That. Is. One. Cool. Video.

Everything we know and think we know is practically nothing compared to the Universe.

And the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force. :yep:

:O:

Seriously, though, I used to be way into astronomy when I was younger. My father bought a telescope from the Sears catalogue (remember those?) right around the time I started school IIRC. He was always a man of insatiable curiosity but I think the purchase was probably inspired by the Apollo 11 moon landing which would have happened shortly before then... I can remember being allowed to stay up past my usual bedtime if anything about it was on TV and he and I watched the coverage religiously. It's probably my first memory of anything that happened on a larger stage than my own little childhood world of home and family and close friends.

Looking back I'm sure it wasn't that great of a 'scope but you could see Saturn's rings and the big moons of Jupiter with it - amazing stuff for a kid my age to get a look at, sure enough. And it made looking at our own moon a whole new experience.

Even as an adult I've sometimes stood outside and looked at the moon and really thought about the fact that, at one time, there were human beings just like me up there walking around looking back at us. I mean, just... realized it, by which I mean made it real to the core of my being, not just as some "historical fact" of great importance. I don't quite know how to explain it, but there's a point where doing that really starts to blow my mind, for lack of a better phrase.

I used to do a lot of stargazing when I was still living at my family home, which (at the time) was far enough out "in the country" to make that possible without the interference of nighttime urban/suburban lighting. Can't really do it where I live now, although on clear, moonless nights I can still find some of the brighter celestial objects. Orion, in particular, feels like an old friend whenever I see him.

Still have a small collection of astronomy/physics/astrophysics books on the shelf but it's been a while since I meandered back into that area of interest. I imagine I'll get there again eventually, at the very least it's too tied up with nostalgia and the happier memories of my childhood to stay on the periphery forever.

Its sad we have lost that spectacle of space travel. What do people my age (25) have to remember? If they are a little older they remember the Challenger. Most my age will remember the Columbia. All tragedies. Most will forget the probes that landed on Mars and Titan, there is just something about a human standing on alien soil saying "we came in peace for all mankind" that inspires us to greatness. :cry:

Well outside I go with my binocs...

I can only look at the stars and planetary sytem in the archipelago
 

absolute dark there,at home too many lights and candles Good luck :up:

My dad and I were both space program geeks.

We had family friends who lived in Florida, between Orlando and the Atlantic coast. We used to visit there at least once a year. One time we went down to Cape Canaveral and took the tour of the KSC. At the time they were working on preparation for the first space shuttle mission - we were taken out on the runway they'd put down there in case the shuttle needed to land at KSC - but of course all the Apollo stuff I recognized was still around... mission control, the Vehical Assembly Building (if you think it looks big on TV, you should see it in person!) and it was totally awesome.

The space exploration exhibit at the MSI in Chicago is also very cool. When I went pretty much all I looked at was that and the U-505... I mean, I stood this close to the actual Apollo 8 command module. How awesome is that?

Thanks. My neighbor was cooking out side and had their lights on so I cut my time short. I didn't want to bother then and tell them to turn out their lights.

But I did make out the double star Epsilon Lyra. Looked like a long stain in the sky next to Vega but I could just barely make out the separate points of light.

I also saw a meteor (biggest I've seen in a while) and a satellite. The latter shined really brightly for a moment- I guess it was its solar panels reflecting the light. interestingly they crossed paths (from my perspective at least)... makes me wonder if someone was taking a shot at it. :D

When I was in school (5th grade) we went to a place in the city called the "Challenger Learning Center". Basically we got to play astronaut for a day flying a pretend mission. One group was mission control and the other was the crew after a while we switched. We had to communicate information back and forth and perform science experiments. I remember my task was to analyze the fake moon rocks and track the orbit of the space craft on the "Big Board".

Also once at the air show I got to see a demonstration of the heat tiles from the shuttle. A person from NASA was there and put some kind of torch to it till it glowed. I think met some people who flew aboard the shuttle at one point but I was really little at the time.

I really hope so that we may be able to post it here would be cool,we can really see the amazing things sometimes,I remember when I saw my first satellites,so far but so fast also,and in the Universe is nothing, to our sun, it takes "only 8 light minutes,it says a lot of the distance we can talk about! :DL

One of my favourite movie quotes about the space program is from "Apollo 13"

Tom Hanks says

We just decided to go. :yeah:

There are the probes on Mars, but I think what impresses younger people today the most is the huge library of pictures we got of Deep Space objects. To me these are the spectacle of today.

