Fordred

APOD: 2008 September 4 - Spokes in the Helix Nebula At first...

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:54:21 +0100

APOD: 2008 September 4 - Spokes in the Helix Nebula

At first glance, the Helix Nebula (aka NGC 7293), looks simple and round. But this well-studied example of a planetary nebula, produced near the end of the life of a sun-like star, is now understood to have a surprisingly complex geometry. Its extended loops and comet-shaped features have been explored in Hubble Space Telescope images. Still, a 16-inch diameter telescope and camera with broad and narrow band filters was used to create this sharp view of the Helix. The color composite also reveals the nebula’s intriguing details, including light-year long, bluegreen radial stripes or spokes that give it the appearance of a cosmic bicycle wheel. The spoke features seem to indicate that the Helix Nebula is itself an old and evolved planetary nebula. The Helix is a mere seven hundred light years from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius.

If Gods Were Drafted Like Fantasy Football

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:26:57 +0100

If Gods Were Drafted Like Fantasy Football:

With fantasy football right around the corner, we wondered what it would be like if you had to draft your Lord and Savior the same way you drafted your fantasy football team. Can Buddha lead your soul to victory, or is he better suited as your flex player? Our in-depth analysis provides you with all the answers you need.

APOD: 2008 September 1 - CG4: A Ruptured Cometary Globule Can...

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:23:43 +0100

APOD: 2008 September 1 - CG4: A Ruptured Cometary Globule

Can a gas cloud grab a galaxy? It’s not even close. The “claw” of this odd looking “creature” in the above photo is a gas cloud known as a cometary globule. This globule, however, has ruptured. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails. These features cause cometary globules to have visual similarities to comets, but in reality they are very much different. Globules are frequently the birthplaces of stars, and many show very young stars in their heads. The reason for the rupture in the head of this object is not completely known. The galaxy to the left of the globule is huge, very far in the distance, and only placed near CG4 by chance superposition.

lolcat: I dun eben no…hao to begin to halp u.

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:13:03 +0100

lolcat:

I dun eben no…
hao to begin to halp u.

APOD: 2008 August 31 - Eclipse over the Great Wall Contrary to...

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:38:29 +0100

APOD: 2008 August 31 - Eclipse over the Great Wall

Contrary to the famous myth, you can’t see the Great Wall of China from the Moon … even during a total solar eclipse. But on August 1 you could see the Moon eclipsing the Sun from the Great Wall. In fact, from this location near the Great Wall’s western end, the Moon completely blocked the Sun’s overwhelming disk revealing a shimmering solar corona and bright planets in the briefly darkened sky. A main pass, The Great Wall’s Jiayuguan Fort, is also silhouetted in the foreground. The pass is the western-most of the wall’s passes and the best preserved, initially built around 1372 during the Ming dynasty. The nearby city of Jiayuguan in Gansu Province was an important stop on the Silk Road.

APOD: 2008 August 30 - The View from Everest What would it be...

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:15:35 +0100

APOD: 2008 August 30 - The View from Everest

What would it be like to stand atop the tallest mountain on Earth? To see a full panoramic vista from there, scroll right. Visible are snow peaked mountains near and far, tremendous cliffs, distant plateaus, the tops of clouds, and a dark blue sky. Mt. Everest stands 8.85 kilometers above sea level, roughly the maximum height reached by international airplane flights, but much less than the 300 kilometers achieved by a space shuttle. Hundreds of people have tried and failed to climb the behemoth by foot, a feat first accomplished successfully in 1953. About 1000 people have now made it to the summit. Roddy Mackenzie, who climbed the mountain in 1989, captured the above image. Mt. Everest lies in the Himalaya mountains in the country of Nepal. In the native language of Nepal, the mountain’s name is “Sagarmatha” which means “forehead of the sky.”

APOD: 2008 August 29 - Generations of Stars in W5 Giant star...

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:36:49 +0100

APOD: 2008 August 29 - Generations of Stars in W5

Giant star forming region W5 is over 200 light-years across and about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. W5’s sculpted clouds of cold gas and dust seem to form fantastic shapes in this impressive mosaic of infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. In fact, the area on the right includes the structures previously dubbed the Mountains of Creation. New evidence indicates that successive generations of stars formed in the W5 region in an expanding pattern of triggered star formation. The older, earlier generations of stars seem to cluster near the middle of the enormous cavities, with younger stars seen near the rims. Winds and radiation from the older, central stars likely carve out and compress surrounding interstellar material, triggering the collapse that gave rise to younger, later generations of stars farther out. In the false-color image, heated dust still within the cavities appears red, while the youngest stars are forming in the whitish areas. W5 is also known as IC 1848, and together with IC 1805 it is part of a complex region popularly dubbed the Heart and Soul Nebulae.

APOD: 2008 August 28 - Fermi’s First Light Launched on...

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:30:53 +0100

APOD: 2008 August 28 - Fermi’s First Light

Launched on June 11 to explore the universe at extreme energies, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope has been officially renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, in honor of Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), pioneer in high-energy physics. After testing, Fermi’s two instruments, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) and the Large Area Telescope (LAT), are now regularly returning data. Fermi’s first map of the gamma-ray sky from the LAT is shown in this false-color image, an all-sky view that looks toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy with the galactic plane projected across the middle. What shines in the gamma-ray sky? Along the galactic plane, energetic cosmic rays collide with gas and dust to produce the diffuse gamma-ray glow. Strong emission from spinning neutron stars or pulsars, and distant active galaxies known as blazars, can be identified by placing your cursor over the map. A prelude to future discoveries, the remarkable result combines only 4 days of observations, equivalent to a year of observations with the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory mission of the 1990s. In addition to the ability to monitor gamma-ray bursts, the greatly improved sensitivity will allow Fermi to look deeper into the high-energy Universe.

