Brian

NuSTAR and Nanoflares

NuSTAR’s solar observations are in the news again!

Yep, finally, not wanting to upgrade because it’ll officially break all of my code on my laptop I think I’ve finally offloaded all of the essential work to my production servers. Which means that today is upgrade day…

Perytons really are mythical creatues

Okay, so this has been going around the arXiv for a few weeks now, but there’s a pretty good case for showing the tenacity of scientists in proving themselves wrong when something just doesn’t feel quite right…

Keyboard Shortcuts for the Win

Okay, this is more of a placeholder and link sharing, but I use Dan Rodney’s list of Mac OSX keyboard shortcuts all of the time. Go check it out here: http://www.danrodney.com/mac/

Huge and young, where’d it come from?

So yesterday I posted about exactly how big a 12 billion solar mass black hole appears to be. But I didn’t get into the followup question of, “So why is this new black hole exciting?” Here’s why this is cool, and surprising.

Massive Black Holes and Size

Question from a friend: Multiple News sources (Time Magazine, Wired, now Salon) are all claiming that this new “Monster” Black Hole which is 12+ billion light years away (thank god) is 12 Billion Times the size of our sun… But, every time I read the article it says “12 billion times the MASS of our… Continue reading Massive Black Holes and Size

Rockets Galore

Here’s a really awesome poster that someone is putting together on Etsy of all modern rocketry (1958 to now). It’s pretty amazing to see where the really modern rockets end up on here. This doesn’t include some of the aircraft-based launch vehicles (like the Pegasus XL rocket that launched NuSTAR), but they’d be pretty tiny.

That’s no moon…

…it’s a space station. Well, not really. But even this thing at a measly 300(ish) meters across has enough gravity to trap a moon (and keep it bound, even when it’s doing a flyby of MUCH bigger fish, like us). Full story with an animated gif of the moon orbiting the asteroid here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4459

There’s no place like home

Let’s be honest, you needed something to splash up on that fancy external monitor. How’s about a live view fo the Earth from the ISS? Granted, half of the orbit it’s dark (because…nighttime). But every half hour or so it’s a very pretty thing to watch. Update: Here’s a link straight to the NASA… Continue reading There’s no place like home

Commuting is for the birds

Okay, so I know that this is old news for most people, but commuting sucks. If the world were a perfect place, then we’d all be able to ditch the car, live in close proximity to all of our friends and relatives, and have an amazing grocery store within an easy bike ride of our… Continue reading Commuting is for the birds

Author: Brian