*** The Official Astronomy & Universe Thread ***

Having just watched Sky at Night those images are great to see Tibz.

While I'm here, Chris Hadfield tweeted this link yesterday...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aCOyOvOw5c

...to spectacular camera (and sound!) footage from a Shuttle booster. It must have been posted here before, because it's over 18 months old, but it's worth repeating. It is also worth saying that the DVD ISO linked from YouTube is an amazing hour or so of slow motion launch footage/commentary. We all struggle with ADHD tendencies when it comes to media these days, but this is well worth focusing on for an hour.

Ah... stuff like this makes me realise how short life is and how many lifetimes' worth of fascinating subjects and material there is out there to witness. I'm just grateful that there are so many talented people out there able to focus on relatively trivial* scientific matters in order to bring about such works of wonder like the Shuttle, CERN, and the tech we're all using right now.

I'm guilty of routinely seeing the threats and dangers in humanity's future, but we really do live in amazing times.


*In the sense that someone has to dedicate a lifetime of research into explosive bolts in order to get the Shuttle pinned down until the critical moment, and so on, down to paint research, foam design, etc. The closest I got to this kind of thing was a university project in the early 80's dealing with glass micro-beads in glues designed for use in orbit. It sounds exotic, but what I actually did was waste six months trying to get vacuum equipment to work. And I'm a lousy plumber, so I contributed approximately zilch to the sum total knowledge of mankind. :-)

Edit: 34:40-ish on the DVD has one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever seen as the sun passes behind the rising Shuttle. Breathtaking moment, somewhat spoiled by someone telling you it's coming. :-)
 
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Cosimo said:
Nice set of pics. :) Is it mainly old timers or a much wider range of astronomers?
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I would say most people there were probably retirement age, but where I was (in the field with the local east mids lot) most people were 30-50, but a lot brought their young children along too.

Very lacking in 12-30 year olds though :p :(
 
A picture of the moon taken by Junocam at 11:07 UTC when Juno was 206,000 Kilometres from the Moon:

yyla.jpg

Later today Juno will slingshot around the Earth using the planet's gravity to propel itself toward Jupiter.
 

This animation tracks Rosetta's journey through the Solar System, using gravity slingshots from Earth and Mars to reach its final destination: Comet 67P/Churyumov--Gerasimenko. Rosetta made three flybys of Earth, on 4 March 2005, 13 November 2007 and 13 November 2009, and one of Mars, on 25 February 2007. Rosetta has also visited two asteroids, taking extensive close-up images of 2867 Steins on 5 September 2008 and 21 Lutetia on 10 July 2010. Once the spacecraft is woken up from deep space hibernation on 20 January 2014, it will head for rendezvous with the comet in May. In November the Philae probe will be deployed to the comet surface. Rosetta will follow the comet to its closest distance to the Sun on 13 August 2015 and as it moves back towards the outer Solar System. The nominal mission end is December 2015.
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More:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta_overview
 
Came across a July article on the New York Times about propulsion engineers and physicists at NASA actively working on theories to develop a "warp drive" that may be able to bend spacetime to allow for faster than light travel relative to local space.

The theory has been around since the 90s but I guess they're focusing on it more now as technology advances.

Read the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/science/faster-than-the-speed-of-light.html?_r=1&

This is one of the models proposed by a Mexican physicist:
6a00d8341bf7f753ef01901e674b12970b-pi.jpg


In 1994, a Mexican physicist, Miguel Alcubierre, theorized that faster-than-light speeds were possible in a way that did not contradict Einstein by harnessing the expansion and contraction of space itself. Under Dr. Alcubierre’s hypothesis, a ship still couldn’t exceed light speed in a local region of space. But a theoretical propulsion system he sketched out manipulated space-time by generating a so-called “warp bubble” that would expand space on one side of a spacecraft and contract it on another.
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Stuff like this almost certainly won't see the drawing boards in our lifetime but it's promising that people with the knowledge to actually do it (in time) are actively exploring how it can be done instead of filing it under Science Fiction. The note about how nature has done it naturally anyway via the expansion of the early Universe is interesting because if Nature can do it then maybe we can too one day.
 
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