What are /r/space's favorite Products & Services?

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Fun fact: Russia actually has more land surface area than Pluto does

EDIT: Some actual data (Yes, it's Bing)

Russia: 17.10 million km² (6.602 million sq miles))

Pluto: 16.65 million km² (6.429 million sq miles))

There's a game called Space Engine. I'm not at home at the moment, ~~so I won't be able to link it~~ but it's a free software that allows you to free roam around stars and universes. I'm not quite sure they are somewhat accurate to what humans have found but they are very close to the real deal. You can roam around the universe and go straight to the star (or any star) you may see intriguing and go straight down to the surface. It's a very cool software.

http://spaceengine.org

Yep, kids on the way; had to sell his home and move in on the couch of another silicone valley investor to finish the first rocket launch that landed his first contracts. Said he was days away from being negative. This is an amazing read <EDIT harmless joke out> https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/006230125X

Every time I think about a planet with methane oceans it reminds me of the time Niven set Pluto on fire. Given that Titan hasn't gone of like a giant bomb yet from violent meteor impacts, I doubt that a little spark from a probe's landing thrusters would set it off (should /r/askscience, I suppose).

It also strikes me that a seagoing probe, either sailing or submersible, could make use of the liquid methane as a fuel source.

Mostly, though, I'm waiting for a probe to send back ambient sounds from inside the atmosphere of another planet. Why the heck hasn't that happened yet? Galileo was in Jupiter's atmosphere for 78 minutes and not one thunderclap. Not a peep from the Mars rovers (atmosphere's thin but come on) and Huygens, in Titan's denser-than-Earth's atmosphere for 90 minutes? I would have been happy with the sound of just wind blowing on the surface of another planet.

Ah, who am I kidding. I'm happy with the outcomes of every one of those missions. Just seems like something as simple as audio should be included in these science packages.

Credit to CFCA for the first image. The second clip was created in Space Engine. The last image is of Gargantua from Interstellar.

I had the camera on a tripod and basically had to manually turn it a little bit every 30-40 shots in order to keep the galaxy in the middle of the frame.

Here's what a single frame looks like.

Edit: Since it's starting to get a bit buried, here's a repost of the details for this shot:

• Nikon D7100

• Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm f/2.8

• 400x1.6s exposures @ 12800 ISO

• 200 darks

• 100 bias

• 50 flats

• Processed in Pixinsight and Lightroom

&nbsp;

Also if anyone wants to check out more pictures, I recently made an instagram account where I'll hopefully be posting future shots. I only have some milky way pictures at the moment.

https://www.instagram.com/thericeeater/

Here is a list of all the new 262 potentially habitable exoplanets. #1 is 97% similar to Earth!

You can't 'play' with it, it's for sightseeing only. It's a virtual universe (known stars/constellations/planets are correct, iirc) where you can travel freely and land on moons, planets or asteroids (procedurally generated surface) and you can alter the speed of time.

Sounds like it would be right up your alley. You can download older versions for free and check it out yourself.

I believe I saw that figure from WSJ. I mean profit margins are pretty tight-lipped info, but I would believe that it was about 1-3% if WSJ were reporting. I would wager it's probably stayed around that going forward since they keep investing. Here's the article in question

That looks like Space Engine, a free space sim/toy, it's on like spaceengine.org

Edit: Here it is http://spaceengine.org

Edit: an I love it, it simulates an entire universe with procedurally generated planets that you can land on, you find some beautiful landscapes. It's even bigger than No Mans Sky. It's Relatively well optimized as well, it doesn't take much to run either.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The website is in Russian but there's a translate button in the top left corner

Thanks for using Universe Sandbox ² to create these images and post. It's humbling to see our work be used in this way.

And good point about the inability to scale black holes. This should work and is something we'll fix.

I'm the project lead on Universe Sandbox ². Let me know if you have any questions...

sci-hub for the win. All you gotta do is Enter the URL and it unlocks most paywalled papers.

Helped me a lot during grad school. These academic publishers are truly a scam. They really have no right to charge exorbitant access fees for articles when they contribute nothing to fund research and pay neither the authors nor the reviewers

> October 9th, 1946

Found a bit more information about it here (link for the lazy):

http://meteorshowersonline.com/showers/draconids.html

Edit: Turns out the Daconids are due for another visit this October, check it out, http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/meteor-shower/draconid.html

Good question. It would be local noon - literally halfway between sunrise and sunset - at 19:00 GMT, so west of the US. Also, since the Earth's north pole is tipped away from the Sun, you'd need to be in the southern hemisphere very near to the Tropic of Capricorn. So, French Polynesia. I think Tahiti is close enough!

[Edited to add: thanks for making me work that out! I just tweeted it, too.]

It's not the first time he does something like that. Well, by "he" I mean his entourage now, since he's dead.

