space photography is a weird case artistically b/c it's explicitly not intended to convey what the naked human eye could perceive but a heavily processed visualisation of data. so kind of more akin to like an anatomical diagram that has all the organs laid out neatly so you can see what the hell you're doing. but then space photography is also a weird case scientifically b/c it has aesthetic dimensions that account for its popular reception & also guide the data processing. like the choice of colours, saturation, &c are intended to produce a pleasing picture, & the picture is put to rhetorical ends: usually a kind of generic humanist delight with the advancement of (gov't) space exploration. so in that sense the space photograph is specifically most like the anatomy in eg a vesalius plate: an artistic piece, used to defend a certain metaphysics wrt 'man's place in nature' &c. not exactly an untrue image but certainly an artificial one (as in: the product of artifice; of an artistic process; not intended to provide a simple 1:1 visual translation of nature but to interpret & advance an argument about it)

Haven't seen anything about Ingenuity on tumblr yet, so I guess I'll make a post about it

Ingenuity (sometimes called Ginny) was an companion craft to Perseverance, one of the rovers currently on Mars. As opposed to any of the past rovers, however, Ingenuity was a rotorcraft intended to fly above Mars' surface.

After landing on Mars in February of 2021 and completing its first flight on April 19th, 2021, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to fly on another planet. Its original goal was only 5 flights, but it well surpassed that number, logging 72 flights with over two hours of in-air time.

On January 18th, 2024, Ingenuity lost contact with Perseverance midway through a flight, and a few days later, NASA had confirmation that the rotors were damaged, leaving Ingenuity incapable of flight.

So long, Ingenuity. You did so much <3

Source:

new webb image(s) alert! 19 galaxies imaged in mid and near infrared light

i’m just blown away by the detail in these images- jwst never ceases to amaze me.

you can find the full resolution images of each of these galaxies in the official release here - i highly recommend looking through each of them, they’re STUNNING.

Sad day for Martians,

Ingenuity, the ‘little helicopter that could’, the first ever helicopter to fly on another planet is down. It took its final flight on the 18th of January where one or more of its roter blades were damaged.

We weren’t even sure it was possible to fly a helicopter on Mars before Ingenuity, and yet this tiny little shoe box of a helicopter managed to fly in an atmosphere less than 1% as dense as Earth’s, flying a total of 72 times in the last 3 years, far exceeding the 5 planned flights.

Having arrived on Mars hitched to the Perseverance rover’s belly, this little guy has spent these 3 years scoutting ahead for Perseverance. But now Perseverance will have to continue its mission without Ingenuity. For the first time since its creation, Perseverance is on its own in that endless red desert.

(images of Ingenuity were taken by NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

Haven't seen anything about Ingenuity on tumblr yet, so I guess I'll make a post about it

Ingenuity (sometimes called Ginny) was an companion craft to Perseverance, one of the rovers currently on Mars. As opposed to any of the past rovers, however, Ingenuity was a rotorcraft intended to fly above Mars' surface.

After landing on Mars in February of 2021 and completing its first flight on April 19th, 2021, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to fly on another planet. Its original goal was only 5 flights, but it well surpassed that number, logging 72 flights with over two hours of in-air time.

On January 18th, 2024, Ingenuity lost contact with Perseverance midway through a flight, and a few days later, NASA had confirmation that the rotors were damaged, leaving Ingenuity incapable of flight.

So long, Ingenuity. You did so much <3

Source:

Ooh hello fellow space nerd! I just wanna say your blog is super cool and interesting. Me being a space enthusiast myself, I would love to talk with you about space and cool scientific discoveries in the future!

Also the Eclipse89 person uses a platform known as Pixilart, which I do as well, so I’m familiar-ish with them. Anyway that’s how I discovered your account!

mmbye!

hello hello! thank you! you can always message me or send in asks about new space stuff, soemtimes i forget to answer but i do try to message back/answer asks! :D

Hello this is the anon that asked about black stars, just wanted to say thank you and I'm so sorry for it being such a time-consuming question!!! Can't believe the author of the book I read didn't bother to clarify that black stars were just a theory...

of course! and no worries about it being time consuming, i barely had any homework over the weekend and i love reading about space so it was no issue whatsoever :)

i just got someone commenting on a post of mine saying they hope it isn't AI generated, so i thought i'd just make it clear:

i will never knowingly post/reblog AI space images. Any images I post on here are normally from NASA, but if I reblog something and it turns out to be AI generated, let me know! I want to showcase the true beauty of space and show everyone what's out there, not just what some ai thinks space looks like.

