Astronomyandgalaxies - GalaxyBrain

Sharp Nebula Shot!

The Boogeyman Nebula and Tarantula Nebula

30 years ago today, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot the space shuttle, piloting Discovery on its STS-63 mission. She later also became the first woman to command the space shuttle. She reflects on her career in #ASQ: s.si.edu/3SJEOQq

@airandspace via X

s.si.edu

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Eileen M. Collins, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, was the first woman to be the pilot on a NASA space shuttle flight. She recently spoke

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Apollo 17 Landing On Dec. 11, 1972

the number of spacecraft failures recently has been absolutely insane and it all comes down to tech bros barging into the industry going "it's not that hard wtf is nasa so bad" and then completely skipping out on any testing

The Star Cluster NGC 602

A image of star cluster NGC 602 from Chandra & NASAWebb is about 175 light-years across and it sparkles with the light from thousands of stars.

The star cluster NGC 602 lies on the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in NGC 602 have fewer heavier elements compared to the Sun and most of the rest of the galaxy. Instead, the conditions within NGC 602 mimic those for stars found billions of years ago when the universe was much younger.

This new image combines data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with a previously released image from the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope. The dark ring-like outline of the wreath seen in Webb data (represented as orange, yellow, green, and blue) is made up of dense clouds of filled dust.

Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC; Infrared: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeilder, E.Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani;

Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand.

Release Date December 17, 2024.

Hilariously funny that the guy known for wandering off without warning to look at birds was allowed to do this

To be fair, a lot of goofy-sounding rocketry/aerospace terminology has a legitimate nomenclatural role beyond just being silly euphemisms.

"Unplanned rapid disassembly", for example, exists as the necessary counterpart to planned rapid disassembly: sometimes a rocket is legitimately supposed to fall apart or blow up, so you need a specific term to emphasise that it wasn't supposed to do that.

Similarly, "lithobraking" was coined by analogy with aerobraking (shedding velocity via atmospheric friction) and hydrobraking (shedding velocity by landing in water), and it does have some intentional applications; the Mars Pathfinder probe, for example, was deliberately crashed into the Martian surface while surrounded by giant airbags, and reportedly bounced at least 15 times before coming to rest.

(That said, aerospace engineers absolutely do use these terms humorously as well, because engineers are just Like That.)

This was shot from Roswell New Mexico using a canon 6D, rokinon 135mm, and star adventurer. I captured about 30x30" frames during the deepest part of the eclipse and stacked them here. All of the data for m45 and the faint nebula was acquired during the eclipse, no compositing from other images here!