Nice gesture, and interesting experience. Though I doubt any time travelers will show up. But we can always dream!

My Grandfather wrote this book! Excited to see it mentioned here.

If you're looking to read this book, Amazon has it:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/034543529X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_0qH3AbCEG5HKX

No, I don't see any money from sales, I just like seeing my grandfather's work being enjoyed!

This again. It doesn't matter how many will be inspired by a movie, what matters is what are the goals and funding proposed by POTUS and Congress. You can make movie like "The Martian" every year but it won't secure any more funding for Nasa and won't give the agency any tangible goal.

To talk about marketing is a misconception to begin with - Nasa isn't selling anything and they don't need public support. During Apollo project majority of Americans <strong>were against it.</strong> Their opinion doesn't matter, it's the government which decides what gets funding. You can just as well start gathering likes on Facebook or start a petition on Kickstarter.

Vast majority of people will see a cool sci-fi movie and immediately forget about it when the next hit like Batman vs Superman or new Star Wars comes out.

BTW here's an interesting paper on public support for manned space exploration: https://www.academia.edu/179045/_Public_Opinion_Polls_and_Perceptions_of_US_Human_Spaceflight_

Windows is easy to explain - they named it '10' because of bad coding (outside Microsoft). There is a common way to get the Windows version in certain coding languages (Java) which returns a string. Certain checks were straightforward [if (osName.startsWith("windows xp"))] but the problem happens with Windows 95 and 98, which are both relatively similar in how they handle things. This lead to people simplifying from two checks down to one (if (osName.startsWith("windows 9"))). This will break when there is an actual version called just "windows 9".

Microsoft cannot fix other people's codebases, and this could make the newer version of Windows a backwards compatibility nightmare. So they just skipped 9.

https://searchcode.com/?q=if%28version%2Cstartswith%28%22windows+9%22%29

I'm right there with you, and so are a lot of people. I still respect him for being one to inspire young children (he's kind of the Bill Nye of this generation), but he has lost a lot of credibility in recent years.

Recently read a book - Seveneves, and I'm pretty damn sure one of the main characters is NDT.

Those laptops don't run the station. They are just for communication and experiments. For station-keeping they use very cool redundant hardware: https://www.quora.com/What-are-computers-used-for-on-the-ISS

edit: more info on the MDM

Something happens similarly in the novel Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, and the plot is much much better. If anyone finds the subject of ISS growing and becoming a space-base for humanity, it's handled great in the novel.

if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. - Douglas Adams

I much prefer Snopes's view on this issue:

>This is one of those items that — although wrong in many of its details — isn't exactly false in an overall sense and is perhaps more fairly labeled as "True, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons." Marveling that the width of modern roadways is similar to the width of ancient roadways is sort of like getting excited over a notion such as "modern clothes sizes are based upon standards developed by medieval tailors." Well, duh. Despite obvious differences in style, clothing in the Middle Ages served the same purpose as clothing today (i.e., to cover, protect, and ornament the human body), and modern human beings are very close in size to medieval human beings (we are, on average, a little bit taller and heavier than we were several centuries ago, but not much), so we naturally expect ancient and modern clothing to be similar in size.

It's really gratifying to see Universe Sandbox ² being used to help reveal and explain how amazing our universe is. In addition to visualizations like this, you can collide planets and galaxies together, experiment with Earth's climate, and create your own Solar System.

I'm the project lead on on Universe Sandbox ² and have been working on it for the past 4 years with a team of very talented people. Let me know if you have any questions...

> They have seen and experienced things that literally 99.99999999% of people haven't and probably never will.

I was curious what the literal percentage would be, so checking 1-536(#astronauts)/ 7,586,628,175(#people as of a few minutes ago) = 99.99999293%

99.99999999% was literally a very accurate number even down to the sig figs! Have an upvote! :)

I'm going to make that my text message alert. The sound of two black holes colliding.

Edit: if anyone wants it. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1qL0XqBp0LEbVJaZ09wSFhhUkI2VjFKNXNHaEl4TTlyVlZJ/view?usp=sharing

Edit 2: additional link http://www.filedropper.com/gravitational-wavesmp3cutnet

Looks like somthing is happening. 1.6b may be a pill congress can swallow.

The new program is named Artemis (https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18622415/nasa-moon-return-first-woman-astronaut-artemis-program)

For more discussion on space politics specifically surrounding a program like this, I recommend this podcast: Space Policy Edition: Lessons From the Moonshot That Never Was https://player.fm/1vreVF

A bit of homework, but Ray Tracing in One Weekend is legendary (and free).

Disney’s short video on pathtracing can also help explain some concepts.

Another important thing is understanding the intersection that raytracing has with rasterization, since that is what consumers are seeing now with the new Turing cores. What the difference is, why people should care, etc.

