Your Trip Is Short.....

[rowjimmy]

is that a fleet of tie fighters going across the moon

That's the International Space Station.

[mbw]

This was taken today.

Sun, Moon, ISS, Earth... All in a row.

ISIS IS IN SPACE?   :crazy:

[rowjimmy]

This was taken today.

Sun, Moon, ISS, Earth... All in a row.

ISIS IS IN SPACE?   :crazy:

ISIS doesn't believe in space.

[Bobafett]

It's only one squadron of tie bombers.  Making a photon bomb run on the Deluc crater.

[mbw]

This was taken today.

Sun, Moon, ISS, Earth... All in a row.

ISIS IS IN SPACE?   :crazy:

ISIS doesn't believe in space.

which is odd since the symbol for their purported religion is almost that exact image.

[Buffalo Budd]

^^I think it's well documented how brilliant ISIS is.

[phil]

^^I think it's well documented how brilliant ISIS is.

buncha jerks if you ask me

[Buffalo Budd]

[pcr3]

I'm hoping we get a clear night up in Maine tonight.  My wife and I are driving up after dinner, and she's generally in bed by 11.  I then usually go outside for a sesh or two and to stargaze, so this is PERFECT.

[Buffalo Budd]

She's been pretty cloudy here in NB all day but it's just started to break apart a little so hopefully by that time (12ish), I may be able to do the same.

[Superfreakie]

Not space, but it might as well be. Amazing HD drone video shot in Antarctica (launched from a yacht).

Whales at 06:30

[PIE-GUY]

Awesome... and hilarious...

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/5/8553609/microwave-oven-perytons

Radio signals puzzled astrophysicists for 17 years. They were coming from a microwave oven.

Since 1998, astrophysicists at Australia's Parkes Observatory have been detecting mysterious bursts of radio waves (named "perytons") that seemed to emanate from all parts of the sky. They lasted for just fractions of a second and happened once or twice a year.

Most believed they came from somewhere quite nearby (perhaps resulting from lightning strikes), but the bursts had some characteristics that made it seem like they'd traveled millions of light-years from distant galaxies or other astronomical objects.

The truth, as recently discovered by graduate student Emily Petroff of Swinburne University of Technology, is decidedly more mundane. It turns out the signals were generated by someone at the facility opening the door of a microwave oven while it was still running.


Most astronomers had long been suspicious that the perytons were generated by something on Earth, because it'd explain why they appeared to emanate from all parts of the sky — they weren't coming from the sky at all, and instead were being generated right next to the telescope. Additionally, they almost always occurred during the daytime, when people were working at the facility.

But for years, scientists were unable to find a convincing explanation. The huge radio telescope at Parkes is in a radio quiet zone, which means that cellphones and other sources of radio emissions are banned nearby. And the perytons' frequency, 1.4 gigahertz (GHz), wasn't known to come from any obvious source of radiation.

Earlier this year, Petroff installed an interference monitor at the telescope. Fortuitously, three more perytons occurred in a single week. This monitor can detect a wider range of emissions than the telescope, and it found that along with each peryton at 1.4 GHz, there was a smaller spike of radio waves around 2.5 GHz.

"That led us to thinking, 'What emits at 2.5 gigahertz?'" Petroff told Popular Science. "And the obvious thing was microwaves."

Still, there was a mystery. Microwave ovens — like the one on site used by staff to reheat food — typically operate at around 2.5 GHz, not 1.4.

In a series of experiments, Petroff and others figured out that if you open the microwave's door while it's still running, the machine's magnetron emits a very brief spike of radiation at 1.4 GHz, as well as the standard 2.5 GHz. In all likelihood, the perytons were caused by a staff member with a habit of opening the microwave door before it was finished cooking. As National Geographic's Nadia Drake points out, this is why many other radio telescope facilities ban microwave ovens.

The scientific value of this discovery
But there's a bright side to this deflating finding. One of the reasons Petroff was looking into perytons was because of a related phenomenon, called "fast radio bursts" (FRBs), which continues to baffle scientists.

These are also short spikes in radio waves, but they genuinely seem to come from beyond the galaxy. And the microwave oven doesn't seem to have been causing them, too — so this work helps to rule out one possible terrestrial origin for FRBs.

[Buffalo Budd]

They've finally found bizarro world...


http://www.iflscience.com/say-hello-earth-20-historic-kepler-discovery-suggests-we-are-not-alone

[mehead]

Not space, but it might as well be. Amazing HD drone video shot in Antarctica (launched from a yacht).

Whales at 06:30

Amazing stuff right there.  Thanks for posting.

