adjusted. We’re still in shock. The universe is not what we expected it to be. It’s not what they told us it would be. This cosmic understanding is all new to us. But there’s nothing to fear. We’re stillspecial. We’re still blessed. And there might yet be a heaven, but it isn’t going to be perfect. And we’re going to have to build it ourselves. If I have something that could be called a soul that needed saving, then science saved it… from religion. [TEXT ON SCREEN] There are too many people, to many moments to thank. [MAN’S VOICE CONTINUES] Some people find it, really, very depressing that the universe can only support life for another 30 billion years— [“KANADA’S DEATH, PT. 2 (ADAGIO IN D MINOR)” STOPS ABRUPTLY] 30. Billion. Years. Are you fucking kidding me? [MAN’S VOICE STOPS. MUSIC FROM ARCADE FIRE’S “WAKE UP” BEGINS AND A SERIES OF IMAGES AND VIDEOS BEGINS. LYRICS USED FROM THE SONG:] Something filled up But now that I’m older Children, wake up I guess we’ll just have to adjust [FROM 14:11 UNTIL END OF VIDEO, DISTANCE MARKERS FADE IN AND OUT AS THE VIDEO ZOOMS OUT FROM A POINT IN OUTER SPACE] 3.9 Mpc/h [THE MUSIC BEGINS TO FADE OUT AND THE FINAL WORDS APPEAR ON THE SCREEN] Science saved my soul… [FADE TO BLACK]
My heart with nothing
Someone told me not to cry
My heart’s colder
And I can see that it’s a lie
Hold your mistake up
Before they turn the summer into dust
7.8 Mpc/h
15.6 Mpc/h
31.25 Mpc/h
62.5 Mpc/h
125 Mpc/h
250 Mpc/h
…from religion
500 Mpc/h
1 Gpc/h
Source: itsfullofstars
Using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists have recently discovered a gigantic, mysterious structure in our galaxy. This feature looks like a pair of bubbles extending above and below our galaxy’s center. Each lobe is 25,000 light-years tall and the whole structure may be only a few million years old.Fermi discovers giant bubbles in Milky Way
Source: nasa.gov
Photo reblogged from Diary of a Madman with 6 notes
Astronomy Picture of the Day - 2010 October 9
Explanation: In late September, two planets were opposite the Sun in Earth’s sky, Jupiter and Uranus. Consequently closest to Earth, at a distance of only 33 light-minutes and 2.65 light-hours respectively, both were good targets for telescopic observers. Recorded on September 27, this well-planned composite of consecutive multiple exposures captured both gas giants in their remarkable celestial line-up accompanied by their brighter moons. The faint greenish disk of distant planet Uranus is near the upper left corner. Of the tilted planet’s 5 larger moons, two can be spotted just above and left of the planet’s disk. Both discovered by 18th century British astronomer Sir William Herschel and later named for characters in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon is farthest left, with Titania closer in. At the right side of the frame is ruling gas giant Jupiter, flanked along a line by all four of its Galilean satellites. Farthest from Jupiter is Callisto, with Europa and Io all left of the planet’s disk, while Ganymede stands alone at the right.
Source: apod.nasa.gov
Photoset reblogged from This Is Not A Blog with 5 notes
Keep Looking Up
Beautiful, aren’t they? Like illustrations in a book. Only these are real. No one drew them. These exist. And there are at least 200 billion of them. The nine images above are just a few of our galactic neighbors, millions of light years away. They may seem obvious to us now, but not even a hundred years ago their existence was in doubt.
Under the only magnifications possible until the 20th century, most notably until the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson in California was built, these fuzzy objects were considered outlying parts of our own galaxy - clouds of gas, perhaps. Other nebulae (“planetary nebulae”, or supernova remnants) had been proven to exist within the Milky Way, and the assumption was that “spiral nebulae” were similarly on the edge of our galaxy, which might just be the edge of the universe.
A great debate about the make up of the universe went on well into the 1920s, when Edwin Hubble, charting Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda “nebula” with the Mount Wilson scope, showed that their distance from us was something near a million light years - much too far to be part of our own Milky Way. Finally proven to be immense conglomerations of stars millions of light years away, they were termed what Immanuel Kant had first called in 1755 the idea of separate Milky Ways: island universes.
Although that term eventually fell out of favor, I’ve always preferred it to galaxy, which sounds like a car model. Galaxy actually comes from the Greek galaktos, literally “milk” (the shared root of our words lactate, lactation, lactic). The myth is that Zeus, desiring his mortal-born son Heracles to have godlike powers, allowed him to suckle on his divine wife Hera’s breast, which, when discovered, caused her to push the baby away, and the resulting spurt of milk created the Milky Way. I think island universe, in addition to separating itself from this mythological nonsense, better communicates the immense solitude of galaxies, surrounded as they are by the vast emptiness of intergalactic space. It also makes me feel like there’s an implied sense of life in those galaxies.
Pause one of those images up there. Imagine that’s our galaxy: dusty disc, spiral arms, supermassive blackhole in the center. Zoom in and pick out one of the tiny pinpricks of light in that whirling disc. It’ll be hard to choose; there are billions. Got it? Now imagine that’s our Sun. And around that sun, visualize our planetary system, a whirling disc too. Along that elliptical plane, on a tiny blue planet circling a tiny yellow star, is, as Carl Sagan wrote, “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was.”
A humbling thought, to say the least. Humankind is nothing. NOTHING to the Universe. We’re a flicker on a speck on a mote. We’ve been lucky enough, thanks to several cosmic coincidences, to not only arise as life, but evolve to intelligence (relatively speaking), and remain protected from the myriad catastrophes surrounding us. Our relatively stable star; our location in the “Goldilocks Zone” of the Solar System (not too hot, not too cold); the axial tilt of the Earth causing seasons; the tidal forces of an overly-large satellite (the result of an unlikely collision between a Mars-sized planetoid and the proto-Earth) creating the right conditions for life; Earth’s strong magnetic field protecting us from radiation; Jupiter, playing gravitational center field, catching our would-be asteroid strikes; the Moon, playing goalie, planting its far side firmly in the face of incoming shots: if it weren’t for these, and a billion other random events, no one would be here at all.
It seems incredibly unlikely that all of the dominoes would fall just so, but they have. And in fact, that’s why we’re here. It’s not a coincidence if these are the prerequisites for intelligent life arising. But as unlikely as it seems, when you’re faced with images like these, how can you not imagine that this has happened countless times, not just in our galaxy, but in the nearly infinite number of other galaxies out there? How can you not believe that right now a vast multitude of individuals across the universe are contemplating images just like these, images that may even include our galaxy, and are attempting to understand their place in the universe - no different than us?
Lets be friends, K?
Source: thetreacheryofwords
Video reblogged from Mohandas Gandhi with 16 notes
National Geographic: What galaxies are made of
Inside the Milky Way : SUN OCT 24 9p et/pt
The brilliant clouds of color in the Milky Way do more than just inspire awe - they help astronomers decipher the galaxy.
Source: National Geographic