It’s funny, I have been reading a lot online and observing people’s reactions to the new cards- and most of the backlash simply comes from not understanding what raytracing is. For graphics engineers in the industry, rasterizers (as brilliant as they are) always feel like a hack at some point or another- ray tracing is “the right way”, and that has us very excited

Amazing photograph, really captures what it was like. I was only at 8,930 feet across the border in northeastern Oregon, but this is one of the best representations I've seen.

For people who are curious about this question of life in the universe I HIGHLY recommend reading “Astrobiology: A very short introduction”. It’s put together by Oxford Press and they did a hell of a job.

It’s tiny, only about 100 pages long, and every single page is absolutely fascinating. I’ve been studying astrobiology for years and I was shocked at how well this book walks though what we know about life, how it started, and how likely it is on other planets. There were things in there I had never even heard of. It’s basically a cliffs notes on our current scientific understanding of life.

I literally couldn’t put it down. Everything is summarized and put together brilliantly.

Thanks for sharing the link. I'm the developer of Universe Sandbox, an interactive, real-time, n-body gravity simulator.

I've been working on Universe Sandbox for over 2 years and I am now working on it full time. The current plan is to keep improving, fixing, optimizing, and adding features as long as I'm able to support myself with sales of the product.

Please feel free to ask questions or share your feedback.

That said, Solar System Scope is a great looking, web based orrery and planetarium. It does a few things I haven't seen before, it's easy to use, and feels pretty polished. I'm impressed.

Rise of the Rocket Girls is a pretty good book about her and a bunch of the other women who were some of the first to work for NASA/pre-NASA organizations.

http://spaceengine.org/

>SpaceEngine is a realistic virtual Universe you can explore on your computer. You can travel from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy, landing on any planet, moon, or asteroid with the ability to explore its alien landscape. You can alter the speed of time and observe any celestial phenomena you please. All transitions are completely seamless, and this virtual universe has a size of billions of light-years across and contains trillions upon trillions of planetary systems. The procedural generation is based on real scientific knowledge, so SpaceEngine depicts the universe the way it is thought to be by modern science. Real celestial objects are also present if you want to visit them, including the planets and moons of our Solar system, thousands of nearby stars with newly discovered exoplanets, and thousands of galaxies that are currently known.

Doesn't include the new data in the OP, but still, this is what you are looking for I think. And it's free!

If you can't see the aurora from where you live, you can watch this live aurora webcam (there are other aurora webcams but they take an image every few minutes whereas this is an actual live stream)::

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwriDd8STdI

The camera is facing north if you see a tower and facing east if you see a dome; west if you see building and traffic lights on the horizon and south if you just see trees and very small buildings.

Depending on what you use to view youtube (brower, app) you can rewind about 12 hours and see what happened earlier. (I watch the youtube app on tv with a roku stick. Sometimes I can hold down the arrow keys to rewind, and sometimes the arrow key only moves 10 seconds per press which is useless.)

I use this android app, set its map to Churchill Canada (where that webcam is) and have it send me alerts so I know when to check the webcam.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jrustonapps.myauroraforecast

The app also has a global map with live geomagnetic info.

If you can see the aurora from where you live, you could install both the free and paid versions of that app to get alerts for your location and for the webcam's location.

Thanks for sharing the link. I'm the developer of Universe Sandbox.

Today has been pleasantly overwhelming. If you have questions, let me know. Thanks to everyone for the positive response.

So I messaged the mods asking if this was okay to post, but didn't receive a response. If this isn't appropriate here, I totally understand it being removed.

Here's the link in the Play Store for the free version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.afkettler.earth

I'm on the beta, and using the pro version, so it looks a little different.

So, a couple things:

• No, this doesn't drain my battery at all. And I've been using it for about a month now. It does, however, use a lot of RAM on the highest graphics settings, so I wouldn't use this on a low-end phone.

• I'm not affiliated with the app maker in any way, I just thought it was awesome and that the folks here in /r/space may enjoy hearing about it.

Thanks for the mention lord_geryon. I created Universe Sandbox.

The OP's (Knoerifaust) simulation is very cool and similar to the first gravity simulator I wrote years ago. It was a personal project like this that lead to the ultimate release of Universe Sandbox.

In the latest version, galaxy collisions are very simplistic. A galaxy in Universe Sandbox is simulated with a single point mass at the center around which the massless "stars" are in orbit. The problem is that when simulated this way the distant stars orbit much more slowly than those at the center which is not how really galaxies behave. In a real galaxy the rotational velocity of stars are constant.

