I'm more of a reader than a writer in 'Mastodon Space' but today I bring you something that those people I follow may not have heard of: what's likely to be the first attempt at a space suit, designed as early as 1936 in Spain. It was to be tested with a hot air balloon but unfortunately the whole thing had to be scrapped due to the Civil War. One piece of the original suit has now been found. In Spanish but Google Translate does the trick.
Why don't we ever see the far side of the moon? From Earth, it appears as if the moon doesn't rotate at all, but it does spin on its axis, just like Earth does. However, the moon is tidally locked to our planet. That means it takes just as long for the moon to rotate about its axis as it does to orbit Earth — roughly one month.
After years of searching, astronomers have finally detected an atmosphere on a rocky planet around another star.
But what a strange planet it is! 55 Cancri e seems to be blanketed in carbon dioxide gas bubbling out of a global ocean of lava. Like an image out of Dante's Inferno.
This scattered collection of stars is actually an irregular dwarf galaxy called Holmberg IX. It resides just off the outer edge of Messier 81, a large spiral galaxy located 11.8 million light years from the Milky Way and located in the direction of the Ursa Major constellation. This image taken by the Space Telescope shows that Holmberg IX belongs to a type of..... #astronomy#space#astrophysics#astrophotography
#PPOD: M51 (NGC 5194) lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbor, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbors one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team
Why were the northern and southern lights so visible over the past weekend? Let's talk about the sun's solar cycle, solar maximum, what causes the northern lights -- and even a conspiracy theory that the aurora were artificially created.
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#TIL that the American Enterprise Institute has built what looks to be a useful dashboard based on data aggregated by @planet4589 and @celestrak to visualize lots of information about trends in #space launches, #satellites and #SpaceDebris.
Bad news for radio astronomy AND optical astronomy. Not only is 'Supplemental Coverage from Space' (aka direct-to-cell) transmission unregulated at this point, but the 2nd generation of #BlueBird satellites will be monstrously large reflectors of sunlight.