Photography

Are fantastic.

Going to save a couple.

Really good shots. The first 3 are my favorite.

Every second that goes by someone on this planets is looking up with just their naked eye or an instrument the positive aspect of science and technology has given us. Thank you Mr. Galilei, how he would love what we have today.

Images shared by backyard astrophotographers today are simply stunning. Power that used to reside in the hands of those w/ access to HST or NASA is now available to all.

Night and Day is always present it’s just a matter of where you are. When we spin around, away from the light of our star and into the dark the Universe is always right there waiting to greet us. When one stops, looks up and knows what they are looking at it becomes very clear what “god” is and it is not a horridly incompetent real estate agent or some omnipotent force that is creepily focused on bedrooms…eww. It is what you see.

Light traveling from so far away you could not get there…ever. At our best speed it would still take multiple lifetimes to travel the distant light travels in 1 light year and every spot of light you see is in the sky is at least 1000’s if not 1,000,000,000,000’s of LIGHT years away.

Some of the objects creating that light are enormous. We think the Sun is big. In todays fastest jet it would still take 6 months to circumnavigate. The Sun burns ~600 million tons of Hydrogen every second and losses ~400 million tons of mass because it takes 4 Hydrogen atoms to fuse into 1 Helium atom and its been doing this every second for 5 billion years and still has enough Hydrogen to go another 5 billion year and one Exo planet found by Kepler is so large it would reach Jupiter / Saturn, you could fit 1000’s of Suns inside it.

Other light comes from huge spinning discs of material 1000’s of light years across spinning so fast that the material glows red hot, in a vacuum due to a former star pulling it in that was >10x the mass of our Sun that has collapsed due to gravity in on itself so violently it has squeezed the very atoms it is made of down so hard all that is left is a Neutron, no Protons, no Electrons just a ball of Neutrons that after the collapse is ~ 10km in size from something that was at least >10x the mass of our Sun. Oh… this 10km ball of goooy neutron material is also spinning some ~9000x a second…gravity on this is so strong that if a person stepped off a ledge 3 feet high…they would be traveling at close to 3 million mph by the time the hit the bottom 1 million/mph/ft….

Things like this simply melts the mind.

There are clouds of alcohol millions of light years in size, planets with lakes made of liquid Nitrogen where it rains diamonds, gravity waves that literally stretch and compress everything…even you and a place so violent and extreme light which travels at 186,000 miles per second cannot even escape from.

It is a wonderful place and it holds all we will ever need. Take the time from a place where we have not turned our back on the Universe with light pollution and… look up.