Picture Of The Day 2 - January 6, 2019

Space Engine on Pillowfort Coming Soon

Just to let all of my followers know. I have received by Pillowfort login and will be playing around with setting up a Space Engine blog on there.

http://www.pillowfort.io

I will still be keeping this blog as my primary blog, and my secondary blog rabbits and shark will also be staying here.

For the time being, I am just trying Pillowfort out, with the anticipation that Tumblr may eventually go under, but until then, I am staying on here, so please don’t worry about me leaving.

My Pillowfort link is below:

Sharkspaceengine

For anyone who doesn't know what Pillowfort is, it is beta blogging site that is possibly going to be an alternative to Tumblr. The site is currently still in beta and charges $5 for a key, but that is temporary, and once the main site is up and running there will be no charge.

Pictures of the day - December 2, 2018

Insight System - Third Planet orbiting Insight B (Insight B-III)

Insight B-III is the giant of the Insight System, being the most massive planet of both of the system’s stars. It is a massive gas giant the nears the boundary with a brown dwarf at 11.75 Jupiter masses. The planet has an active atmosphere from both solar heating and internally released heat and has an average atmospheric temperature of 147 F.

The planet orbits the sun at an average distance of 0.21 AU, and completes an orbit once every 41.33 days. The planet is not quite tidally locked with a rotational rate of 41.67 days vs its orbital period of 41.33 days. As a result, a solar day on the planet lasts 14.00 Earth years.

No major satellites orbit the planet; however, 30 asteroid-like irregular satellites orbit the planet.

Note the star visible in the last picture is the Insight System’s primary star Insight A. Viewed from the gas giant, the star shines with an average magnitude of -17.29, bright enough that it illuminates the dark side of objects to approximately the same level of lighting as the average living room.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight B-III

Polar View

Crescent View

Equatorial Cloud Bands

Nearby asteroid moon

Distant asteroid moon

Ten Interesting facts about Mercury

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. As such, it circles the sun faster than all the other planets, which is why Romans named it after their swift-footed messenger god. He is the god of financial gain, commerce, eloquence, messages, communication (including divination), travelers, boundaries, luck, trickery and thieves; he also serves as the guide of souls to the underworld

Like Venus, Mercury orbits the Sun within Earth’s orbit as an inferior planet, and never exceeds 28° away from the Sun. When viewed from Earth, this proximity to the Sun means the planet can only be seen near the western or eastern horizon during the early evening or early morning. At this time it may appear as a bright star-like object, but is often far more difficult to observe than Venus. The planet telescopically displays the complete range of phases, similar to Venus and the Moon, as it moves in its inner orbit relative to Earth, which reoccurs over the so-called synodic period approximately every 116 days.

Mercury’s axis has the smallest tilt of any of the Solar System’s planets (about ​1⁄30 degree). Its orbital eccentricity is the largest of all known planets in the Solar System; at perihelion, Mercury’s distance from the Sun is only about two-thirds (or 66%) of its distance at aphelion.

Its orbital period around the Sun of 87.97 days is the shortest of all the planets in the Solar System.  A sidereal day (the period of rotation) lasts about 58.7 Earth days.

Mercury’s surface appears heavily cratered and is similar in appearance to the Moon’s, indicating that it has been geologically inactive for billions of years. Having almost no atmosphere to retain heat, it has surface temperatures that vary diurnally more than on any other planet in the Solar System, ranging from 100 K (−173 °C; −280 °F) at night to 700 K (427 °C; 800 °F) during the day across the equatorial regions. The polar regions are constantly below 180 K (−93 °C; −136 °F). The planet has no known natural satellites. 

Unlike many other planets which “self-heal” through natural geological processes, the surface of Mercury is covered in craters. These are caused by numerous encounters with asteroids and comets. Most Mercurian craters are named after famous writers and artists. Any crater larger than 250 kilometres in diameter is referred to as a Basin.

The largest known crater is Caloris Basin, with a diameter of 1,550 km. The impact that created the Caloris Basin was so powerful that it caused lava eruptions and left a concentric ring over 2 km tall surrounding the impact crater.

Two spacecraft have visited Mercury: Mariner 10 flew by in 1974 and 1975; and MESSENGER, launched in 2004, orbited Mercury over 4,000 times in four years before exhausting its fuel and crashing into the planet’s surface on April 30, 2015.

It is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial radius of 2,439.7 kilometres (1,516.0 mi). Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largestnatural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan.  

As if Mercury isn’t small enough, it not only shrank in its past but is continuing to shrink today. The tiny planet is made up of a single continental plate over a cooling iron core. As the core cools, it solidifies, reducing the planet’s volume and causing it to shrink. The process crumpled the surface, creating lobe-shaped scarps or cliffs, some hundreds of miles long and soaring up to a mile high, as well as Mercury’s “Great Valley,” which at about 620 miles long, 250 miles wide and 2 miles deep (1,000 by 400 by 3.2 km) is larger than Arizona’s famous Grand Canyon and deeper than the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. 

The first telescopic observations of Mercury were made by Galileo in the early 17th century. Although he observed phases when he looked at Venus, his telescope was not powerful enough to see the phases of Mercury.

source

source

source

images: Joseph Brimacombe, NASA/JPL, Wikimedia Commons

js

Picture of the Day - December 30, 2018

Globular cluster. Almost 10,000 stars packed into a sphere just 100 light years across.

Picture of the day - November 27, 2018

Red and dusty desert world similar to Mars but with a much thicker atmosphere, glowing red under the light of a red sun.

Picture of the day - February 6, 2019 - (Very late post)

Ringed ocean world with greenish-gray colored oceans. The Carina Nebula fills the sky in the background.

Twin Sunset

Picture of the Day 2 - October 22,2018

Two sun’s setting viewed from planetary orbit.

Starlight

Red Giant

Picture of the Day - November 8, 2019

A scorched plant and its moon orbiting a bloated Red Giant. Both of these worlds orbit the star at twice the distance Neptune orbits from the sun, yet have surface temperatures of more than 1,200 °F.