new photos of jupiter from the juno spacecraft | (good to know that van gogh had a say in how jupiter was designed)
Remains of supernova explosion Cassiopeia A most recent supernova in Milky Way
I realized why the idea of constellations has always swayed me. constellations are so very human.
our wonder of the stars is bone-sunk; we’ve been thinking and dreaming and watching and watching and watching since the beginning of time, and we looked for so long that we started making connections.
we played a celestial game of connect-the-dots; trying to find order in something so vast and trying to show that the stars are in everything and everything is in the stars.
we plucked pictures out of the infinite; there’s a dog, there’s a bear, there’s a lion, see? look, right there; the stars hold and mirror back everything we see.
but then it went a step further. instead of everyday things, we stopped picking out the cups and the bears, and instead we saw stories.
look, Andromeda, chained to a rock and waiting to be devoured by Cetus. there’s Orion, and Hercules, and do you see Orpheus’ lyre? Zeus sent an eagle to retrieve it after Orpheus’ death and he placed it in the sky.
we did the most human thing imaginable: we wrote our stories into the stars. we filled the night sky; previously so vast, so unknowable; with our history. we forged connections to the stars and made it so our children will always know where they come from.
Callisto, Jupiter’s heavily-cratered Galilean moon that’s around 99% as large as Mercury but only a third as massive, bears a striking resemblance to that planet.
via reddit
The Infrared Visible Andromeda: This remarkable synthetic color composite image was assembled from archives of visible light and infrared astronomy image data. The field of view spans the Andromeda Galaxy are also included in the frame. via NASA
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These postage-stamp-size images reveal 36 young galaxies caught in the act of merging with other galaxies. These galaxies appear as they existed many billions of years ago. Astronomers have dubbed them “tadpole galaxies” because of their distinct knot-and-tail shapes, which suggest that they are engaging in galactic mergers.
Credit: NASA, A. Straughn, S. Cohen, and R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and the HUDF team (Space Telescope Science Institute) Source: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo0604a/