We're working on a full rewrite of Universe Sandbox that we hope to release in 2013. Eric, the astronomer, has been working on improving the quality of the galaxy simulation by adding dark matter particles. Even with just a few hundred of these we obtain a much improved rotation curve (although, the low number also makes the galaxy appear to be less stable). We're exploring adding damping and pressure calculations to simulate the arms of a galaxy so they act like waves instead of static features, but that work is still quite experimental.

Let me know if you have any questions.

For a more realistic concept of Martian colonization, The Case For Mars by Robert Zubrin is an excellent read. Zubrin focuses on a smaller scale, less expensive method of colonizing Mars which involves three Ares class launches, one for a MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle), an ERV (Earth Return Vehicle), and habituation module. The MAV will use in-situ, or on planet resources to produce methane rocket propellant and fuel the crew’s method of leaving the planet once their stay ends. They will dock with the ERV in LMO (Low Martian Oribit), where the ERV will perform a transfer burn to get back home. This plan is known as Mars Semi-Direct (the original, known as Mars Direct, combined the MAV and ERV, but NASA necessitated the modifications that created Semi-Direct) and has been a vision of Zubrin since he originally proposed it to NASA in the 1990s. It should be noted, however, that one needs at least a small scientific background to understand Zubrin’s book. (Concepts such as ISP, deltaV, orbital mechanics ex. Hohmann Transfer, and chemistry involving synthesis of propellants as well as catalyst reactions. Most of it is explained but a minimal background in rocket science is helpful)

EDIT: this plan comprises NASA’s most recent Mars plan, which was actually designed around Zubrin’s suggestions and collaboration with NASA as part of the SEI. This plan can be found in more detail here

> Enormity is for things which are both enormous and terrible.

Primarily, yes, but not exclusively.

See definitions 3 and 4.

>3. the quality or state of being huge : immensity the inconceivable enormity of the universe

>4. a quality of momentous importance or impact the enormity of the decision

Venus and Jupiter are the easiest to spot right now. As soon as the sun goes down, if you look to the West before it's even fully dark, the brightest object in the sky is Venus, a few minutes later to the right of it will be a much fainter Jupiter. When it is fully dark and you can see all the stars, Saturn is just hanging out at the top of and following the Scorpio constellation right now. For a synopsis of easy things to see in the sky check out Sky at a Glance on Sky and Telescope

The thing that made it easiest for me to start tracking things though was this program - Stellarium, you can track where everything is and can manipulate the time to see where things will be in the future.

Shout-out for z-lib / 1lib. You can find most academic books there to pirate as PDFs. Fuck paying $150 for the 13th edition version 4 of some basic chemistry book just because your university professor gets paid to require it and nothing else.

https://z-lib.org/

here's another example using Solar System Scope[1] with 'realistic orbits' selected. Planets enlarged for emphasis. As you can see, from the Earth's point of view, the planets seem to be in line at this current position of their orbit.

[1] Solar System Scope

It's easier to comprehend if you fly around in it with this free Universe Simulator

http://spaceengine.org/

Also it'll give you a good ol' bowl of existential crisis'O's.

Trained?! HAH! I've been in the journalism business for 16 years, and no one is trained. It's a dying, lost art. The up-and-coming generation are focused on social media and click generation. It's the new way to make a buck. The old guard aren't much better. I've got a guy twice my age working for me whose stories are bland and boring. The meat is there, but all the flavor is gone. You have to choke his stories down like dry salt beef. Nourishing, but a pain to push through.

At 34, I find myself somewhere in the middle. I've seen so many "trained" journalists straight out of college who couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag. Only pounding the pavement on your beat really gets you learning as a journalist, and only then under the tutelage of someone who knows what they're doing.

I have six editors working for me right now, none of which have even heard of Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style." I have to explain basic concepts like "eliminate unnecessary words." Both journalism college and the old media are failing the next generation of news reporters.

Nice! My only comment would be, why do the moons look unnaturally large? Ganymede is the largest and it's only a fraction of Jupiter's size. That photo makes them look deceptively big when they should be just pin points compared next to the giant.

Edit: In response to a question I was sent, WolframAlpha has a nice comparison and illustration to give you a better idea of the sizes involved

Have you seen this article? It describes the (supposed) method of making what were at the time very accurate maps by collecting and combining as much data from ship logs as possible. Perhaps an interesting analogue to our current situation cosmologically.

The planets definitely did move with the rest of the stars. For this particular image, I used Photoshop to remove the trails of the three planets. Then I took a single image from my sequence, extracted just the planets, and added that to the startrail scene. Because the camera was on a tripod and all the images are aligned, the planet picture was placed accurately. Here is the original startrail with moving planets.

Like what /u/Booblicle said, I used special software that automatically rendered together all my pictures. I used software called StarStaX, which is probably the same as astrostack. I opted to do stacking because here in New Jersey, light pollution sucks the fun out of long exposures. Thanks to StarStaX, I can get a nice image. Not to mention I could go back and create a timelapse from all 186 images... like this one.

Nothing to get too excited about. The connection between chariots/wagons and railroad gauge is a really, really loose one. In fact, there are many different railroad gauges used around the world.

Here's what Snopes has to say about this notion.

Edit: Also, I noticed that Aldrin said that two horses needed to pull a vehicle side-by-side. Standard gauge is 4' 8.5". Try fitting two horses, side-by-side, in that space!

Mirror lenses tend to not be zoomable (Just trying to think of the optics for one and I can't). A search for the lens shows a very long "birding" lens. Not particularly fast (its an f/8-f/16) but if you pump the ISO high enough, its ok for a starting for wild life.

That said, your mirror lens approach is a good one. One can find an 800mm f/6.3 (even faster than the 420-800 zoom) for about $100 also. (amazon). I would certainly suggest the OP to consider getting that one for astrophotography. AS its a much shorter (physical length) and lighter, it will be easier to use on a tracking tripod mount.

The tech is used for all kinds of things now. Protein folding, cancer research, etc. I think there is a site somewhere you can see all the programs you could help out. Any search for distributed computer research should get you there.

Edit: I went looking. Here you go. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

NASA tests astronauts for claustrophobia as part of the selection process:

https://www.quora.com/Do-astronauts-living-and-working-in-a-space-station-suffer-from-panic-attacks-such-as-spelunkers-in-deep-caves/answer/Garrett-Reisman

They said elsewhere the total cost they put into it is actually about $400

Edit: and it was that low because they got this telescope for $250. Its a great picture with a very misleading title.

https://www.amazon.com/Meade-Instruments-Coma-Free-Telescope-0810-90-03/dp/B002AK4N74

Columbia had nothing to do with cold weather. Temperature in Titusville at the time of launch was over 60 degrees. Launch occurred on an average January day. The foam that impacted the orbiter (not ice) was likely liberated due to thermal cycles on the tank cracking the foam; this could have occurred in any weather.

Distance from earth to moon < Roche limit of jupiter

Even if it corrected for angular momentum, earth would be broken apart under Jupiter's gravity. It'd probably form some pretty rings, too.

I just did it with an mp4 wallpaper app and it looks great. Hoping it doesn't devour battery like some live wallpapers I've used.

I did some math and I estimate that if the aliens have a huge 1000 meter diameter telescope, and are only about 10 light years distant, then they might almost be able to capture a single photon reflected from the event. There are only about a dozen stars that close to us.

I put the calculation in a python script at repl.it so that you can play with the numbers. Just hit "run" to run the calculation: https://repl.it/BCC2

He was also the first man on the moon to take a picture of someone else taking a leak.

Source More Reputable Source

EDIT: Added more reputable source since people thought it was a joke. I believe he really does have that first. He just did it into his suit so there is no visible evidence.

Wait, $13,000 is enough to buy & build a telescope that's powerful enough to test this? That's super cool. I don't know much about the telescope time market - I would have imagined that the kind of telescopes you buy time on were not the kind of telescopes you might be able to purchase & build yourself.

Edit: This guy looks increasingly suspicious. Someone questioned his claims and credentials in the comments and he briefly appeared only to duck out. Guardian comment links seem to be flakey - here's the comment I linked: >"But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope – they are all booked out." >That is not true. There are several major facilities for which observations in January 2017 can still be applied for, and there is not a single one for which you can even yet apply for observations in January 2018. If his idea was good enough, he could submit it to the normal telescope time allocation committees. It looks like he himself knows it's not. And there is not even any reason to wait for the comets to be in a particular part of the sky. Just observe them, or any other comet, at any time, to see if they emit at that frequency. >He published his idea, but not in an academic journal. The "Washington Academy Review" does not appear in the Web of Science list of journals; it's no more than a magazine. >He also has no scientific track record at all. NASA's Astrophysics Data System contains no publications by him. >I also absolutely don't believe that you can build a high quality radio telescope in four months, even if you do have a good scientific idea and an academic track record. This sounds like it's verging on fraud and I am disappointed that the Guardian links to his money grabbing campaign without checking the facts.

I recommend anyone that is into space and has a PC, downloads space engine from spaceengine.org. It's free and an absolutely amazing resource the simulates the entire observable universe.

Agree, agree! The whole point of infographics is to simplify complex stuff, to make it easier to digest. This graphic does have a high information density, but there are too many distracting elements and not enough visual direction. For example, it took me three or four minutes of staring at the figure just to figure out that the inner dial was a temporal close-up and the outer dial was the "long view". How do the star graphics across the top fit in to the narrative? WTF is the lunar phase diagram at lower right for? All those colored arcs in the middle seem to mean something, but I don't think they do. Why use constructed sets of units for the dials, with microscopic annotation of what they mean -- when you could just use direct labeling by year?

