Could this be the future? But IN SPAAAAAAAAACE?



Yeah, probably.

Check this out, as if NYC were on other planets:

http://www.space.com/21211-new-york-cit ... s-art.html

http://www.space.com/21211-new-york-cit ... s-art.html

Isnt that really mean to Charleston Heston? He'll have no idea where he is.


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Dudes! Curiosity been drillin'. Again.

Its so sexy, I sort of imagine this:



Oh yeah, you sexy space-car-laboratory. You get your drill on. Wear that low-cut top I like.

http://www.space.com/21223-mars-rover-c ... -rock.html

Curiosity first used its drill to collect samples back in February, boring into a nearby rock called "John Klein."

Who is John, huh? Why doesn't anyone choose me? Eh, you know I can't stay mad.

What? You did it again? Now, this, I am not sure if I can abide. I need to be alone.
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I'm back!

Commercial Space Flight

...is pretty important, you guys. Like, it seems like thats all there is gonna be, soon.

http://www.space.com/21222-spaceflight- ... tests.html

Have a good idea? Have a team of scientists? Want millions of dollars?

...what the hell are you doing here?

Check out SpaceShipTwo. Its pretty awesome: http://www.space.com/19021-spaceshiptwo.html
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I sort of wanted to cry, because of how awesome this is.

http://www.space.com/21201-star-trek-te ... aphic.html

It breaks down Star Trek tech, as if it were real. Well, it will be, eventually.

And for all of you on the other side, the Star Wars camp (I'm Star Wars, more of less), there is this.

Holy Crap, I could just sit there for days and read it. Actually, I think I did.

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/

Sweet mother of...the site is down. I think I need to be alone.

I guess you can go here whilst I weep.

http://starfleetjedi.net/wiki/index.php ... _Star_Wars
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Ok, I think I am better now.

You know how the other day, how I said the moon sucks and deserves to get punched in the face?

It was unpopular, but I stand by it.

What I do NOT stand by is the heinous bombardment of Mars:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... marscomet/

Don't you think Mars has been through enough? Losing its atmosphere and its liquid water? This has been going on for billions of years and it MUST STOP.

He has no home. Where will he go?


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The British are Coming!

...to space or whatever.

http://www.space.com/21225-british-spac ... -2015.html

European Space Agency astronaut Timothy Peake, 41, will be the first British astronaut to fly in space in 20 years when he launches aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in November 2015. His mission was unveiled at London's Science Museum today.

I guess that is still pretty awesome! I mean, better than this:



The English have a lot of rebuilding to do.
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Gany's Galaxy

Isn't she great? I feel like that announcer from Harry Potter during the Quidditch games. Anyway:

Good news everyone!
I'm going to tell you all about the exciting world of adaptive optics!

The atmosphere of Earth, as much as we love it, really is quite a pain in the ass when it comes to ground based telescopes. The light coming from the stars gets distorted by the turbulent atmosphere; this is why we see stars twinkle. It is also the reason that distant objects are very difficult to resolve with a ground based telescope, without the image being blurry. Over the last twenty years, however, astronomers have been working on ways to correct these abberations, and came up with adaptive optics.




The Gemini Planet Imager is an advanced adaptive optics system that should be up and running on the Gemini South Telescope in Chile by October of this year. This system consists of some "add-ons" for the telescope, which should provide the clearest images to date of distant objects, including exoplanets. The first upgrade is a Deformable Mirror, which is in fact a 64x64 grid of small mirrors known as facets. This system of mirrors is connected to 4096 actuators, and this allows for the facets of the mirror to be rapidly adjusted in order to correct for atmospheric turbulence.





Along with the deformable mirror, this system uses lasers, pointed at an area just to the side of the region to be observed by the telescope. The astronomers are then able to use the lasers to detect fluctuations in the atmosphere, and they calibrate the mirror system appropriately, correcting position up to a million times per second. This is the basis for adaptive optics.




When using these telescopes to observe exoplanets, another very simple upgrade is necessary, too. The light from a star is so bright, that it drowns out any light that might be reflected by an orbiting planet. Astronomers use a coronograph, which is essentially an opaque disk, to block out the intense light from the star, but allowing us to see the reflected light from any planet nearby.

In the image below, the dark blue circle in the very centre is the coronagraph. The area the coronagraph covers is much larger that the apparent size of the star, in order to block out as much of the light as possible. The planets are visible (labelled b - e) because of the light reflecting off them from the star.




This above image is particularly special, because although we knew planet "e" was there, we didn't think it would be possible to directly image it because it is so close to its star. With the new system in place on the Gemini, we should be able to improve resolution so that we can see objects up to ten million times fainter than a star. There is a worldwide project set up called "Project 1640" in which many adaptive-optics enabled telescopes team up and gather data from specific areas simultaneously, and the results so far from this project indicate a surprising variation in the atmospheres of detected exoplanets. The project is focusing on nearby star systems only for now, within 200 light-years of our own solar system.

So who knows? Maybe we will discover a new Earth that we can move to if we wreck this one!

Read more!
http://planetimager.org/
http://planetimager.org/
http://spie.org/x44517.xml
http://www.amnh.org/our-research/physic ... oject-1640

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You know what cool people do? They share these articles on facebook and twitter and everywhere else on the internet. I guess you wouldnt know about it.