There’s an astronaut in a gorilla suit floating around the International Space Station
We have no idea why this suit was deemed essential enough to send into zero gravity, or why Kelly himself found it personally important. But it’s kind of heartwarming to know that even astronauts on the ISS share the ability to keep completely useless and unwieldy items around the home.
Yeah, this doesn’t have “Last moments of recoverable footage” written all over it at all.
APES IN SPACE
space
America’s abandoned space history
Photographer Roland Miller has captured dozens of launch pads, bunkhouses and research facilities that were used during the frenzied space race of yesteryear — many of which no longer exist or are closed to the public. His book, Abandoned in Place, is published by the University of New Mexico Press in March 2016. To see more shots of America’s abandoned space history, visit The Guardian.
Bonus comic!
Yahoo! Einstein was right again! :D We now have our first detection of gravitational waves!
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0
This was the best way to give a general explanation. I’m still trying to understand exactly what we can get from knowing gravitational waves exist but still cool.
(The Moon’s surface in true color and high resolution, via China’s Yutu rover (JPEG Image, 4095 × 2768 pixels))
Okay, this picture is HUUUUUUUUUUUUGE, and it’s amazing.
It’s surreal to see a world without* an atmosphere and therefore a deep black sky. And before you claim it’s fake because there aren’t any stars, that’s because camera exposure to see the surface is too short.
*technically the moon has an atmosphere, but it’s around 10-100 trillionth of ours^
^assuming you’re reading this from Earth, and this isn’t being read in the year 2050 on a Mars colony
I was zoomed in on it, trying to figure out why it was making me vaguely uncomfortable and why my mind kept insisting this was fake, and I realized the problem I was having was that I was expecting atmospheric perspective to fade the contrast on the farther objects and make the horizon hazy, but….. no atmosphere.
i… am …disturbed
The preceding comment is interesting because it highlights one of the ways that our perception of reality can be culturally influenced.
You know how sometimes, when you’re watching a movie with computer-generated special effects, you can just tell whether certain scenes are CGI, even though you can’t put your finger on exactly why?
Well, one of the things your brain is picking up on to make that determination is missing or incorrectly simulated atmospheric haze; this is highly characteristic of cheap CGI because atmospheric haze is a huge pain in the ass to correctly calculate – most low-budget productions either omit it entirely, or else fake it with simple linear distance fog.
That’s why photos of the Lunar surface and objects in outer space tend to look fake to modern audiences: we’ve been unconsciously conditioned to associate wonky atmospheric haze with bad CGI.
Space is so creepy and wonderful. Who the hell needs hell when there’s space.
Like there’s an old constellation called Eridanus that you can see in the southern sky, and its not a very interesting constellation. It’s a river. It’s actually the water that’s pouring out of Aquarius, so in the sky it’s kind of boring. It’s a path of stars.
But within Eridanus, in between the stars, there’s a place where the background radiation is unexplainably cold. Because after the Big Bang, there was all this light that scattered everywhere, and it’s the oldest light in the universe, but we can’t see it. It’s so dim that it only shows up as a glow of microwaves, so to us, it just looks like the blackness of the night.
But there’s this spot in Eridanus where that little glow of ancient microwaves isn’t what it should be. It’s cold and dark.
And it’s enormous. Like a billion light year across. Of mostly just emptiness. And we don’t know why. One theory is that it’s simply a huge void, like a place where there are no galaxies. Voids like that do exist. Most of them are smaller, but they’re a sort of predictable part of the structure of the universe. The cold spot in Eridanus, if it were a void, would be so enormous that it would change how we understand the universe.
But another theory is that this cold spot is actually the place where a parallel universe is tangled with our own.