Astronomy is a spectacle that is hierarchically structured: Star System in galaxies in local groups in superclusters in the cosmic web. The dimensions are unimaginable, and better than using numbers to learn aboiut them is to try to grasp them in scaled analogies. However, the fascination does not end up there: in the reverse direction, into the small, again you are being confronted with these incredible relations between small and smaller objects and atoms and subnuclear particles - and the unbelievable ammount of empty space between them.

Carl Sagan said: "We are all made of star stuff". He meant that the atoms we are made of all have been recycled several times already in the nuclear fusuin of emerging stars at the beginning of their lives, or the nuclear reaction when stars died. I would say additionally to him: "We, and everything that is, are all made of nothing but empty void." We are just forms without substance. We are dreams, shadows of images and ideas. Potentials. Why do I think of probability clouds now, like they use the term in particle physics when they say farewell to the idea of material smallest objects and startb to think of them as abstract "tendencies to be" only? :)

The Ultra Deep Field photo by Hubble is commented by the author with something like that the universe is 78 billion lightyears across. but do not be mistaken, since light travels one lightyear in distance per year (= ~9.5x10^12 km), we cannot see anything that is beyond the range of around 15 billion lightyears, since that is the estimated age of the universe. The observable universe thus cannot be greater than 2x14 billion lightyears (= ~2.6x10^23 km) and this only when we sit right in the "middle" of it. what the author points at are models concluded on by examining background radiation, that indicate that the universe actually does not end at the border to which we can see, but that it continues beyond that. Other values mentioned even consider 150+ billion lightyears as size if the total universe, but most of it we just cannot see since light has had no time to get from there to us. And it is still expanding! So, the real great unknown, I mean: the really real unknown :) - does not begin earlier than 14 billion lightyears away from us!

And if then considering that the further away we look, the more we look back in time and do not see present, but past - in 14 billion lightyears distance we see it how things looked 14 billion years ago, but we still do so by staying in our present - then it really becomes mindbogging and one looses interest to think in words anymore, isn't it like this? At least that's how it is for me.

And maybe in that moment something happens indeed, that something like a cycle gets completed, when the space in the atoms and the space in the universe finally return back to the witness perceiving these dimensions and link up again with the inner space that is this witness' mind reflecting over it. The space "out there" and the inner space in us - maybe the only difference between it is our thought, to use an analogy: like the surface of a bubble is the only thing that separates it's inner void from the outer void in which it floats.

It's all just a dream within a dream within a dream. Mind dancing with it's own imaginations. Can one dare to imagine that maybe "exploration of space" also is "exploration of mind", and that "exploration of mind" means "exploration of space"? I never was able to ignore this intriguing thought.

That empty space and void stuff made me thinking.

I did some mathematical gameplay to see how much of the total universe we possibly could see if we compare the size of the observable universe to that of the total universe.

Let's use rounded values, it's good enough for our purposes: 1 lightyear ly = 300,000 km (3x10^5); all fractions rounded to just one decimal. We also assume that the universe(s) has the shape of a perfect sphere.

To get a first idea: how many cubic kilometers does 1 cubic lightyear hold? The term is defined by convention not to cover the volume of a sphere, but a cube. So, when 1 ly = 9.5 x 10^12 km, then multiplying this value three times with itself gives a result of

1 ly^3 = 9. 5x10^38 km^3

Now to the volume size of the different universes we have. We scale that in cubic lightyears. I base on the idea that when we can look 14 billion lightyears into every direction, then this distance is not the total diameter but the radius of a spheric observable universe.

We have three universes we want to compare to each other: the observable universe (2x14=28 billion lightyears in diamter, and two different estimations for the size of the total universe, as mentioned earlier: 78 billion and 150 billion lightyears in diameter.

The formula to calculate the colume of spheres is this:

v = (4/3) r^3 pi; r being the radius.

The observable universe has a radius of 1.4x10^13 lightyears. We enter that into the formula. We get a result of

1.1x10^40 ly^3 -> observable universe

The total universe if it is 78 billion ly in diameter. First we must devide it by 2 to get the radius, then we use the formula again. The result is:

2.5x10^41 ly^3 -> total universe with d=78 billion ly

And the size of a universe with 150 billion ly in diameter:

1.8x10^42 ly^3 -> total universe with d=150 billion ly

Now we compare the volumes by using percentage calculation. We find that if

the total universe is 150 billion ly in diameter, then the observable universe covers a volume of just 0.6% of that. That means the other 99.4% of the total universe we cannot see because in a universe of the age of 14 billion years, light has had no time to travel from there to here.

