The thread for space cadets!
- Thread starter hobbsyoyo
- Start date
Freak Tesla accidents; superyachts sinking; submersibles imploding
Lots of billionaires risking their lives and dying lately.
Now another billionaire will attempt the 1st private space walk about 3 times higher than the space station!
3 days from now, on August 27th.
Polaris Dawn Is the Most Ambitious—And Risky—Private Spaceflight Yet
The Polaris Dawn mission—a partnership between SpaceX and billionaire Jared Isaacman—will soar to historic heights and attempt the first-ever commercial spacewalkwww.scientificamerican.com
Good luck Polaris Dawn
Polaris Dawn has been delayed 24 hours due to a helium leak.
No flight today.
Here are the 4 brave people performing it.
Historic Spacewalk From SpaceX Craft Caps Polaris Dawn Mission
The crew spent five days in orbit on a mission that includes the first spacewalk by astronauts from the commercial sector.
www.cnet.com
Polaris Dawn has been delayed 24 hours due to a helium leak.
No flight today.
Here are the 4 brave people performing it.
Historic Spacewalk From SpaceX Craft Caps Polaris Dawn Mission
The crew spent five days in orbit on a mission that includes the first spacewalk by astronauts from the commercial sector.
Delayed again until ???
The weather forecast for the splashdown area 5 days from now went bad.
Stargazers in Salisbury, UK, were treated to a magical sight as the Perseid meteor shower, seen each year when Earth passes through debris left by the comet Swift–Tuttle, rained shooting stars over the prehistoric monoliths at Stonehenge.
Taken by astronaut Matthew Dominick onboard the International Space Station, this photo offers an unconventional view of the Northern Lights. The colourful glows are caused by the ionization of gases, such as oxygen and nitrogen, in Earth’s atmosphere, often in the aftermath of solar storms. The Sun is currently moving through the peak of its 11-year cycle of activity, and scientists expect auroras to happen more frequently over the next two years. In May, the Northern Lights were visible on Earth at much lower latitudes than usual owing to a particularly intense solar storm.
Boeing's problem-plagued Starliner approaches the landing site at White Sands Space Harbor in White Sands, New Mexico, on September 7
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tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
Gotta wonder how Ian Banks would feel now about Musk naming his landing-barges after Culture Ships...
Qactus
Romani ite domum
Watching the spacewalk livestream right now 
www.theguardian.com
SpaceX Polaris Dawn: all-civilian crew completes first privately funded spacewalk – as it happened
Billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis take part in first privately-funded spacewalk
www.theguardian.com
Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon
Tokyo-headquartered company ispace announced on Thursday it is sending a tiny toy red Swedish house to the Moon.
Why? Because we've hurled so much junk to the Moon already, why not a house? More likely, The Register assumes, money. ispace claims it's art.
"The Moonhouse is an artistic and epic story that Mikael [Genberg] has envisioned for 25 years. The story of the Moonhouse, a small red house on the surface of the Moon, will finally come to fruition with ispace leading to an iconic artwork filled with new possibilities and new ideas," explained the private spacefaring concern.
Genberg is known for creating whimsical architectual structures in unusual places – for instance, a treehouse hotel in Vasteras, Sweden, or an underwater hotel, also in Sweden. He placed a red house, similar to the Moonhouse, near the top of Stockholm's globe-esque Avicii Arena in 2009, and has been looking to replicate the work on the Moon for a number of years.
Tokyo-headquartered company ispace announced on Thursday it is sending a tiny toy red Swedish house to the Moon.
Why? Because we've hurled so much junk to the Moon already, why not a house? More likely, The Register assumes, money. ispace claims it's art.
"The Moonhouse is an artistic and epic story that Mikael [Genberg] has envisioned for 25 years. The story of the Moonhouse, a small red house on the surface of the Moon, will finally come to fruition with ispace leading to an iconic artwork filled with new possibilities and new ideas," explained the private spacefaring concern.
Genberg is known for creating whimsical architectual structures in unusual places – for instance, a treehouse hotel in Vasteras, Sweden, or an underwater hotel, also in Sweden. He placed a red house, similar to the Moonhouse, near the top of Stockholm's globe-esque Avicii Arena in 2009, and has been looking to replicate the work on the Moon for a number of years.
EnglishEdward
Deity
That will really confuse the alien archaeologists in a billion years time.
An actual picture of an exoplanet, the closest, coldest and oldest we have ever imaged directly.
ε Indi Ab, 11.9 light years away. Six times the size of Jupiter, as far out as Neptune and only about 2 C. It is solar age, 3.7–5.7 Gyr compared to all 25 directly imaged so far that are younger than 500 Myr, and all but six are younger than 100 Myr.
This is the description of the image:
This image of the gas-giant exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab was taken with the coronagraph on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). A star symbol marks the location of the host star Epsilon Indi A, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph, resulting in the dark circle marked with a dashed white line. Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest exoplanets ever directly imaged. Light at 10.6 microns was assigned the color blue, while light at 15.5 microns was assigned the color orange. MIRI did not resolve the planet, which is a point source.
