Thought some of you might like this picture a friend took in his garden on a school night ... he's pretty bloody awesome with everything he does with camera's and telescopes Credit Chris Spencer Arc Photographic From Chris .... Orion is one of my all time favourite constellations and the Orion Nebula is just so fascinating and super easy to shoot. Taken just now from my back garden, even through the local light pollution
Yeah I’ve viewed the Orion Nebula with my scope a few times. Pretty nice one to view as it’s relatively easy to find. Nice pic btw. Stacking and processing the images is harder than finding the nebula haha.
if you can get to a patch of sky with very little to no light pollution the sky looks something like this. Absolutely breathtaking. The only time I’ve seen this many stars is in the middle of the North Atlantic on a cold winters night. The large smudge is The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and it’s the furthest object we can see with the naked eye. It’s also traveling straight towards us at a speed of around 70 miles per second. We’ll merge with it in about 5 billion years. The smaller smudge bottom right is the Triangulum Galaxy.
If we could travel the speed of light we would reach Mars in around 3 minutes. Going at the snails pace we currently reach we are looking at nine months. Really does fascinate me the distance light travels in a minute, hour etc etc.
Makes me wonder about the veracity of the Apollo moon landings over 50 years ago as yet another 21st century moon landing only partially succeeds. Japan moon landing live: Japan in contact with moon lander - but problem with solar panels puts mission in jeopardy Japan has become the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon, but it was a tense wait for contact with the "sniper" probe after it touched down. We've had an update from the Japanese space agency - which is communicating with the probe but faces a potentially serious problem. Japan moon landing live: Japan in contact with moon lander - but problem with solar panels puts mission in jeopardy
Nasa's Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which made history by achieving the first powered flight on another world, has suffered mission-ending damage. In a statement, Nasa said the aircraft was forced to perform an "emergency landing" that damaged its rotors. The space agency's Bill Nelson said the aircraft was "the little helicopter that could" and had racked up far more missions than had been intended. He said Ingenuity had "paved the way for future flight in our solar system". Ingenuity is said to remain "upright" but images taken by an accompanying ground vehicle showed that "one or more of its rotor blades" were damaged and it was "no longer capable of flight". Nasa said the circumstances were being investigated. "Ingenuity has paved the way for future flight in our solar system, and it's leading the way for smarter, safer human missions to Mars and beyond," Mr Nelson, a Nasa administrator, said in a video message on social media. "That remarkable helicopter flew higher and farther than we ever imagined and helped Nasa do what we do best - make the impossible, possible." Ingenuity reached the Red Planet in February 2021 by riding on the belly of the Perseverance rover. It was meant to be on a short technology demonstration to prove flight was possible in the ultra-thin Martian atmosphere. The vehicle went on to support Perseverance by previewing areas of Mars that might be of interest, helping the wheeled robot and its drivers on Earth pick the right path. Before its mission came to an end on Thursday, Ingenuity performed 72 flights and flew more than 14 times farther than originally planned. Many will mourn the passing of the plucky chopper but its withdrawal from service has probably come at the right time, the BBC's science correspondent Jonathan Amos says. The Perseverance rover is about to undertake some long, fast drives as it seeks to climb up on to the rim of Jezero Crater. If still functional, Ingenuity would, in all likelihood, have struggled to keep up with Perseverance, or at the very least held up the rover's exploration. Ingenuity: Damage puts end to ground-breaking Mars helicopter mission
Brightest and hungriest black hole ever detected The most luminous object ever detected has been spied in the distant Universe. It's a quasar - the bright core of a galaxy that is powered by a gargantuan black hole some 17 billion times the mass of our Sun. Known as J0529-4351, the object's power was confirmed in observations by the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Scientists, reporting in the journal Nature Astronomy, say the black hole has a voracious appetite, consuming the mass equivalent to one Sun every day. J0529-4351 was actually recorded in data many years ago but its true glory has only just been recognised. "We have discovered an object which has previously not been recognised for what it is; it's been staring into our eyes for many years because it's been glowing at its brightness for longer than humankind has probably existed. But we've now recognised it, not as being one of the many foreground stars in our Milky Way but as a very distant object," Christian Wolf, from the Australian National University (ANU), told BBC News. The numbers are crazy.
To be honest if it’s 17 billion times the size of our Sun, and it only eats 1 Sun a day, that doesn’t seem like that much of an appetite at all, it’s like the equivalent of me eating half a grain of rice a day, the lying bastards.
Space related. The Space Shuttle That Fell To Earth. Three part doc about the Space Shuttle Columbia that disintegrated over Texas during re-entry in 2003. On BBC download. Brilliant watch.
