Space and Astronomy in general

OG_slinger wrote:
Stele wrote:

Captain Kirk is going to space!

He's finally a Rocket Man.

Well sure but then there’s also this song where he un-ironically sets the record straight.

In 2004 The Shat made an album with Ben Folds producing it. The album is called has been. It contains plenty of humor but it’s not the same schlocky crap that he put out in the ‘70s. Shat actually wrote all of the lyrics and there’s not one single “cover” song on the album.

I have to admit, 17 years later I still love this album. Some songs are better than others but they’re all good and some are great.

That song above has Brad Paisley singing and playing guitar.

Agathos wrote:

Will it finally launch? I am terrified.

https://twitter.com/ESA_Webb/status/...

Here's a version of the video for the Twitter-averse.

I worked for an airline. We had a rule: passing through a country didn't count. So, if I went from Atlanta to Geneva, but changed planes in Frankfurt, I couldn't claim to have visited Germany on that trip

You had to leave the airport and spend at least most of a day there.

Just crossing the Kamen line then falling back doesn't count

It is obviously enough to have a profound effect.

I mean the moon is within earth's gravity well. Does that mean that you haven't gone to space until you have gone beyond the moon's orbit? Has anyone actually done that?

tanstaafl wrote:

I worked for an airline. We had a rule: passing through a country didn't count. So, if I went from Atlanta to Geneva, but changed planes in Frankfurt, I couldn't claim to have visited Germany on that trip

You had to leave the airport and spend at least most of a day there.

Just crossing the Kamen line then falling back doesn't count

What about spending most of a day in the airport, waiting on standby for an open seat?

fangblackbone wrote:

It is obviously enough to have a profound effect.

I mean the moon is within earth's gravity well. Does that mean that you haven't gone to space until you have gone beyond the moon's orbit? Has anyone actually done that?

If this video is true, no human has ever left earth's atmosphere.

I'm calling it now: It's a rock.

Spoiler:

Or an EXTREMELY elaborate Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker ARG.

Gigantic 'Super-Jupiter' orbiting two stars shatters assumptions on how planets form

The planet, dubbed 'b Centauri b', is located about 325 light years from Earth. The gas giant, apparently similar in composition to Jupiter but about 11 times more massive, belongs to a planetary class called "super-Jupiters" exceeding the mass of our solar system's largest planet.

It orbits a pair of stars gravitationally bound to one another, called a binary system. It has what might be the widest orbit of any known planet - about 100 times wider than Jupiter's orbit around our sun and about 560 times wider than Earth's.

Put together, the two stars making up the b Centauri system have a mass between six and ten times that of the sun.

Until now, no planet had been found orbiting a star more than three times the sun's mass. Stars larger than that emit so much radiation that they were thought to torch the planetary formation process. This discovery dashes that view.

"Finding a planet around b Centauri was very exciting since it completely changes the picture about massive stars as planet hosts," said astronomer Markus Janson of Stockholm University in Sweden, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature

Holy $#!^ this might actually happen.

I'm actually getting a little antsy thinking about this launch.

Scheduled to launch at 7:20AM ET on Christmas Eve. I have that day off from work and was kinda hoping to sleep in a bit, but I think I might adjust my plans for this.

merphle wrote:

Scheduled to launch at 7:20AM ET on Christmas Eve. I have that day off from work and was kinda hoping to sleep in a bit, but I think I might adjust my plans for this.

Good news (for you):
They've pushed it back a day due to winds.
It's currently 0720 EST on the 25th.

Hrdina wrote:
merphle wrote:

Scheduled to launch at 7:20AM ET on Christmas Eve. I have that day off from work and was kinda hoping to sleep in a bit, but I think I might adjust my plans for this.

Good news (for you):
They've pushed it back a day due to winds.
It's currently 0720 EST on the 25th.

Aww. That's a suboptimal day/time for me. I doubt I'll be able to discourage the kids from jettisoning their present fairings on Christmas morning for very long.

Maybe can keep it on the TV while we do Santa stuff

merphle wrote:
Hrdina wrote:
merphle wrote:

Scheduled to launch at 7:20AM ET on Christmas Eve. I have that day off from work and was kinda hoping to sleep in a bit, but I think I might adjust my plans for this.

Good news (for you):
They've pushed it back a day due to winds.
It's currently 0720 EST on the 25th.

Aww. That's a suboptimal day/time for me. I doubt I'll be able to discourage the kids from jettisoning their present fairings on Christmas morning for very long.

The kids can take care of themselves.

Scott apparently recorded his weekly news segment when the launch was still scheduled for the 24th, but had time to add some text about the 24-hour weather delay.

Scott Manley wrote:

It can look so far back in time that it can see its original launch date.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/PAJiivr.png)

But then there's the two weeks of space origami.

Agathos wrote:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/PAJiivr.png)

But then there's the two weeks of space origami.

T minus 12 hours and 12 minutes, and counting.

I hope Dec 25 goes something like:
Wake, watch launch, back to sleep, wake, cook breakfast, presents, nap.

Also crossing my fingers for a successful JWST launch and deployment. I was interning at Northrop Grumman in 2006 and they were promoting the upcoming launch back then. Now I'm approaching middle age with two kids and it's actually happening. Don't get me wrong, it will be awesome to see what discoveries it leads to. But after almost 15 years of working on flight instruments at JPL now, I'm real nervous knowing many of the things that can go wrong. Wishing for the best for all those who worked on it so long, the science community that has supported it for decades, and all the astronomy enthusiasts out there.

Somehow woke up at 6 AM - still go for launch in 1:13:28.

Looking good!

Mixolyde wrote:

Looking good!

Separation!

Edit: We got to see the solar array deploy in the video before JWST went out-of-range.

Hrdina wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Looking good!

Separation!

Edit: We got to see the solar array deploy in the video before JWST went out-of-range.

it looked like that all went about as perfectly as could be hoped.

I wonder why the solar array deployed earlier than expected?

merphle wrote:
Hrdina wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Looking good!

Separation!

Edit: We got to see the solar array deploy in the video before JWST went out-of-range.

it looked like that all went about as perfectly as could be hoped.

I wonder why the solar array deployed earlier than expected?

Hopefully it doesn't mean that the JWST flight software was coded in metric time or something.

According to the deployment video, that was supposed to be at T+31 minutes, so it wasn't too early. Maybe the timeline was adjusted slightly because the mission launched today instead of yesterday?

Hrdina wrote:

Maybe the timeline was adjusted slightly because the mission launched today instead of yesterday

Oh yeah, that would make sense. Slightly different alignment towards the sun. It just seemed so strange to see something happen “off script” when everything else was otherwise nearly spot-on.

Space_Kadet, back in 2018 or so I flew to Johnson for work (Federal computer reseller) and on the way back, I sat next to a woman wearing a new cast and a dejected affect. She had something, a jacket maybe, with an NG jacket with an allusion to the Webb project, so I started a conversation. She was an engineer from Buffalo and the Webb had basically been her career since the early 80's. At the time, NASA was doing a full review and so NG was getting the telescope ready to be inspected, and she was a project leader for one of the teams. She was on one of those ladder platform things and slipped and badly broke her wrist. This meant she could no longer perform manual inspection tasks and given that NG was paying serious money to let her live in Buffalo and work in Houston, she was almost in tears at the thought that she'd be reassigned.

Never knew what happened, of course, but man did that story pull at the heartstrings. Her whole career shifted because of a slip. And that was a seriously prestigious project for them that was going through a hard time.

I am sooo glad to see it get through the first flight hurdle.