astro picture for the day / quote for the day

Credit: University of Kent

Quote for the day,

"There is no god like the throat: it takes sacrifices daily." ~Nigerian Proverb

The Pluto mission will indeed be exciting; but, even before New Horizons spacecraft gets to Pluto, the Dawn spacecraft, having already revealed the Vesta asteroid as wonderous, will have explored Ceres and will be exploring Ceres.  Ceres is the biggest asteroid of the asteroid belt in between Jupiter and Mars.  Vesta is the second largest.  And, this October, a comet will streak right past Mars!  This next year is exciting indeed! 

The LHC collider will also be up and running again at higher energies to search of dark matter and hidden dimensions.

- Messenger spacecraft flyover Mercury

- Science/Technology extra,

A working space drive? Space exploration enthusiasts have longed for a space drive for a long time. This one has people excited; it's passed a third party test. What it is microwaves generated from the solar sails; the microwaves are put in a cavity where they interact with the vacuum energy.  Vacuum energy is probably the greatest finding of quantum physics.  It's a Paul Dirac generalization of Heisenberg's uncertainty relations.  Getting to the point, with little explanation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, if particles disappear within the limits of the uncertainty principle, then particles can pop into existence out of nowhere.

astro picture for the day / quote for the day

Image Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

Science/technology extra,

and I can't help perhaps reposting this news,

Both of these explorations gives new evidence for dark matter.

"Science is one of the few areas of human life in which the majority do not rule." - Samuel Ting

astro picture for the day / quote for the day

Image credit, ESO

"I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself, i seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore ,and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." - Isaac Newton

astro picture for the day / quote for the day

Image Credit & Copyright: Rolf Olsen

"The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject . . . And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendents will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them . . . many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate . . . Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all." - Seneca, Natural Questions, Book 7, first century A.D.

astro picture for the day

ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope image

Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patients to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession, but which fill on a limited number of reeins(not to sure about this word in my quote) and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined; it is as limitless as that space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinit as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomical gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness of life," - James Sylvester

I like this one when you size it up; you can see lots of galaxies, even galactic clusters in the background.  It's too bad the galaxy on the far left side is halved!

- I wasn't able to size it up enough just by clicking on the image provided here on this blog; but, by making it your desktop image, the image is the right size!

astro picture for the day

Image credit, ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/Davide De Martin

Science/tech news extra,

Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy

Flight design keeps advancing.  One could imagine solar powered propellers as well.  And then, imagine 3d printing one of these?

Well, I'm finding all kinds of exciting futuristic aerospace videos! New 3-Story "Sky Whale" Design for Future Airplanes

Strange & Extreme Airplanes (Aeroplanes) I thought I'd show some of the past creativity as well.

An weird idea of mine that isn't about airplanes, but because of the nuclear powered bomber mentioned in the 'strange and extreme airplanes' link above, I thought I'd mention this. A year or two ago, I thought of making a hugh tank.  A tank the size of a luxery boat, or the largest private boats you see.  How to move it?  Make it nuclear powered just like nuclear powered submarines.  I'm actually surprised no militaries in the world have ever thought of this!

astro picture for the day / quote for the day

Image Credit: Romano Corradi (IAC),
Nicolas Grosso, Agnès Acker, Robert Greimel, Patrick Guillout

"I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming, and a little mad. Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a devine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings." - A.N. Whitehead