Best Boardgame
Anyone else play this game as a kid?
thanks to @graceandmanners for the heads up on this
i really did get chills from watching this.
Animated from hundreds of thousands of still photographs from NASA’s Cassini orbiter, the above video isn’t actually a NASA project. Instead, it’s a preview of a full-length IMAX film dubbed Outside In: a non-profit project funded by a number of individual supporters.
The most striking thing to note about the breathtaking visual fly-by of Saturn seen above is that the footage isn’t computer-generated or enhanced with CGI or 3D effects. What you see are a huge number of high-resolution still images animated in sequence to create full motion using a “2.75D” photographic fly-through technology. Filmmaker Stephen Van Vuuren is aiming for a limited IMAX release for the feature-length movie, to be accompanied by a synchronized light show in planetarium, museum, and gallery locations to be announced.
ESA’s Herschel infrared space telescope has made an unexpected discovery: a dark hole in space. The hole has provided astronomers with a surprising glimpse into the end of the star-forming process. A cloud of bright reflective gas known to astronomers as NGC 1999 sits next to a black patch of sky. For most of the 20th century, such black patches have been known to be dense clouds of dust and gas that block light from passing through.
When Herschel looked in its direction to study nearby young stars, the cloud continued to look black, which should not be the case. Herschel’s infrared eyes are designed to see into such clouds. Either the cloud was immensely dense or something was very unusual.
Investigating further using ground-based telescopes to confirm the discovery, astronomers found the same phenomena: this patch looks black not because it is a dense pocket of gas but because it is truly empty. Something has blown a hole right through the cloud. “No-one has ever seen a hole like this,” says Tom Megeath, of the University of Toledo, USA. “It’s as surprising as knowing you have worms tunnelling under your lawn, but finding one morning that they have created a huge, yawning pit.”
Stars are born in dense clouds of dust and gas that can now be studied in unprecedented detail with Herschel. Although jets and winds of gas have been seen coming from young stars in the past, it has always been a mystery exactly how a star uses these to blow away its surroundings and emerge from its birth cloud. Now, for the first time, Herschel may be seeing an unexpected step in this process.
The astronomers think that the hole must have been opened when the narrow jets of gas from some of the young stars in the region punctured the sheet of dust and gas that forms NGC 1999. The powerful radiation from a nearby mature star may also have helped to clear the hole. Whatever the precise chain of events, it could be an important glimpse into the way newborn stars disperse their birth clouds.
Casey Kazan via ESA
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