Figures...

Steven Hawking has partnered with Yuri Milner to send “nano craft” the size of a postage stamp equipped with micro HD cameras and communication to our closest neighboring solar system. The tiny spacecraft will weigh just fractions of an ounce and will be capable of traveling at 20-25 percent of the speed of light. An array of lasers would propel the tiny vehicle up to 47,000 miles per second. At that speed, the craft could reach the closest star, Alpha Centauri, in about 20 years. Alpha Centauri is 4.4 light years (26 trillion miles) from Earth. The endeavor is ambitious, as this distance is 3,000 times farther than any man-made craft has flown.

Stephen Hawking has announced the project, dubbed “Breakthrough Starshot,” on his Facebook page on Tuesday this week.

Your regular commercial airliner, like a Boeing 747 is fast. A super-spy jet like the SR-71 Blackbird is much faster than that, traveling at over three times the speed of sound. So how does a deep-space probe like New Horizons, which recently flew past Pluto, compare? Thanks to this animation, you can see it’s very, very fast indeed!

Arp 159 and NGC 4725                                                                               

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/7/10729338/academics-study-government-officials

Close-up of the Bubble Nebula

(via APOD; Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Legacy Archive; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt )

It’s the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant molecular cloud, visible to the right. At this place in space, an irresistible force meets an immovable object in an interesting way. The cloud is able to contain the expansion of the bubble gas, but gets blasted by the hot radiation from the bubble’s central star. The radiation heats up dense regions of the molecular cloud causing it to glow. The Bubble Nebula, featured here in scientifically mapped colors to bring up contrast, is about 10 light-years across and part of a much larger complex of stars and shells. The Bubble Nebula can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia).

1969 photos of Neil Armstrong practicing for the moon landing. Or faking it. 

via Paleofuture

Robert McCall

NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula from NASA APOD, 22 April 2016

UFO Sighting 2007-July 3-United Kingdom

The picture was taken around sunset. Witness reports that his wife noticed a stationary, very reflective object behind the cloud and being completely flummoxed about it told him to get the camera. As he raised the camera and increased the zoom, the object suddenly started moving at an incredibly fast speed, witness stated “I just pressed the button several times”. We got several pics, but it only appeared in one, the first one. It was gone in an instant… The witness choose a UFO site on the internet by random to anonymously report the sighting.