If the total universe is smaller and "just" 78 billion lightyears across, then it still is only 4.4% of the total universe that we can ever hope to see. 95.6% will remain hidden to us, always.

Now mind you that the universe is expanding. The most distant galaxies we can see move away from us with almost the speed of light. Go figure. For us humans, however, it does not make a difference, because we simply will not exist long enough as if the difference in size of the universe will make a difference to us regarding the values above for how much of the universe we can see.

Estimations say there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone. If we scale our galaxy down to 1 cm, and the Andromeda galaxy also (it compares in size to ours), both would be around 25 cm apart in that scaling. If our galaxy were a football field, then our sun would be an object so small you would need a microscope to see it. the next star to our sun would be around 4 mm away, Alpha Centauri. The ratio between space and the soze of stars and voids and the size of galaxies is such that the probability of galaxies colliding is much greater than that of stars in a galaxy colliding with each other - and this although the abuss between galaxies is so very much bigger in dimension than that between stars. In the voyage scale model http://www.jeffreybennett.com/voyage_scale.html
they have build on a mall in the US, they visualised the solar system like this: they set up scaled models of the planets in straight line in correct relatiove distances. the sun has the size of a grapefruit, the earth is an object the soze of the tip of a ball pencil, 15 m away. Jupiter has the soize of a small marble. Pluto, back then still counted as a planet, is 600 meters away. the next star system, Alpha Centauri, would be 4 thousand kilometers away: or one trvael distance from the american West coast to the East coast. As I read a joke in a book: what astromers do when looking at other planets is they find a grapefruit that is 4000 km (and high factors of that) away and then identify an object the size of a ballpencil's tip circiling around it just some centimeters or meters away. :D

If you ask what the solar system is, then the best reply I think is possible is this: it is nothing but empty space.

Want to talk of "space travel", anyone? the term is a hopeless euphemism, i think. :)

Sunday morning. Some people go to church, I do this stuff instead. The delight found might be the same. :)

It is a bummer that it is almost a certainty that humans will never be able to explore the entire universe (and anything beyond of course). It is just too big. :nope:

Nah. It is us who are small....:hmmm:


.

How we arrive at the unit of measurement known as 1 year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhqzW...layer_embedded#!

Skybird I have looked at the Worl Wide Telescope, only thing is you have to install silverlight..

I do agree you get to see amazing stuff but having a telescope you get the thrill of seeing it for real.

I have a 130mm Newtonian and even where I live with a few streelights near by I was blown away when I found Saturn and could see the rings an moons and that was when I was only at 65X magnification.

If you need to cycle somewhere then a refractor would probably be the best to get. The problem isn't the tube but the tripod. They are a pain in the backside.

Is this so - well, I had Silverlight installed before, and thus did not recognise it is needed for WWT also. However, that should be no porblen, I am not aware of any problems with Silverlight. It is something like a downtuned .NET environment which also never has given me any reasons for concerns, I think it was Google Earth depending on .NET. So in all honesty I only can say: Silverlight should not cause any fears. If there is problematic stuff going on with it, I am not aware of it, nor are my scanners.

Anyhow, youtube has many videos available for or from or about it.

It is in principle a planetarium, wehre zooming into any given point of the sky gives you access to the giant database of professional images from satellites, observatories, and different sensors types that - oin photographic quality that you do not see in standard planetarium software. These ics are the real stuff, the real pics they have shot at, the software is kind of a very clever user itnerfae to access the database much like you access the database of Google earth photography. In a given image, you also have the option to choose amongst the availably image so9urces, sensor types, and combine different images of the given object, if the database hold according photography. So, opyu zoom to the thing you want to look at, you choose amongst the variety of satellites and obsrvatopries that attributed images to that objct, you choose the image type you want to get (visual, infrared, x-ray, etc), and there you are. So, it does much more than Google Earth does. It gives you your own supertelescope, so tpo speak, and you can do with it and look at what ever you want. It is your entrance ticket into the biggest database of astronomic photography that I know of. They also jave many tours, that are preprogrammed shows for edcuational purproses for example, like oyu know it from Celestia, for example - just that this is done much more professionally and visually much more stunning, offering more options. you can also program your own tours.

I understand your love for your telescope, Xabba, it reminds me of the fascination I felt when having that microscope back then. but I also saw the big difference between that cheap thing - and the laboratory microscopes we had at school back then (early 80s). Microscope cpurses where just once a week, so on the other days I stayed with what I had, since there was no virtual microscope on no internet, and since I had training almost every day I had little time anyway.