The Burning Sun Begins To Set Behind A Large Volcano.

Lunar Shadow

Picture of the Day - October 14, 2018

Small satellite casting its shadow across a gas giant.

Picture of the Day - January 21, 2019

A ringed Titan under the dim glow of a red sun.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about space or astronomy in general?

I’m not sure which is the biggest mistake, but I believe that one of them is the colors that are imposed on the images of planets, nebulae and other bodies of space. Many images are not real colors, many of them are fake colors. False colors are used to differentiate, some particular type of material, temperature, wavelength, chemical or mineral variations, and other factors.

Mercury with colors in visible light

Color-enhanced, this image represents chemical and mineral variations across the planet: tan areas are lava-formed plains, and blue regions show material that reflects little light.

This image shows two different views of the Horsehead Nebula. On the right is a view of the nebula in visible light, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile . The new image on the left shows the nebula in the infrared, using observations from Hubble’s high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3.

Some illustrations of space can also deceive or confuse, like images of exoplanets, where in fact we do not know for sure what it would be, since we can not have such clear images to the point where we can see them closely, and other things like representation of the curvature of space time, which shows a curvature in 2D, would actually be in 3D, but this is a little harder to visualize.

Curvature of the space-time fabric in 2D

Curvature of the space-time fabric in 3D

An annotated view of the Beta Pictoris system.

Artist’s impression of Beta Pictoris b. The debris disk around the parent star can be seen.

You can learn more about it by clicking here!

Amazing Star Trails (Lincoln Harrison)

Picture of the day - December 11, 2018

Preview picture of the Insight A system. Rocky moon transits across the face of an ice giant.

Tumblr Changes - My Thoughts

I know this post is not about space and astronomy, but I wanted to voice my thoughts about the upcoming ban on Tumblr and how the automatic algorithms are going to affect everyone on there.

First off, I do not post or follow any NFSW Tumblr, so the primary ban does not affect either my Space Engine Tumblr or Rabbit and Shark Tumblr or other Tumblr’s that I follow in that regard, but the algorithms Tumblr has created are already beginning to affect my space engine posts. I mean seriously, how are my pictures of planets, alien landscapes and nebulas being flagged as adult material?

I understand that there are nearly 450 million users on here, but Tumblr has just 400 or so employees and for their employees to go through perhaps billions of images is not practical so they had to write a program to do the work for them. Auto-flagging images however, is a major problem for us non-NFSW Tumblrs, and we are only just now seeing the start of this problem. Eventually it is going to get to the point that we all have to wait weeks even months for our “sensitive marked” pictures to be marked as safe, since an actual person will have to review it.

Final conclusion. This ban and the way it is being implemented is a bad idea, and to be honest I also think an assault on free speech. More importantly, Tumblr better fix its auto-identification programs before a lot of us leave out of frustration when pictures of planets, rabbits, and sharks are all marked as adult.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AND REPOST.

River Valley

Picture of the day - October 30, 2018

Best shot yet of a river valley I have found, taken on an Earth-like world. The planet has a unique yellow-colored atmosphere.

Sagittarius Triplet

Insight System - Post 1

First post of the Insight System.

The Insight system (named after the newest Mars lander) is a wide-spaced binary system consisting of a yellow G1V type star (Insight A) and a dimmer orange K5V type star (Insight B), that orbit each other in an elliptical orbit at an average distance of 192.3 AU. Both stars complete 1 orbit around each other every 2,432 years.

Insight A is 1.6 times brighter than our sun, and Insight B is only 1/6th the brightness of our sun.

Both stars have their own solar systems.

My first post if of the 6 planets orbiting the dimmer star Insight B.

First Planet Insight B-I (1.1 Earth masses)

Second Planet Insight B-II (5.3 Earth Masses)

Third Planet Insight B-III (11.7 Jupiter Masses)

Fourth Planet Insight B-IV (0.20 Jupiter Masses)

Fifth Planet Insight B-V (0.27 Earth masses)

Outer-most planet Insight B-VI (1.42 Jupiter Masses)

More pictures to come soon.