Photo

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:04:09 +0100

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as..."

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:08:19 +0100

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

- 101 Atheist Quotes - The Atheist Blogger

APOD: 2008 August 23 - The Matter of the Bullet Cluster The...

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 13:33:05 +0100

APOD: 2008 August 23 - The Matter of the Bullet Cluster

The matter in galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, fondly known as the “bullet cluster”, is shown in this composite image. A mere 3.4 billion light-years away, the bullet cluster’s individual galaxies are seen in the optical image data, but their total mass adds up to far less than the mass of the cluster’s two clouds of hot x-ray emitting gas shown in red. Representing even more mass than the optical galaxies and x-ray gas combined, the blue hues show the distribution of dark matter in the cluster. Otherwise invisible to telescopic views, the dark matter was mapped by observations of gravitational lensing of background galaxies. In a text book example of a shock front, the bullet-shaped cloud of gas at the right was distorted during the titanic collision between two galaxy clusters that created the larger bullet cluster itself. But the dark matter present has not interacted with the cluster gas except by gravity. The clear separation of dark matter and gas clouds is considered direct evidence that dark matter exists.

"IP is the glue that holds the loose collection of computing devices that we call “the..."

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:29:00 +0100

“IP is the glue that holds the loose collection of computing devices that we call “the internet” together. It is one of the most important inventions of the 20th century and testimony to the fact that when you let engineers build solutions with minimal political or commercial interference they tend to make things that stay working.”

- Addressing the growth of the net - BBC Technology

APOD: 2008 August 19 - NGC 6960: The Witch s Broom Nebula Ten...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:27:49 +0100

APOD: 2008 August 19 - NGC 6960: The Witch s Broom Nebula

Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light must suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was an exploding star and record the colorful expanding cloud as the Veil Nebula. Pictured above is the west end of the Veil Nebula known technically as NGC 6960 but less formally as the Witch’s Broom Nebula. The expanding debris cloud gains its colors by sweeping up and exciting existing nearby gas. The supernova remnant lies about 1400 light-years away towards the constellation of Cygnus. This Witch’s Broom actually spans over three times the angular size of the full Moon. The bright star 52 Cygni is visible with the unaided eye from a dark location but unrelated to the ancient supernova.

Video

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:37:50 +0100

"Oh, war. It’s just God’s way of teaching Americans geography."

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:44:32 +0100

“Oh, war. It’s just God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

- Jon Stewart (via noraleah) (via david)

Wooooooooooooooo, Imperial, here I come!!!! :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D...

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:53:00 +0100

Wooooooooooooooo, Imperial, here I come!!!! :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D

badminton shuttlecock (via jmpsmash)

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:39:26 +0100

badminton shuttlecock (via jmpsmash)

APOD: 2008 August 11 - Black Hole Candidate Cygnus X 1 Is that...

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:18:38 +0100

APOD: 2008 August 11 - Black Hole Candidate Cygnus X 1

Is that a black hole? Quite possibly. The Cygnus X-1 binary star system contains one of the best candidates for a black hole. The system was discovered because it is one of the brightest X-ray sources on the sky, shining so bright it was detected by the earliest rockets carrying cameras capable of seeing the previously unknown X-ray sky. The star’s very name indicates that it is the single brightest X-ray source in the constellation of the Swan Cygnus. Data indicate that a compact object there contains about nine times the mass of the Sun and changes its brightness continually on several time scales, at least down to milliseconds. Such behavior is expected for a black hole, and difficult to explain with other models. Pictured above is an artistic impression of the Cygnus X-1 system. On the left is the bright blue supergiant star designated HDE 226868, which is estimated as having about 30 times the mass of our Sun. Cygnus X-1 is depicted on the right, connected to its supergiant companion by a stream of gas, and surrounded by an impressive accretion disk. The bright star in the Cygnus X-1 system is visible with a small telescope. Strangely, the Cygnus X-1 black hole candidate appears to have formed without a bright supernova explosion.

How to regularly backup Windows XP to Ubuntu, using rsync - Justinsomnia

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:24:00 +0100

How to regularly backup Windows XP to Ubuntu, using rsync - Justinsomnia

APOD: 2008 August 9 - Aurora Persei Dark skies are favored for...

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:14:00 +0100

APOD: 2008 August 9 - Aurora Persei

Dark skies are favored for viewing meteor showers — so the best viewing of this year’s Perseids will occur in the early morning. While the Perseid meteor shower is scheduled to peak over the next few days, bright light from a gibbous Moon will also flood the early evening and mask the majority of relatively faint meteors. Still, skygazing in the early morning after the Moon sets (after about 2 AM local time) could reveal many faint meteors. Persistant observing at any time after sunset can reward northern hemisphere watchers looking for occasional Perseid fireballs. Astronomer Jimmy Westlake imaged this bright Perseid meteor despite the combination of moonlight and auroral glow over Colorado skies in August of 2000.