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stfoskey12
Emperor of Foskania
Interesting. I didn't think about how exoplanets would glow in the infrared, making them easier to image in an IR telescope.
bene_legionary
Believes in love
That’s cool! I was looking up the planned imaging of another exoplanet in Epsilon Eridani, AEgir, a couple months ago. Didn’t know James Webb was going to image this planet.
Comet possibly visible to the naked eye, amd perhaps even during the day with binocualrs!
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China on 9 January 2023 and independently found by ATLAS South Africa on 22 February 2023. The comet will pass perihelion at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million mi) on 27 September 2024,[1][3] when it could become visible to the naked eye.[5][6]
It should be visible in the northern hemisphere from about now, though it will be very low on the horizon before dawn.
There will be a better chance from around 12 October, this time after sunset in the western sky.
[td]
Why we see comets: the same reason we see peoples breath:
Forward-scattering by the dust particles around a comet increases with the comet's phase angle relative to Earth and the Sun (marked β in the diagram). In other words, the closer the comet is to the Sun on the sky — that is, the closer the phase angle approaches 180° — the brighter it appears. At the highest phase angles, the comet appears in nearly the same direction as the Sun and its dust glows brightly, the same way your breath looks like a brilliant white cloud when backlit by the Sun on a cold morning.
Your breath on a cold morning appears even brighter if it's backlit (left). Likewise, the images of glowing, backlit plumes of water, ice and gas photographed by NASA's Cassini spacecraft at Enceladus appeared brighter due to the high phase angle. In both cases, the observer is looking nearly in the direction of the light source.
Current position:
Map showing Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) in Sextans on September, 28 2024. Field of view: 50x30 degrees
Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) on 28 September 2024, as seen from Crete. The image was obtained with a Samyang 135mm f/2 lens and a stock Olympus E-PL5. 26x8s tracked frames were stacked in DSS (total exposure time 3 minutes 28 seconds) and edited in SIRIL.
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China on 9 January 2023 and independently found by ATLAS South Africa on 22 February 2023. The comet will pass perihelion at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million mi) on 27 September 2024,[1][3] when it could become visible to the naked eye.[5][6]
It should be visible in the northern hemisphere from about now, though it will be very low on the horizon before dawn.
There will be a better chance from around 12 October, this time after sunset in the western sky.
Date | Phase angle | Baseline magnitude | Enhancement magnitude | Visual magnitude with forward-scattering |
| Sept. 29.0 UT | 100.5° | 2.4 | –0.3 | 2.1 |
| Oct. 2.0 | 121.3° | 2.2 | –1.1 | 1.1 |
| Oct. 5.0 | 143.3° | 2.1 | –2.5 | –0.4 |
| Oct. 6.0 | 150.9° | 2.1 | –3.2 | –1.1 |
| Oct. 7.0 | 158.6° | 2.1 | –4.1 | –2.0 |
| Oct. 8.0 | 166.1° | 2.1 | –5.3 | –3.3 |
| Oct. 9.0 | 172.1° | 2.1 | –6.7 | –4.6 |
| Oct. 9.4 | 173.0° | 2.1 | –6.9 | –4.8 |
| Oct. 10.0 | 171.5° | 2.1 | –6.5 | –4.4 |
| Oct. 11.0 | 164.9° | 2.2 | –5.1 | –2.9 |
| Oct. 12.0 | 157.0° | 2.3 | –3.9 | –1.6 |
| Oct. 13.0 | 148.9° | 2.4 | –3.0 | –0.6 |
| Oct. 14.0 | 140.9° | 2.5 | –2.3 | 0.2 |
| Oct. 15.0 | 133.2° | 2.7 | –1.7 | 0.9 |
| Oct. 18.0 | 112.9° | 3.2 | –0.7 | 2.5 |
| Oct. 21.0 | 96.9° | 3.8 | –0.2 | 3.6 |
Spoiler What the angle means :
Why we see comets: the same reason we see peoples breath:
Forward-scattering by the dust particles around a comet increases with the comet's phase angle relative to Earth and the Sun (marked β in the diagram). In other words, the closer the comet is to the Sun on the sky — that is, the closer the phase angle approaches 180° — the brighter it appears. At the highest phase angles, the comet appears in nearly the same direction as the Sun and its dust glows brightly, the same way your breath looks like a brilliant white cloud when backlit by the Sun on a cold morning.
Your breath on a cold morning appears even brighter if it's backlit (left). Likewise, the images of glowing, backlit plumes of water, ice and gas photographed by NASA's Cassini spacecraft at Enceladus appeared brighter due to the high phase angle. In both cases, the observer is looking nearly in the direction of the light source.
Current position:
Map showing Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) in Sextans on September, 28 2024. Field of view: 50x30 degrees
Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) on 28 September 2024, as seen from Crete. The image was obtained with a Samyang 135mm f/2 lens and a stock Olympus E-PL5. 26x8s tracked frames were stacked in DSS (total exposure time 3 minutes 28 seconds) and edited in SIRIL.
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Qactus
Romani ite domum
That catch is such an incredible feat. And it was their first attempt ^^
Wow, just wow.
Here's another, shorter video of it:
