Mothman: *sees Porchlight*

20gayteen is almost over. then we’ll have 20biteen. but what will we do for 2020

Orange Cat: [unfriendly/somewhat sharp meow]

Second cat slowly looks at the camera.

Man, filming, bashfully and sounding somewhat frightened: Sorry!

You ever just... yell about #space??

Country roads, take me home

To the place I belong

West Virginia, mothman mama

Take me home, country roads

I’m so proud of Red Gerard and I want everyone to know that

The Treesqueak is a Fearsome Critter that is said to reside in the forests of North America. It is a commonly seen Fearsome Critter and looks much like a weasel but has the ability to change color and wrap itself around tree limbs that is “chameleon-like”. The Treesqueak is said to have a number of different calls: “a whine like a panther, a squeal like a young pig, and sometimes a roar like a bunch of cannon crackers at a shotgun wedding”. 

I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographers’ fault. Bigfoot is blurry and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.

Mitch Hedberg (via archiemcphee)

After 15 years on Mars, it’s the end of the road for Opportunity

After 15 years of exploring Mars, a dust storm led to the demise of NASA’s longest-lived rover.

Opportunity has finally run out of, well, opportunities. After weeks of trying to revive the veteran Mars rover in the wake of a blinding dust storm, NASA has given up on ever hearing from it again.

After one last failed attempt to reach Opportunity February 12, NASA officials announced the end on February 13. “I was there with the team as these commands went out into the deep sky,” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a news conference at the Jet  Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “I learned this morning that we had not heard back, and our beloved Opportunity remains silent. It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete, and with it the Mars Exploration Rover mission as complete.”

Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 for a mission that was supposed to last 90 Martian days. Its twin rover, Spirit, had landed three weeks earlier on the other side of the planet.

Spirit succumbed to a stuck wheel in 2010 (SN: 2/27/10, p. 7). But Opportunity kept going. Over 15 years, the rover found abundant evidence that water once flowed and pooled on the Red Planet’s surface. It also shattered records for planetary exploration and shaped Mars missions for years to come.

But on June 10, 2018 — 5,111 Martian days into its 90-day mission — Opportunity went silent, caught in a massive planetwide dust storm (SN Online: 6/13/18). At first, the rover team hoped Opportunity could ride out the storm and wake up when the skies cleared. But it didn’t.