This graphic has a high enough information density that it looks inspired, but it misses the point -- it's what Edward Tufte would call a "confection" that gloms multiple distracting elements together for artistic value only -- and the artistic/design value distracts from the main purpose of the graphic, which should be communicating the timeline.

BTW, I strongly suggest reading Edward Tufte's books on graphic design and communication -- they are absolutely brilliant and very accessible. "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is his first one, "Visual Explanations" is the most relevant to infographics like this.

> would it still be a 365 1/4 day year?

The number of days in a year has been decreasing. This is not just a physics calculation - we also observe it in coral fossils. Like rings on trees which tell you how many years old a tree is, some coral make a daily pattern. 600 million years ago there were 423 days in a year.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/229486/geochronology/70065/Coral-growth

One word - cashflow.

A value of $21 billion doesn't mean all that value is sitting in their bank account....because it isn't.

And their revenue? It's not "billion*s*" just yet.

According to reports (ie https://www.fool.com/amp/investing/2017/02/05/how-profitable-is-spacex-really.aspx), their revenue peaked at $1 billion in 2014, while net profit was 0.2%.... which is kinda 😳

In 2015 SpaceX "record(ed) a $260 million loss on $945 million in revenue".

So they need the funding to pay the short term bills, and hopefully they can start balancing their books better and turning a better profit.

I just went looking for it. Googled 'Hubble Deep Field Print' and the top hit was this 24" x 36" poster on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Hubble-Ultra-Deep-Field-Poster/dp/B004VW2WVI

Reviews make it sound like the quality of that print isn't great, but it's a start. Imma look for something better. If you find one, please let me know.

IIRC, there are ultra high res pics on the NASA website that can be downloaded. I bet you could download one and take it someplace that has a bad-ass printer.

And I'd add Stellarium to the list of Space software you can toy around with. As the name suggests, it won't let you explore space, but rather will show you what's visible in the sky at a given time and location on Earth.

Quite nice for wannabe stargazers. I learned of its existence in high school when they made us work with some automatic telescope similar to that one. We could even connect the telescope to a PC and see where it was pointing at inside Stellarium.

They aren't normally that expensive.. My guess is that these particular models are no longer being produced, and so the price has skyrocketed... just like Elon's roadster.

The simplest way may be using photos and a wallpaper changer. I don't know how many shots you have, but if for example there were 1,440 so one per minute, just create a folder with the photos in order and set the wallpaper app to start that folder in order (no random) at noon and change the photo every 60 seconds and that should do it.

I use Wallpaper Changer (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.j4velin.wallpaperChanger) and it looks like that would do it.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

The rest of the Sagan quote can be found here.

https://www.elitedangerous.com/ is only the Milky Way galaxy. But, it's got great graphics and game design. They put in 3 different types of travel to make it playable:

1. Move around a planet
2. Move around a solar system
3. Move from one star to another

An amazing plane. I find it incredible that they leak fuel so quickly on the ground, but then it seals up nice and tight when running at speed.

A really excellent read about this plane from a pilot can be found here:
http://gizmodo.com/5511236/the-thrill-of-flying-the-sr+71-blackbird

Excuse the Gizmodo link - this was before they went to shit. The story is really awesome and worth a read.

According to the EXIF data on his Flickr page, it was taken November 2, 2012 at roughly 1:20 AM. Using Stellarium to go back in time I can see exactly what stars they are.

The lower star is HIP 22838, an 8th magnitude star. It's invisible to the naked eye. The middle star doesn't have any reference according to Stellarium at magnitude 8.45, and the top star is HIP 22947 at magnitude 7.35, still invisible to the naked eye.

If someone wanted to know, from left to right the Galilean moons are Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, and Io.

Its available on Amazon Prime. https://www.amazon.com/Salyut-True-Story-Soviet-Apollo/dp/B0797NNH8P/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1522652129&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=salyut+7

It's a very good movie. Excellent production values, special effects. The space scenes are right up there with "Apollo 13" and "Gravity". Not at all what I was expecting from a Russian movie.

It takes quite a few historical liberties, perhaps the most annoying of which is the crew that rescued Salyut 7 is given different names than the real one. Not sure why (maybe a legal issue in Russia).

You will see more realistic Soviet era space hardware in this movie than anywhere else. And, as an aside, I have to give credit to the Russians- they are HELL on historical accuracy, in terms of correct equipment, uniforms, etc. Their war movies are just usually spot on. For Salyut 7, there is a scene of the commander standing on his balcony wearing a track suit. My (Soviet) wife pointed to it and said, "THAT WAS THE ONLY KIND OF TRACK SUIT THEY SOLD BACK THEN!!!". Like I said, Russians do details really well. Same scene had the cosmonaut dropping his drinking glass off the balcony because he was used to no having gravity. I could totally see myself doing that.

