Space and The wonders/mysteries of The Universe

The waning crescent moon has been awfully chummy with some planets in the early morning over here. There's Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn all lined up in a row, and as the moon becomes more of a crescent it's sinking down past them this week.

Everybody grab holt of something - the combined gravity's gonna pull us all off!  

Hee hee yes, we can see Jupiter & Venus with the moon here also. Its lovely that we've had clear skies, & at last, seen lots of beautiful stars twinkling away instead of a dark grey blanket of nothingness.

I can see Uranus.

(sorry I couldn't resist. )

That's in the evening, actually.

You child.

{{ "There's no point in being a grownup if you can't be childish sometimes."- The Doctor
Good advice I say. }}

true that.

Been there, done that. What's the point this time? If there was a clear reason I'd be all for it. Otherwise it's billions of dollars spent just for show.

After years of hearing Trump speak it's like a cool breeze to hear Pence speak. Not that there's much I like about the guy, but at least he has a skill set.

I must protest at calling photons a pure packet of energy.  Energy is not "stuff", it's a book-keeping device.  A photon is not any more pure energy than any bit of mass would be, or a gravity wave.  All these things have specific properties and can do various things, constrained by the book keeping of conservation of energy.

It's like saying snow is made up of the pure white.  The whiteness is a property, it only takes material form in a poetical sense.  Snow is frozen water. Or to put it more directly saying a photon is pure energy is like saying the blast you get from a furnace is pure temperature. Nothing is made of temperature; it's a property that describes how fast molecules are moving at random.

halfwise wrote:Been there, done that.  What's the point this time?  If there was a clear reason I'd be all for it.  Otherwise it's billions of dollars spent just for show.

After years of hearing Trump speak it's like a cool breeze to hear Pence speak.  Not that there's much I like about the guy, but at least he has a skill set.

I thought the original point was to be a proving ground for the Mars mission as they as developing a lot of new technology. Also with a mind to set up a permanent presence that would be used to help future deeper space missions.

If Trump or Pence are saying it probably more likely because China and India are starting to do things in space!

Lancebloke wrote: If Trump or Pence are saying it probably more likely because China and India are starting to do things in space!

No doubt! That's always the primary reason for doing such things.
The only reason we went to the moon in the first place was after Kennedy threw down the gauntlet during the "Space Race" with USSR (an outgrowth of the "Arms Race" which was piling up nuclear missiles and silos throughout both our countries at the time.)  
All things considered, it's probably safer here on Earth if we fight our wars through proxy races off the planet than through arms races here at home....

We went to the moon the first time to prove we can do a hard thing when others couldn't.

But that's been proven in this case. If we were going to put a colony there to prove that such a thing could be nearly self sufficient, I'd be supportive. If the current statement mentioned a stepping stone to Mars, I'd be supportive. If we were going to prove that it could be done by free enterprise, I'd be supportive. For just about any decent reason I'd be supportive, but we are given no reason.

Trump originally wanted to send men to Mars, but I have to believe he was told it was too hard (he actually listened?). So instead we're doing something we've done before just to show we haven't totally lost it. Not good enough.

halfwise wrote:We went to the moon the first time to prove we can do a hard thing when others couldn't.

While I can't argue with that, I remember as a kid the news reporters and politicians in the 60's were constantly hammering on the point that "We've got to get to the Moon before the Russians so they don't build a Moonbase first!" Even as a 1st grader I knew that!

As I think about it now, it wasn't that much different from the modern rhetoric of building a boarder wall before we're invaded.
And if you look at what was spent on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs (in current dollars) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA we could probably have built something like 20 to 50 boarder walls back then. More if we outsourced the construction!
But it was the 1960's and I guess our priorities were different back then.....

In the 1960s the 'drug war' hadn't created mega drug cartels and Mexico was a nice neighbour.

Yep, not only were drug cartels created by our War on Drugs, but like any war, millions of economic refugees were created. We can't seem to remember that. And we've always got some kind of war going, which not only justifies developing new technologies, but gives us a place to test them.  

1960's = Vietnam / "Space Race"
1970's = "War on Drugs" (...still ongoing...)
1980's = Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars")
1990's = 1st Gulf War (with first use of satellite-based GPS cruise missiles etc.)
2000's = 2nd Gulf War (satellite based drones etc ...still ongoing...)

And people wonder why there are so many refugees in the world....

We won the war on tobacco, and NOT by making it illegal. I think part of the problem with drugs is that it happens mainly in private, so the social pressures that drove down smoking and drunk driving are less in force.

Was doing a bit of telescoping last night.

For anyone that thinks this stuff is hard to do, I have a relatively cheap telescope (about £175) and a couple of eye pieces (about another £50) and last night I could see Jupiter, some of the more defined cloud bands, 3 if its moons and Saturn with it rings very clearly... all from a back garden with the brightest fucking light next door!

It's pretty incredible to see for yourself and would highly recommend!!!

Other highlights I have found so far (not last night) include the Orion nebula, the Pleiades star cluster and the faint galactic bubble of the Andromeda galaxy!!!

I got an app on my phone. You point it at the night sky and it tells you everything. Names of stars, planets, constellations. Its great.

SkyView

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/skyview-lite/id413936865

https://www.google.com/search?q=sky+view+app&oq=sky+view+app&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.11846j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

That's what I have been using too!

Just make sure to calibrate your phone when using otherwise it lies to you!