Hello hello! I was wondering if you could explain to me about black stars? (Sorry if this comes off as bossy!) It's just that I read in a book that they're the stars that are on the brink of dying and someone else (whom I do not think is that much of a reliable source) says they don't exist or that they're black holes, I would not be inclined to believe them, but books *do* get outdated so.. thank you so much if you can satiate my curiosity!

hello anon! i’d never heard of black stars before, so i did a bit of research. something important to note with this information is that i couldn’t find an article or study more recent than 2013, and with how fast astrophysics and cosmology have been changing, it’s likely that these are out of date, so take everything stated here with a grain of salt.

from my understanding, black stars are a theoretical alternative to black holes, utilizing semiclassical general relativity, as opposed to classical general relativity which says that black holes should exist.

the main study i was reading had a bunch of jargon i couldn’t fully understand, but seemingly, the main difference between black stars and black holes are that black stars don’t have to have an event horizon (in a black hole, the event horizon is the “point of no return,” or the point at which the escape velocity is so high it surpasses the speed of light).

another thing i read was that black stars don’t/wouldn’t have a singularity. this would be caused by quantum processes within the star creating degeneracy pressure (think: pressure between subatomic particles), which would prevent the particles within the star from occupying the same point in space and forming a singularity. this lack of a singularity would make it so light can escape the black star, but would be extremely warped and redshifted. this would solve the question of how information can be destroyed in black holes, but again, is very theoretical.

black stars could also be an in-between phase between a red supergiant and it’s collapse into singularity (forming a black hole), which may have been what you were referring to by saying “stars on the brink of dying.”

i would, however, take this all with a grain of salt as i mentioned earlier. these studies are from over 10 years ago, and a lot has changed since then (including actually imaging black holes!), which, as black stars seem to be an alternative to black holes given some inconsistencies in our knowledge, the fact that we’ve imaged black holes makes it more unlikely that they’re real.

i hope that answered your question, if not, feel free to comment or send another ask :)

sources:

Are you a Neptune enjoyer? well I've got some news that will ruin your day! (:

(yes, this news is a couple weeks old now, I had this sitting in my drafts and forgot about it)

We all know Neptune. the beautiful dark blue, windy planet, the farthest planet in our solar system, discovered by math, etc. etc.

[ID in alt]

right?

WRONG.

turns out, when voyager 2 imaged Neptune, the photos were processed in false color to better show the clouds in its atmosphere. While astronomers at the time all knew about this color change, throughout the 34 years since then, the sentiment got lost. Neptune was depicted as dark blue in everything from children's books to university books, and everyone took it as fact that Neptune was, in fact, that shade of blue. But it isn't.

In true color, Neptune is a much, much lighter blue, coming in at only a few shades darker than Uranus (cursed, i know).

Above is the false color image compared to the true color image, while below is true color Neptune compared to true color Uranus [IDs in alt]

anyways I hoped you enjoyed this session of cursed space news with jupiter! smash that like button and subscribe for more *awkward thumbs up*

Alright, time for the first real discourse of 2024.

Uranus- JWST NIRCam

This image also shows 14 of the planet’s 27 moons: Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Juliet, Perdita, Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Ariel, Miranda, Bianca, and Portia.

This picture shows Uranus's north polar cap as well as a storm just below the polar edge.

is there a smell comparable to space ? i assume we dont know because we would die if we tried to smell it but thats so cool

yeah if humans tried to smell space just like that, we’d die, no doubt about it 

but the smell of space lingers on spacewalk suits, and docking hatches when astronauts open them!

apparently, space itself smells like burning hot metal, or a hot barbeque grill with a slight hint of spent gasoline. The moon, apparently, smells like a gun after its been shot!

The coolest thing about it all is that the smell is actually what are left of dying stars- it’s literally the smell of stardust, and the particles smell like that because they’re so rich in hydrocarbons- something so very essential to life, and speculated by a lot of astronomers and astrobiologists and such to be the very thing life on earth started from!

another neat fact is that no two solar systems smell the same- ours smells like that because our solar system in particular is extremely rich in carbon, and other solar systems and places in the universe will have extremely different smells depending on what elements are most abundant in their system! 

i just realized it’s been a hot second since my last post on this blog, so here’s some of the photos i’ve taken over the past couple months at uni, some through the 21in on campus :)

seeing a lot of extremely positive moon and astronomy tags on my stuff and guess what

you can just do astronomy if you want. that is a thing you can do for free without any equipment or special education. i don't think enough people know this

see this website. it's a free sky simulator. it's available as an app for iOS/android, on the website itself, and on macOS/windows/linux.

whenever you want to go outside and look at the sky, take a look at stellarium and it'll tell you what you're seeing when you look up.

for instance this is roughly what you'll see if you're in the northern hemisphere around 7pm EST

it's all right there. you can just go outside and do it. for free

do astronomy

and reblog this for others if you already do astronomy or if this was a good/useful resource for yourself

Something I've been curious about for a while:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives . . . on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." - Carl Sagan _________________________________

no neutral option - choose whichever option fits you more/the best

anyone here interested in proofreading my mission proposal for my planetary science class?

(it’s about neptune if that interests anyone)