Acting is good to very good. It may seem wooden to Americans, but that's just because that's how Russians come across.

This is a must see for any space geek and would make a fantastic space film marathon: Gravity, Apollo 13, Salyut 7.

Im not sure its fair to say Korolev was better than Von Braun. While Korolev was free to work on his rocket teck von braun was put on ice in the USA and was not allowed to work on rockets until it become glaringly clear that the US needed von braun as the Soviets were way way ahead at that point.

Korolev and Von Braun were both awesome engineers. Theres no question. I do not see a need to say one was better than the other.

There is a pretty interesting, and mostly accurate very entertaining documentary that talks almost exlusively about the 2 of them on netflix. American Genius: Episode 6

https://www.netflix.com/watch/80087796?trackId=13752289&amp;tctx=0%2C5%2C18a225c1-97ee-4138-b5be-d375414cf89a-61322747

all of the above and more. A lot of our antibiotics come from one microorganism trying to kill another.

But simply eating someone's lunch is enough. My uncle had some terrible dermatitis for months which wouldn't heal. I bought him this ( loaded with ~~Bacillus Ferment~~ Bacillus Subtilus) in 8 hours the irritation was reduced by half, the next day it was gone & he began healing normally.

I think the Bacillus Ferment simply crowded out whatever was irritating his skin. Possibly it stole their food, or disrupted their division, or outright poisoned them. It could simply have made it too difficult for them to get around & live their lives.

Even small changes to an environment can have huge results, I'd bet there are 100 tricks microorganisms use to get an edge on the competition. There are a lot of them, and they reproduce quick, this stuff is in constant flux.

There's another one rusting away in the Arizona desert.. If you have base access, you can check it out. But watch out for bees, it's filled with them. If they ever recommision this particular one, it would be simple for them to launch thousands of bees into space. Don't tell the Russians.

For people who want to buy it:

I got it from the German amazon.com (I’m from the Netherlands). I don’t know if it’s on the US Amazon.com

Link: https://www.amazon.de/6-Jupiter-MOVA-Globe-Mova/dp/B00K5V8UME

The author of the original manga has a viking manga currently serialized called Vinland saga and it is badass.

There's also gonna be an anime adaption too so can't wait to see it.

If anyone wants to read it, it's on Gutenburg.

It's actually a hilarious satire about works like The Odyssey and The Illiad. The title pretty much translates to "True Story Bro" and Lucian's whole point was "you realize we can all make up mythology, right? No one's stopping you!"

They tried this with chickens. They were raised in a centrifuge at two gees, and came out as these "great mambo chickens" that stomped around like little dinosaurs.

Animal bodies adapt to stress. You build both muscle and bone in response to exercise, and lose them in zero gee or hospital bed rest because you are not using them. A centrifuge room above one gee would build your body faster.

The reference is not entirely correct. The file servers switched to Linux from Windows, but the non-critical computers, used for procedures, timelines, and email, run Windows 7 now. The critical laptops that command to the onboard computers use Linux.

Here's a reference from a coworker who talked about this on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Does-ISS-use-Linux-or-Microsoft-for-its-computers/answer/Robert-Frost-1

Source: I train astronauts

Possibly the Orion test version scheduled to arrive today at the Virginia Air and Space Center?

Edit: messed up link

Edit: well. how to escape the ")" in urls?

Universe Sandbox ² is better than the original in nearly every way. Completely rewritten from the ground up in a new engine with a team including a climate scientist and astrophysics.

And we've just released on Early Access, it's going very well, and we've got a handful of really exciting new features already in development.

I'm the project lead on Universe Sandbox ², let me know if you have any questions...

This is not correct. Newton's law of universal gravitation holds for any number of bodies.

You're correct that we can't find analytical solutions for more than two bodies (and some special cases of three bodies) but that doesn't stop us from doing a numerical solution.

Numerical solutions require quite a lot of computational power but thankfully we have really fast computers these days. In fact, with Universe Sandbox, you can use your home computer to do massive n-body simulations of colliding galaxies and whatnot. That's way more than is required for simulating a mission like Rosetta, just from your home computer.

Einstein's laws of relativity only kick in when you're travelling close to the speed of light. For interplanetary transfer, Newton's laws are good enough by a fair margin.

NOTE: you still need Einstein's relativity for practical space missions, e.g. for radio communications.

NOTE #2: in practice, we supplement Newton's laws with mathematical tools introduced by Halley, LaGrange, Hamilton and many others. But Newton's law of universal gravitation is at the heart of it.

Actually, this would be the book:

The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation

It's actually really good, but holy COW is it dense and technical.

