Duxgregis - I Had Tumbler One Time... Okay?

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (via mrs-princeton-dicaprio)

#ILoveIS

It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful it makes me want to cry. It’s the fulfillment of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people’s efforts, but it’s also the fulfillment of an idea suddenly becoming real.

Peter Saulson of Syracuse University, who has spent more than three decades working on the detection of gravitational waves.

Astronomers Strike Gravitational Gold In Colliding Neutron Stars

(via npr)

Au in some stars many, many, many AUs away.

Navigating Space by the Stars

A sextant is a tool for measuring the angular altitude of a star above the horizon and has helped guide sailors across oceans for centuries. It is now being tested aboard the International Space Station as a potential emergency navigation tool for guiding future spacecraft across the cosmos. The Sextant Navigation investigation will test the use of a hand-held sextant that utilizes star sighting in microgravity. 

Read more about how we’re testing this tool in space!  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Note to self: in order to write, you have to actually do more than stare at a Word document rereading what you’ve already written. For example, maybe typing new words would be a good strategy.

Mythology Asks

Anubis: How do you feel about death?

Atum: What are your greatest imperfections?

Bastet: Do you have any cats?

Hathor: What brings you joy?

Horus: What is one thing you've had to fight for in your life?

Osiris: Do you believe in the underworld?

Ra: Do you have any major responsibilities or importance?

Thoth: Do you like to read/write?

Arawn: What is the most terrifying thing you've ever done?

Bran: How is your health?

Brighid: Tell us about your relationship with your father.

Cernunnos: What is your favorite animal?

Danu: What is your relationship with your mother?

Morrigan: What do you think happens when we die?

Olwen: What is your favorite flower?

Rhiannon: Have you ever been betrayed?

Bragi: What kind of music do you listen to?

Freya: Have you ever been in love?

Freyr: Do you have any children?

Hœnir: Are you a silent or talkative person?

Iounn: How old are you?

Loki: What is the best trick you've ever pulled on someone?

Odin: What is your family like?

Thor: Would you consider yourself pretty powerful?

Tree: What have you done with your life? What are you going to do with it?

Aphrodite: What do you think of yourself?

Ares: Are you an easy person to anger?

Athena: Would you consider yourself an artist?

Apollo: Do you play any instruments?

Dionysus: Do you drink?

Hades: Do you have a bad reputation?

Hekate: Have you ever tried to communicate with the dead?

Hermes: Have you ever stolen anything?

Poseidon: Are you a moody person?

Zeus: Are you a confident person?

Jupiter: Would people say that you are intimidating or fairly approachable?

Pluto: Where do you think we go when we die?

Apollo & Dianna: Do you prefer to be up during the day or at night?

Mars: Have you ever gotten into a fight?

Minerva: Do you generally give good advice?

Proserpine: Have you ever felt trapped?

Plutus: Do you have a job?

Venus: Have you ever had your heart broken?

Vesta: Do you like being home or do you try to get out whenever you can?

Morpheus: Do you daydream often? Of what?

...what we stay alive for.

Edify yourself 👽

Weird Animal Facts (see 15 more)

I second this

petition to ban “slideshow” as an article format on the internet

I love this

Rachel C Lewis | @wnq-quoteoftheday | @wordsnquotes-online

I want to live with SOFIA in the sky

What's Inside SOFIA? High Flying Instruments

Our flying observatory, called SOFIA, carries a 100-inch telescope inside a Boeing 747SP aircraft. Having an airborne observatory provides many benefits.

It flies at 38,000-45,000 feet – above 99% of the water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere that blocks infrared light from reaching the ground! 

It is also mobile! We can fly to the best vantage point for viewing the cosmos. We go to Christchurch, New Zealand, nearly every year to study objects best observed from the Southern Hemisphere. And last year we went to Daytona Beach, FL, to study the atmosphere of Neptune’s moon Triton while flying over the Atlantic Ocean.

SOFIA’s telescope has a large primary mirror – about the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Large telescopes let us gather a lot of light to make high-resolution images!

But unlike a space-based observatory, SOFIA returns to our base every morning.

Which means that we can change the instruments we use to analyze the light from the telescope to make many different types of scientific observations. We currently have seven instruments, and new ones are now being developed to incorporate new technologies.

So what is inside SOFIA? The existing instruments include:

Infrared cameras that can peer inside celestial clouds of dust and gas to see stars forming inside. They can also study molecules in a nebula that may offer clues to the building blocks of life…

…A polarimeter, a device that measures the alignment of incoming light waves, that we use to study magnetic fields. The left image reveals that hot dust in the starburst galaxy M82 is magnetically aligned with the gas flowing out of it, shown in blue on the right image from our Chandra X-ray Observatory. This can help us understand how magnetic fields affect how stars form.

…A tracking camera that we used to study New Horizon’s post-Pluto flyby target and found that it may have its own moon…

…A spectrograph that spreads light into its component colors. We’re using one to search for signs of water plumes on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and to search for signs of water on Venus to learn about how it lost its oceans…

…An instrument that studies high energy terahertz radiation with 14 detectors. It’s so efficient that we made this map of Orion’s Horsehead Nebula in only four hours! The map is made of 100 separate views of the nebula, each mapping carbon atoms at different velocities.

…And we have an instrument under construction that will soon let us study how water vapor, ice and oxygen combine at different times during planet formation, to better understand how these elements combine with dust to form a mass that can become a planet.

Our airborne telescope has already revealed so much about the universe around us! Now we’re looking for the next idea to help us use SOFIA in even more new ways. 

Discover more about our SOFIA flying observatory HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.