I think it would be cool if aliens landed in some high tech shiny silent spaceship, got out of it, and asked to be presented with George Soros and Bill Gates. The right wing nutjobs would go crazy over it. They'd ask the aliens if they're sure they don't want to see trump and it would be the first time anyone on earth heard an alien laugh.
I think it would be cool if aliens landed in some high tech shiny silent spaceship, got out of it, and asked to be presented with George Soros and Bill Gates. The right wing nutjobs would go crazy over it. They'd ask the aliens if they're sure they don't want to see trump and it would be the first time anyone on earth heard an alien laugh.
Cool. I didn't know that. Also haven't seen any right wing outrage that astronomers are biased. At least not yet. Maybe they did before but I missed it.
I just hope aliens don't confront me. Hell, they'd not believe any of it. They'd either kill me straight off or just get back in and head home, doing the equivalent of an alien head shake the whole time back. Some of them would say "man, I ain't never going back to that place." And that would be how I saved the world.
... I just hope aliens don't confront me. Hell, they'd not believe any of it. They'd either kill me straight off or just get back in and head home, doing the equivalent of an alien head shake the whole time back. Some of them would say "man, I ain't never going back to that place." And that would be how I saved the world.
... The ultramassive black hole, one of just four ever observed, is more than 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, a new study said....
The mass of all the stars in the galaxy, dubbed Abell 1201, is more than a trillion times that of our Sun, meaning it would be expected to have a particularly large black hole at its centre....
My mind boggles at astronomical facts.
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
... I just hope aliens don't confront me. Hell, they'd not believe any of it. They'd either kill me straight off or just get back in and head home, doing the equivalent of an alien head shake the whole time back. Some of them would say "man, I ain't never going back to that place." And that would be how I saved the world.
... The ultramassive black hole, one of just four ever observed, is more than 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, a new study said....
The mass of all the stars in the galaxy, dubbed Abell 1201, is more than a trillion times that of our Sun, meaning it would be expected to have a particularly large black hole at its centre....
My mind boggles at astronomical facts.
I always liked those cartoon black holes....a character whips one out (it's just a black circle), throws it on the floor or wall in front of him, jumps into it, then reaches out and pulls the hole in after him. It's perfect.
... The most powerful rocket ever built was scheduled to blast off any time between 9:28 a.m. and 10 a.m. EDT from its South Texas launching pad ...
Love the euphemism, one of the best of the year. Is that what's happened to Twitter?
... If the launch does light as planned, it will happen on 4/20, a number that SpaceX founder Elon Musk likes to add to several public events and related to cannabis, the Times reported. When he proposed to buy Twitter, he offered $54.20 and when he said he would take Telsa private it had to hit a share price of $420.
We have a scapegoat!
NASA is watching the SpaceX launch closely, as the success of Starship has a direct effect on the Artemis III mission. NASA will use a variant of Starship to land humans on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years....
Starts going wrong around 3:45, explosion at 4:15.
Not sure why folks cheered. Maybe they thought it was supposed to happen.
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
... The eclipse will be seen over Australia, East Timor and the eastern Indonesian islands. The moon’s shadow will pass in front of the sun beginning at 9:34 p.m. EDT on Wednesday and will end at 2:59 a.m. EDT on Thursday according to timeanddate.com.
The eclipse is known as a hybrid solar eclipse because the event combines a total solar eclipse and an annular solar eclipse.
A solar eclipse happens when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, blocking out the light of the sun. An annular eclipse happens when the moon does not totally block out the sun, but blocks out most of it leaving a halo around the moon’s outer edges.
If you can’t make it to Australia to see the solar show, you can watch it online at timeanddate.com. The site will livestream the event....
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
Love the euphemism, one of the best of the year. Is that what's happened to Twitter?
Jordan Klepper on The Daily Show, paraphrased: This was for all the haters that said Elon Musk could not possibly destroy something faster than he did Twitter.
Twice in one week! You're welcome, America.
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
... It will be the latest in a series of solar storms that have hit our planet in recent months, as the sun nears a peak of activity.
The storms have sparked auroras that have been seen as far south as North Carolina, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, California, and Oklahoma.
Here's how to spot the dazzling spectacle:
How to spot and snap the aurora
Before heading out, check the aurora forecast on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website to see if you could see the aurora in your area.
NASA predicts the storm could hit as a moderate (G2) to strong (G3) storm, about halfway up the geomagnetic storm scale, per spaceweather.com.
If the storm hits as a G3, the aurora could descend to mid-latitudes and could be seen in states like Oregon, Nebraska, and Virginia, per spaceweather.com....
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
... I just hope aliens don't confront me. Hell, they'd not believe any of it. They'd either kill me straight off or just get back in and head home, doing the equivalent of an alien head shake the whole time back. Some of them would say "man, I ain't never going back to that place." And that would be how I saved the world.
I always liked those cartoon black holes....a character whips one out (it's just a black circle), throws it on the floor or wall in front of him, jumps into it, then reaches out and pulls the hole in after him. It's perfect.
