Picture Of The Day - February 16, 2019 (Late Post)

Triangulum Log - Post 4 - Vista System (Planet 2)

Here we come across the system’s second planet, a warm desert world. This rocky world orbits 0.41 AU from the sun and has a mass roughly one fifth that of Earth. It is a hot world covered in a thin Carbon Dioxide/ Sulfur Dioxide atmosphere with one tenth the atmospheric pressure of Earth. The planet is tidally locked to the sun and has an average surface temperature of 231° F on the day-side.

High Resolution Pics

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Oculus System - Post 3 (Cratered Wasteland)

The system’s third planet is a nearly airless Mars-sized world, heavily cratered world. The planet orbits 1.19 AU from the sun, has a mass of just 8.6% that of Earth and roughly half of Earth’s diameter. A tenuous carbon dioxide atmosphere clings to the surface with a surface press of just 1/100,000th that of Earth. Surface temperatures can reach the boiling point of water during the day, and fall nearly -300 °F at night.

High Resolution Pics

Picture 1 - Mercury-like planet

Picture 2 - Two small satellites

Picture 3 - A view from a moon

Picture 4 - Setting Sun.

Picture 5 - Broken Crater

Picture 6 - From just 10 km above the surface.

Picture 7 - The Surface

Pictures of the Day - December 31, 2018

Here I come a across a massive Super-Jovian gas giant. The planet is close to the boundary line with a brown dwarf and has a mass of more than 11 times that of Jupiter. It orbits a hot B-Type star that is part of a binary system consisting of a B type main sequence star and a blue supergiant. The system is located just outside of a globular cluster.

Monstrous storms rage across the planet’s atmosphere, powered not just from the warmth of two luminous suns, but also from internally released heat. A well-structured ring system surrounds the planet along with 66 natural satellites, 6 of which larger than the planet Mercury, including 1 ocean moon larger than Earth that has its own ring system.

Space Engine System ID: RSC 5581-4-0-0-300 B3 to visit the planet in Space Engine.

Planet Stats:

Radius: 71,573.62 km (11.22 x Earth, 1.02 x Jupiter) Mass: 11.06 Jupiter Masses (3,515 x Earth) Orbital Distance: 11.43 AU Length of Year: 16.33 Years Length of Solar Day: 7 hours 56 mins Gravity: 27.90 g Temperature: 720 K (836°F) Atmosphere Composition:  92.7% Hydrogen, 6.88% Helium, 0.32% Methane, 0.10% Hydrogen Deuteride

Ten Interesting facts about Mercury

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. As such, it circles the sun faster than all the other planets, which is why Romans named it after their swift-footed messenger god. He is the god of financial gain, commerce, eloquence, messages, communication (including divination), travelers, boundaries, luck, trickery and thieves; he also serves as the guide of souls to the underworld

Like Venus, Mercury orbits the Sun within Earth’s orbit as an inferior planet, and never exceeds 28° away from the Sun. When viewed from Earth, this proximity to the Sun means the planet can only be seen near the western or eastern horizon during the early evening or early morning. At this time it may appear as a bright star-like object, but is often far more difficult to observe than Venus. The planet telescopically displays the complete range of phases, similar to Venus and the Moon, as it moves in its inner orbit relative to Earth, which reoccurs over the so-called synodic period approximately every 116 days.

Mercury’s axis has the smallest tilt of any of the Solar System’s planets (about ​1⁄30 degree). Its orbital eccentricity is the largest of all known planets in the Solar System; at perihelion, Mercury’s distance from the Sun is only about two-thirds (or 66%) of its distance at aphelion.

Its orbital period around the Sun of 87.97 days is the shortest of all the planets in the Solar System.  A sidereal day (the period of rotation) lasts about 58.7 Earth days.

Mercury’s surface appears heavily cratered and is similar in appearance to the Moon’s, indicating that it has been geologically inactive for billions of years. Having almost no atmosphere to retain heat, it has surface temperatures that vary diurnally more than on any other planet in the Solar System, ranging from 100 K (−173 °C; −280 °F) at night to 700 K (427 °C; 800 °F) during the day across the equatorial regions. The polar regions are constantly below 180 K (−93 °C; −136 °F). The planet has no known natural satellites. 

Unlike many other planets which “self-heal” through natural geological processes, the surface of Mercury is covered in craters. These are caused by numerous encounters with asteroids and comets. Most Mercurian craters are named after famous writers and artists. Any crater larger than 250 kilometres in diameter is referred to as a Basin.

The largest known crater is Caloris Basin, with a diameter of 1,550 km. The impact that created the Caloris Basin was so powerful that it caused lava eruptions and left a concentric ring over 2 km tall surrounding the impact crater.

Two spacecraft have visited Mercury: Mariner 10 flew by in 1974 and 1975; and MESSENGER, launched in 2004, orbited Mercury over 4,000 times in four years before exhausting its fuel and crashing into the planet’s surface on April 30, 2015.

It is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial radius of 2,439.7 kilometres (1,516.0 mi). Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largestnatural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan.  

As if Mercury isn’t small enough, it not only shrank in its past but is continuing to shrink today. The tiny planet is made up of a single continental plate over a cooling iron core. As the core cools, it solidifies, reducing the planet’s volume and causing it to shrink. The process crumpled the surface, creating lobe-shaped scarps or cliffs, some hundreds of miles long and soaring up to a mile high, as well as Mercury’s “Great Valley,” which at about 620 miles long, 250 miles wide and 2 miles deep (1,000 by 400 by 3.2 km) is larger than Arizona’s famous Grand Canyon and deeper than the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. 

The first telescopic observations of Mercury were made by Galileo in the early 17th century. Although he observed phases when he looked at Venus, his telescope was not powerful enough to see the phases of Mercury.

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images: Joseph Brimacombe, NASA/JPL, Wikimedia Commons

Evening of the Cosmos. Widescreen Wallpapers 1440 x 900.

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Approaching Eclipse

Picture of the Day 2 - October 30, 2018

The approaching shadow of an eclipse across an alien desert.

Pictures of the day - December 27, 2018

Parting Shots of the Insight A and Insight B Systems, Alien Skies.

Now that all of the worlds of the Insight A and Insight B systems have been revealed, here are some parting shots before I begin my exploration of new star systems.

Space Engine System ID: RS 5581-42-6-76887-1116

High Resolution Pictures

Insight B-IV-M3 sky

Insight A-VII Sky

Insight A-V Sky

Insight A-IV-M8 Sky

Insight B-V Sky

Insight B-VI-M2 Sky

Insight B-I Sky

Picture of the day - December 6, 2018

Another picture of the fifth planet of the Insight B system.

Amazing Star Trails (Lincoln Harrison)