Starscaping

Hoo boy, you are ska-ROOOOD! Because it's either the morning, and you need to get to work, or you're at work, or it's the evening and you need to do chores/spend time with your family/stalk people online, and here I am pointing you toward the Star Formation game, which in its addictiveness makes the infamous Falling Sand game look like eating your boogers in public (i.e., pathetically easy to kick...not that that's an actual habit anyone would ever need to break...no sirree, just trying to turn a humble phrase here...).

They could have called this Herding Hydrogen. Theoretically, you set off supernovae to compress clouds of interstellar gas so that they become gravitationally bound and collapse into massive short-lived stars which themselves go supernova. Basically though, you Nuke Stuff until it glows, and then it goes BOOM and Nukes other Stuff and the eternal cycle of Blowing Stuff Up rolls on. I submit that this is scientific evidence that the Creator exists and that He is a dude.


In not-completely-unrelated news, last night I got curious about what would happen if I held my camcorder--literally the cheapest commercially available model--up to the eyepiece of my thermos-sized telescope. The answer is that I got something that is pretty crap on any objective scale, but at least recognizable and therefore a smashing success personally. I'm posting this not to brag--oh hay-ull no--but as a reminder that the night sky is accessible even to those of modest means.

Clear skies!

Sea of Crises

a.k.a. Mare Crisium. A basalt-filled impact basin 376 miles in diameter and more than 3.8 billion years old. It's got some killer mountains around it, and it's a good place to go exploring right after a full moon, when the rest of the moon is still washed out in direct sunlight.

Conditions were suboptimal tonight. It was windy so the atmosphere was just roiling through the eyepiece, which makes for less than crisp photos. But it's supposed to rain all week so I gave it a whirl anyway.



Southeast of Mare Crisium are four big craters in an arc: Langrenus, Vendelinus, Petavius, and Furnerius, in order from closest to Crisium to furthest away. There are also a couple of cool valleys, Valis Palitzsch and Vallis Snellius. There are no true water-carved valleys on the moon. Some lunar valleys formed by faulting, some were carved by flowing lava (strange but true), and some are collapsed lava tubes.

Valles Palitzsch and Snellius formed another way: they were gouged out by immense chunks of crust blasted away from the impacts that formed the maria. Vallis Palitzsch is 82 miles long and 25 miles wide at the fat end. For reference, Mount Everest is less than 6 miles tall and Mauna Kea is just over 6 miles tall if you measure from the ocean floor. Neither would amount to much compared to the block of crust that dug out Vallis Palitzsch when it landed.

Vallis Snellius is another secondary impact feature, created by a chunk of debris from the impact that formed Mare Nectaris. It is narrower but longer, 367 miles long in all. Imagine a piece of rock several miles wide rolling from LA to San Francisco (actually some puritans would probably like to see that happen).

I wonder about the mountains, craters, and so on that were in the way of those juggernauts. I would like to have been around to watch them get flattened.

Some fun, huh?

Railgun!

The Navy set a new record for the most powerful railgun shot, and brought my dream of cosmically powerful weaponry one step closer to reality.

From the story:

Thursday’s test produced a record 10.86 megajoules, which sent the 7-pound aluminum slug at Mach 7 (more than 5,000 mph) for 80 meters, a roughly 20-millisecond ride.

Before:


Check out the visible shock wave. That's what you get at almost 1.4 miles per second.

After:


According to the story, the shot trap was a steel box filled with 2.5 tons of sand, and after the projectile hit it, it was splayed open like a flower. I wish we had some pictures of that, instead of this stupid billboard getting blown to hell and gone. Ah well.

Quick, grab your brain--before it explodes!

NGC 6543

I am a big fan of big explosions. And I'm not ashamed about it.

I also like to stare into the abyss, and I like having my mind blown by things that are unimaginably old and inconceivably immense. So maybe it was my destiny to work on sauropods. But if I wasn't so attached to dinosaurs, I'd be an astronomer for sure.

Supernovas are good. It's hard to beat a big ole whammy-kablammy. But lately I've been drawn to planetary nebulas. Despite the name, planetary nebulas have nothing to do with planets, they just look a bit like planets through small telescopes, like mine, or the ones around a hundred years ago when they were named. In fact, planetary nebulas are shells of gas blown off over hundreds of thousands or millions of years by the death throes of dying stars. Some of these stars later go whammy-kablammy, which is probably the ultimate cosmic twofer for any observers with a few million years to spend watching. A good candidate for that is Eta Carinae, which has already blown off a sweet planetary nebula that looks like twin mushroom clouds, and which will probably go supernova or hypernova in the next million or so years.

Eta Carinae

One of the best planetary nebulas is NGC 6543, the Cat's Eye Nebula,shown at the top of this post. I've had it as my desktop background since last June. Completely by coincidence, it is one of the things I got to see through the awe-inspiring and hellanormous Lick refractor last September.

Centaurus A

Supergiant stars blowing off immense glowing clouds of gas over millennia are pretty good, but even better are giant jets of crap blasted out by galaxies. That's right, folks. Galaxies. Active galaxies, like Centaurus A here (awesome composite stolen from APOD), emit huge jets of energy from their cores. These jets have their origins in the accretion discs around the central black holes, which eat stars for breakfast.

Just think about that for a while.

And look at the pretty pictures, which are of real things that really exist in our universe.

And try not to let your brain explode.

I dare you.