... Brad Tucker from the Australian National University (ANU) estimated the meteor was between half a metre and a metre in size and would have been travelling 100,000 to 150,000 kilometres per hour....
Dr Tucker said meteorites were likely to be on the ground, but would appear as small rocks....
Cool.
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
Because the eclipse will move across the country — and will cross time zones — it'll occur at slightly different times depending on your location. If we use Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) to explain the global duration of the total solar eclipse, here's the breakdown:
Partial eclipse begins: 15:42 UTC
Total eclipse begins: 16:38 UTC
Greatest eclipse: 18:17 UTC
Total eclipse ends: 19:55 UTC
Partial eclipse ends: 20:52 UTC ...
Maximum possible totality is about 8 minutes. Over 3 hours is ridiculous. In fact, the article says as much in the immediately preceding sentence:
... The total solar eclipse will happen on April 8, 2024. The entire eclipse will last a few hours, but totality will last just a few minutes.
Then:
Wow, the people of Alaska will get a really good view of the eclipse . . . including the residents of Alaska's capital, Little Rock.
This was posted by TRAVEL + LEISURE magazine at least 24 hours ago. Neither glaring flub has been fixed yet.
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
FILE - A commercial airliner flies Northwest across Lake Michigan in front of the "Full Buck" supermoon, the first of four supermoons in 2023, July 3, 2023, in Chicago. The cosmos is offering up a double feature in August: a pair of supermoons. Catch the first show Tuesday night, Aug. 2, as the full moon rises in the southeast.
The cosmos is offering up a double feature in August: a pair of supermoons culminating in a rare blue moon.
Catch the first show Tuesday evening as the full moon rises in the southeast, appearing slightly brighter and bigger than normal. That’s because it will be closer than usual, just 222,159 miles (357,530 kilometers) away, thus the supermoon label.
The moon will be even closer the night of Aug. 30 — a scant 222,043 miles (357,344 kilometers) distant. Because it’s the second full moon in the same month, it will be what's called a blue moon....
The last time two full supermoons graced the sky in the same month was in 2018. It won’t happen again until 2037, according to Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project.
Masi will provide a live webcast of Tuesday evening’s supermoon, as it rises over the Coliseum in Rome....
This year’s first supermoon was in July. The fourth and last will be in September. The two in August will be closer than either of those....
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
An upcoming NASA launch to the International Space Station may be visible to people in multiple states in the eastern U.S.
Weather permitting, NASA will launch the Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket Aug. 1 at 8:31 p.m. ET from the NASA from the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island in eastern Virginia. According to NASA, the launch may be visible to residents throughout the mid-Atlantic region and possibly on the East Coast....
Looks like we're a little too far west according to the map and it's supposed to be partly cloudy for us, but maybe ...
The supermoon (above) is tomorrow just after sunset (9:02 PM), too.
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
... A more sinister proposition lurks in The Three-Body Problem, the brilliant and bestselling science-fiction trilogy by Cixin Liu, the Chinese author.
Alien-hunters have long been perplexed by The Fermi Paradox, which asks why, if aliens are so clever, we haven’t met them yet.
Cixin presents a solution, the “dark forest theory”, first proposed by David Brin in 1983. This suggests that any advanced civilisation would eventually present a threat, so it’s logical for a more advanced civilisation to destroy it as soon as possible.
In this universe, the only societies that endured would be those that kept shtum. The books are being adapted by the producers behind Game of Thrones. Even more people will be aware of the books’ dark premise: that if we don’t stop mucking around in space, something much worse than winter will be coming.
"shtum"? Ah:
shtum: quiet, silent (Yid. שטום shtum "mute", German stumm)
Yiddish. First for me. Are we expecting Jewish aliens with space lasers?
Anyhow,
Perhaps the best we can hope for is that any obscure powers lurking out there are studying broadcasts from the dawn of radio until now. They would see Woodrow Wilson and JFK give way to Donald Trump, Churchill and Atlee to Boris Johnson. A civilisation that walked on the Moon and had supersonic airliners now squabbles online over whether Barbie is feminist and which loos people ought to use.
These watchers of our skies would conclude that, rather than advancing towards galaxy-ruling technology of our own, we are going backwards.
Who would bother to destroy a civilisation that is doing a perfectly good job of destroying itself? We thought it would be our ingenuity that would save us, but our stupidity may prove more valuable.
A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
-- Charlie Sykes on MSNBC
1312. ETTD.
“Picture of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail… A new world is unveiled everyday.”
"The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a follow-up to its first images that were revealed last month. The photo is of the Cartwheel Galaxy and is a composite image created from its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)."
Tonight, super blue moon, about 7:44 pm. Cloudy here.
India, peacock.
The supermoon rises behind the ancient temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, about 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of Athens, Greece, Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)
Better yet, AOC has an asteroid named after her.
You've written your personal scifi novel.
My mind boggles at astronomical facts.
Then:
