NASA: 2016 Look Ahead

NASA just released thousands of high-res Apollo mission photos

The space research agency’s Project Apollo Archive made a massive update to its Flickr account Sunday, adding a trove of more than 8,000 photos taken during Moon missions from 1969 to 1972.

spoopy

Celebrate the Saturn V’s Birthday by Watching the Largest Rocket in History Fly

The Saturn V rocket is objectively the most badass vehicle ever made. Screw your SR-71 Blackbirds. To hell with your Maglev trains. Shove your hoverboards up your butt. The Saturn V, flagship of the Apollo Moon landings, has them all beat for style, performance, and historical impact, hands-down, end of story.

No doubt the launches were even more incredible to witness in person, but this visual mosaic of all 13 blast-offs is bound to give you a contact high nonetheless. Watch on, and pay your respects to this masterpiece of engineering, which repeatedly burned up in the atmosphere so that we didn’t have to.

You heard it right: That’s Walter Cronkite, arguably the most unflappable newsman in history, losing his shit over the raw power of the Saturn V.

“My God, our building’s shaking here,” he says with palpable delight. “Oh it’s terrific, the building’s shaking! This big blast window is shaking! We’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go into the clouds at 3,000 feet! Oh, the roar is terrific!”

We feel you, Walter. A lot of rockets have come and gone since the Saturn V was retired in 1973, but none have ever exceeded the sheer explosive wonder of this Apollo Age champ. It remains the largest and most powerful rocket of all time, standing 36 stories high and weighing about 6.2 million pounds when fully fueled. For comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, slated for its first flight next year, will stand 22 stories high.

“It has more capability than any vehicle in history,” Elon Musk said of the Falcon Heavy, “apart from the Saturn V.”

Alas, the Saturn V rockets were also expendable launch vehicles, meaning that only the tiny command modules carrying the returning Apollo astronauts ever made it back to Earth. But though we don’t have many physical remains of the beasts that gave us our first boosts to another world, we have plenty of nostalgically sepia-toned footage recording their pyrotechnic departures from our planet.

Mad props, Saturn V. You’re the real MVP.

Source: @vicemag​ [x]

Construction Starts for Camera That Will Capture More Galaxies Than There Are People on Earth

Beginning in 2022, the most powerful digital camera ever built will start taking pictures of the southern sky. Over the course of a 10-year mission atop a mountain in Chile, the 3.2 gigapixel instrument is expected to accomplish a feat that might be hard to wrap your mind around. It will record tens of billions of galaxies floating in space–the first time a telescope will have ever identified more of the massive celestial objects than there are people on Earth.

Late last month, the U.S. Department of Energy gave its blessing for researchers to start building the camera that will sit at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The gif above shows the three-ton, small-car-sized camera on the left. Illustrated is the system that slides filters down in front of the 3.2 gigapixel CCD, which senses light and is a digital camera’s version of film. The filters will let the camera record in light wavelengths from the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared. Learn more and see images below.

Keep reading

the sunset was violently sudden & spectacular tonight. these pictures were taken abt 2 minutes apart

What is this? http://space-pics.tumblr.com/ source:http://imgur.com/r/Astronomy/WhU2y3g

There Will Be A Supernova In The Sky In 2016

A supernova will appear in the sky in the first few months of 2016, according to astronomers working on the Hubble Space Telescope. The prediction is possible because they first saw the star explode in 2014 in a gravitationally lensed galaxy, which will make it visible again next year.

Gravitational lenses happen when a massive object (or objects such as a cluster of galaxies) magnifies and distorts the light of background galaxies. In this case, the galaxy cluster is so massive that it deforms space and time so that it acts like a gigantic magnifying glass.

Sometimes, these distortions produce multiple images of the same object. Although they belong to the same galaxy, the images we see were not emitted at the same time. Because light travels at a finite speed, photons will take a different amount of time to travel around the massive object depending on the path they follow – with some routes taking longer than others.

The supernova explosion that we will see in 2016 is a re-run of the 2014 one, known as the Refsdal Supernova. It was generated in a galaxy nine billion light-years away, and the lens is created by a massive galaxy cluster, called MACS J1149+2223, five billion light-years from us.

Read more ~ IFL Science

Image: This image shows the appearance of the Refsdal Supernova. The middle circle shows the predicted position of the reappearing supernova in early 2016.    Credit: NASA/ESA/HST  

This is what our night sky could look like guys.

• Use the hand you write with.

• Make a fist with your thumb outside, not tucked inside. If it’s tucked inside your fist, when you punch someone, you might break your thumb. The thumb goes across your fingers, not on the side.

• Don’t be like in the movies—don’t aim for the face. Face punches don’t usually stop people, and you can miss when they duck their head or break your hand on their jaw. If you want to get away quickly, or end a fight, aim for the chest, or the ribs. If you really want to do some damage, e.g., you’re being attacked, aim for the throat, which will make it hard for your attacker to breathe for a hot minute.

• When you punch, you want to aim and hit with your first two knuckles. Not the flats of your fingers, and not your ring or pinky knuckles, which can break more easily. You can use your weight, if you’re on your feet, to add wallop, and spring into a punch with your feet and torso.