The Sun Compared To UY Scuti, Largest Known Star.

SPACE ENGINE

a simulator of the entire universe, on your laptop.

The Tarantula Nebula

You can never escape creepy crawly spiders, not even in the endless vacuum of space. One hundred and eighty thousand light-years away, the Tarantula Nebula is waiting for you to fall into its starry web.

Image Credit: NASA

NGC 6357, The Grand Star Cathedral

Saturn, rings and moons seen by the Cassini spacecraft wow!

Image credit: NASA/JPL (original video)

Feeling blue by Hubble Space Telescope / ESA

my entry for @brideanthology: a short comic about two elderly brides 💛

Sometimes it's fun to play with gender, to subvert and mix words and roles. I like it when my friends call me bro. I like to dress in men's clothes and enjoy the power and respect they represent. I like the cool guy image.

Sometimes it's fun to pass, to accidentally trick and challenge people. They make funny stories, and I feel like a shapeshifter making fun of the social order.

But I always return to myself. Underneath it all is my real, unchangable female self, and I am a woman.

I am a woman with a shaved head. A woman in a suit. A woman called sir and bro and he. A woman who's rough and tough and handsome and bold.

I am a woman in rebellion, and there are no words or clothes or assigned roles or social standards that can take it from me.

*heavy metal guitars wailing* Find this illustration in my shop as an art print, sticker, tees, and more! Visit the shop link in my main profile.

Alpha Scuti

The brightest star in the small southern constellation of Scutum, and just under 200 light years from Earth. 

The star sits in front of the main body of the Milky Way’s central region, giving it a spectacular star field behind. Many of the background stars lie between 2-10,000 light years behind it, with a few over 17,000 light years. It’s important to remember, we can only see the very brightest of the stars in the milky way, a star like our Sun is only visible by the naked eye not far beyond 32 light years, so stars 1000′s of light years away are incredibly luminous, but also maybe only a tiny % of the actual stars that lie there.

Alpha Scuti was once a star not too dissimilar to our own sun, but has since began the process of falling out of the main sequence and becoming a red giant. Although only 1.3 times the mass of our sun, it has now bloated to 20 times our sun’s radius and 186 times brighter than the sun.