Well, Mars for example has been beautifully scanned by more than one probe, here's a heightmap with a spatial resolution of 200 meters. Don't download the full size one though, it's a whopping 11 GB.

As for the other planets in our solar system, you can see in this recent Space Engine blog post that they use a mix of real data and fake elevation maps.

Outside of these, every star, planet and moon is procedurally generated!

The best "telescope" in that range is a pair of binoculars. Anything else is more likely to cause someone to be turned away from astronomy.

These are $56 at amazon right now (normally $90). Get those and a decent tripod (the binoculars are a little heavy), and the total price should be well under 100 pounds.

Assuming that we can accelerate uniformly at +/-1g for the whole trip, a little over 7 years ship time.

Source

Calculation

To be frank they could have just launched an unmodified of-the-shelf quadcopter flight controller to do the same thing. That would weigh 6.6g and have 36x36x3mm dimensions and have more instrumentation than this thing.

https://www.banggood.com/Betaflight-F4-Flight-Controller-STM32-F405-MCU-Integrated-OSD-p-1103940.html

The capsule holding this 'satellite' will have better instruments than this for navigation.

This makes for a good headline.

my favorite Neil Armstrong joke is this sketch

That's why I made this, but nobody gets it. :)

the flash is stripped of credit to the maker, and also messed up with things weirdly showing outside the border

original maker(s) here or here on newgrounds

also repost

Good question. We've announced that we're working on the pre-requisite tech for spaceships on our roadmap blog post but it's unclear even to us when these next steps will be ready for release. I'm super excited about all the cool stuff to come.

Any way they might be able to provide a public API to grab live data so that someone in the public could make a site similar to this?

Looks like they're using Lightstreamer?

I loved Chris Hadfield's autobiography. It was a great read and really highlights the talent, perseverance, and hard work necessary to become an astronaut.

A little while back, I read a comment on a HN discussion which explained that that crackling is because the sound is so loud that the air is actually physically 'clipping'. How neat is that?

It made me appreciate watching launches even more.

Cropped and tweaked the colours a bit.

~~2560x1600 JPG (500 KB)~~

Let me know if anyone wants a bigger version (cropped from teh source image to 4000x2500, but that PNG's 20 MB)

ARGH! Imgur jpg'd it - here's the PNG https://www.dropbox.com/sh/genjeywmzloj1tp/oiIiakNALJ/WISE-Infrared-map-of-the-Universe_2560x1600.png

Still? Jesus. I recently read The Soviet Space Race With Apollo by Asif Siddiqi (link for those interested) and the Proton was a dismal enterprise held together by ego. It basically had a 70% failure rate back then.

You can do this on your phone! Get the Google cardboard app and pick up a VR viewer from Amazon for 10-20 bucks. You can find a decent one here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07546GT3X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_L7fzAbZK353HA

That was the first one that popped up when I searched for one, seems decent quality and will work with most phones.

Happy hunting!

No, seriously, that's why some of the early pictures were a little blurry. The transparent dust covers were still on the lenses. Gizmodo did a bit on it - http://gizmodo.com/5932521/why-do-the-mars-rovers-images-look-so-bad

My real point, though, was that this stuff is plenty newsworthy, but it's a little premature to be calling for 24/7 news coverage when they're still getting the thing fully operational.

The phrase "computer codes" is dated. I went to the Google Ngram Viewer and searched for "computer codes" (without the quotes) between 1900 and 2010. Results: the phrase never showed up (in books) before 1940. Then appearances rose steadily until around 1986. It has been in steady decline since then. I'd give you an URL but it doesn't seem like there's an easy way to share one. The overall site is https://books.google.com/ngrams/

There's all the rest, and then there's Orbiter Space Flight Simulator: http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

This free simulation has the most accurate modeling of real physics that you will find in freeware, plus it's infinitely moddable. The latest Orbiter 2016 has just been released, with unbelievably beautiful scenery, clouds, terrain and visual effects. Whether you want ultra-realism with historical vessels, ultra-modern flight decks in futuristic vessels, or you want to use this as a programming platform, the universe is waiting for you. Check out the community on http://www.orbiter-forum.com/index.php

(Full disclosure: I write some of the mods in this game.)

Celestron SkyMaster 15x (I bought these back in college). They are ~$70, but I think they are worth it. You will see Jupiter's largest moons, hanging out around Jupiter (it's stunning). I recommend looking around Orion's Belt and Sirius also. You'll find clusters and nebulas which are jawdropping. I never thought I'd see so many stars/galaxies in such a dense area. I've spent hours at the window with these binoculars. I also highly recommend downloading Stellarium. I mentioned Stellarium to one of the other astrophysics majors, and by the end of the week, everyone in our major was talking about it. You'll see why once you download it.