[runawayjimbo]

The search for where our children's children's (x1000) children are gonna go once we sufficiently fuck up this planet is on!!

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33641648

'Earth 2.0' found in Nasa Kepler telescope haul
A haul of planets from Nasa's Kepler telescope includes a world sharing many characteristics with Earth.

Kepler-452b orbits at a very similar distance from its star, though its radius is 60% larger.

Mission scientists said they believed it was the most Earth-like planet yet.

Such worlds are of interest to astronomers because they might be small and cool enough to host liquid water on their surface - and might therefore be hospitable to life.

Nasa's science chief John Grunsfeld called the new world the "closest so far" to Earth.

And John Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California, added: "It's a real privilege to deliver this news to you today. There's a new kid on the block that's just moved in next door."

The new world joins other exoplanets such as Kepler-186f that are similar in many ways to Earth.

Determining which is most Earth-like depends on the properties one considers. Kepler-186f, announced in 2014, is smaller than the new planet, but orbits a red dwarf star that is significantly cooler than our own.

Kepler-452b, however, orbits a parent star which belongs to the same class as the Sun: it is just 4% more massive and 10% brighter. Kepler-452b takes 385 days to complete a full circuit of this star, so its orbital period is 5% longer than Earth's.

The mass of Kepler-452b cannot be measured yet, so astronomers have to rely on models to estimate a range of possible masses, with the most likely being five times that of Earth. If it is rocky, the world would likely still have active volcanism and its gravity would be roughly twice that on our own planet.

The new world is included in a haul of 500 new possible planets sighted by the Kepler space telescope around distant stars.

Twelve of the new candidates are less than twice Earth's diameter, orbiting in the so-called habitable zone around their star.

This zone refers to a range of distances at which the energy radiated by the star would permit water to exist as a liquid on the planet's surface if certain other conditions are also met.

Of these 500 candidates, Kepler-452b is the first to be confirmed as a planet.

Dr Suzanne Aigrain, from the University of Oxford, who was not involved with the study, told BBC News: "I do believe the properties described for Kepler-452b are the most Earth-like I've come across for a confirmed planet to date.

"What seems even more significant to me is the number of planets in the habitable zone of their host stars with radii below two Earth radii; 12 is quite a few compared to the pre-existing Kepler planet catalogue.

"It bodes well for their attempts to provide a more robust measure of the incidence of Earth-like planets, which is the top-level goal of the Kepler mission."

While similar in size and brightness to the Sun, Kepler-452b's host star is 1.5 billion years older than ours. Scientists working on the mission therefore believe it could point to a possible future for the Earth.

"If Kepler-452b is indeed a rocky planet, its location vis-a-vis its star could mean that it is just entering a runaway greenhouse phase of its climate history," explained Dr Doug Caldwell, a Seti Institute scientist working on the Kepler mission.

"The increasing energy from its aging sun might be heating the surface and evaporating any oceans. The water vapour would be lost from the planet forever."

"Kepler-452b could be experiencing now what the Earth will undergo more than a billion years from now, as the Sun ages and grows brighter."

Dr Don Pollacco, from Warwick University, UK, who was not involved with the latest analysis, told the BBC: "Kepler data allows you to estimate the relative size of a planet to its host star, so if you know the size of the host, hey presto, you know the size of the planet.

"However, to go further - i.e. is it rocky? - involves measuring the mass of the planets and this is much more difficult to do as the stars are too far away for these measurements (which are incredibly difficult) to make.

"So in reality they have no idea what this planet is made of: It could be rock but it could be a small gassy ball or something more exotic maybe."
Dr Chris Watson, from Queen's University Belfast, UK, commented: "Other Kepler habitable zone planets may well be more Earth-like in this respect. For example, Kepler-186f is approximately 1.17 Earth radii, and Kepler-438b is approximately 1.12 Earth radii.

"In fact, at 1.6 Earth radii, this would place Kepler-452b in a category of planet called a 'Super-Earth' - our Solar System does not actually have any planet of this type within it! Super-Earths are hugely interesting for this reason, but one might then say, well, is it really 'Earth-like' given all this?"

He added: "When we look at the type of star Kepler-452b orbits, then it seems to be a star not too dissimilar to our Sun... The other Kepler habitable zone planets that have been discovered so far tend to be orbiting M-dwarfs - stars far cooler than our Sun, and therefore the planets need to orbit much closer to receive the same levels of heating.

"So it may be a potentially rocky super-Earth in an Earth-like orbit (in terms of host star and orbital distance). It's this combination of the host star and orbit that set it apart in my opinion."