Dark Space

2022-08-29 13:00:02 Scale & Composition of Earth’s surface: Major constituents of the crust, water, and atmosphere

All life known (so far) to exist has lived on this thin layer, which comprises just 0.49% of Earth's total mass.

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2022-08-29 10:00:03 Here’s we’ve revisited a popular visualization from a few months ago. We’ve added a layer of data that shows the seasonal ice and snow fluctuations near the arctic. You can see how the ice builds up while the north pole is receiving little to no direct sunlight. Then it retreats as the Northern Hemisphere heats up again.

This simulation uses data from Science on a Sphere, which collects and hosts a multitude of geo/temporal data

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2022-08-28 16:00:05 Are you 1 in a 1000?

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, meaning when look at the sun, Mercury is never far away. That’s makes it hard to see because it’s only in the few minutes before sunrise or after sunset that the sun will be below the horizon, but not too far below. It also needs to be as far as it can get from the sun (from our perspective).

In the mornings (left panel) Mercury will be visible about 30 minutes before sunrise when the sky is just beginning to become illuminated. In the evening, about 30 minutes after sunset, as the sky begins to darken. Also, one needs a very clear view of the horizon, since all this is happening near the horizon. That means either high up, or with no trees/buildings near by.

This simulation shows 2 years worth of pre-dawn and post-dusk views, side-by-side, when Mercury might be visible. Right now in late June 2022 and early July, Mercury is visible in the morning.

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2022-08-28 13:00:01 Precession is a phenomenon in which the moment of momentum of a body changes its direction in space.

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2022-08-28 10:00:02 Amateur model of a black hole

Did you know that black holes are not at all what they are usually depicted as (similar to funnels and bubbles)?

In fact, a doughnut-shaped gas disk rotates and glows around the black hole, the edge of which is sucked in. The black hole itself appears as a spot in the central part.

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2022-08-27 16:00:05 Kosmonovat from the slate, a fine job!

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2022-08-27 13:00:01 Hubble's images in relation to the rest of the night sky.

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2022-08-27 10:00:03 On July 17, 1975, after the docking of the American and Soviet ships, Alexey Leonov invited the Americans to celebrate this case by drinking vodka. He was joking, in fact, they were tubes with borscht and a vodka label sticker.

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2022-08-26 16:00:06 Simulation of the collision of the Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy. At the end of the process, a new galaxy is formed. But no longer spiral, but elliptical.

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2022-08-26 13:00:02 The last flight of the Juno probe over the surface of Jupiter

In Roman mythology, Juno is the wife of the God Jupiter. The station has been operating in a polar highly elliptical orbit since the beginning of July 2016.

"Polar" means that the spacecraft flies close to the poles, and "highly elliptical" means that out of 53 days of one revolution, the flight near Jupiter takes only about two hours. Juno's scientific instruments allow scientists to look under the planet's cloud layer in different ranges.

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