Yeah. So this vale of tears is a vale of tears.There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of, revealed by our natural philosophy.
This may be a dreadful time on all kinds of scales, but it remains the greatest era of exploration in human history. We are not simply citizens of a misgoverned republic (and shut up all you jackals who live in better-run places just now). We have become, thanks to extraordinary and driven work by tens of thousands (at least), inhabitants of a cosmos–and some recent results drive that truth home.
For one–our own star is ready for its close up:
That’s a Solar Orbiter mission image, depicting what are called “campfires” on the surface of the sun, at a resolution never before achieved. Lots more images and details here.
And, to stretch our legs a little, how about this? The first image ever made of a planetary system around a sun-like star:
And one more, not a new one, but to me, one of the most extraordinary cultural monuments in the history of humankind, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field:
Every time I look at that, my breath catches. From the Hubblesite press release:
This tiny slice of the universe, speckled with galaxies near and far, tells the story of galaxy evolution over cosmic time. Among the 10,000 or so galaxies pictured here are newborns, adolescents, adults, and retirees. Like looking through a vast collection of family photos, astronomers are poring over this comprehensive image to see how galaxies grew up, matured, and aged.
Check out that release, btw. It’s a very brief introduction to the multiple layers of inquiry and effort it took to make that image–which takes our eyes, and hence our minds, from the almost-present back 13 billion years, to the time when the universe was, in cosmic time, a toddler.
One picture, constructed by puny, tiny, ever-so finite humans, to hold the sweep of the universe.
Respites come at all angles. Straight up being one of them.
Open thread.
Frankensteinbeck
I started the outline for my next book today. Very, very preliminary title is ‘Being Adopted By A Superhero Is Awkward.’ My beta readers for I’m Late To Alchemy Class were almost unanimous in wanting more of a particular side character, so I’m giving her her own book.
I kinda wanted to write my reverse cosmic horror Younger Things, about a teenage girl who opens a portal to the Outer Darkness, goes through, and wreaks devastation with her ‘logic’ and ‘compassion’, but books that weird do not sell. I got to go where the money is right now.
HumboldtBlue
Speaking of stars, this grandma should have become one.
Cermet
The solar image was taken, I believe by the new very large solar telescopr built on Milokai, on the big Island. Interesting how hot under the collar some here posted about new telescopes being built there. But this is what results when these new instruments are built.
Ken
@Cermet: Actually the image is from the Solar Orbiter probe.
Which is apparently different from the Parker Solar Probe? I’m unsure because both articles claim the probe has gotten closer to the sun than any other probe. Parker won’t reach its closest orbit until 2025.
Tom Levenson
@Cermet: The solar image was made by a space-based observatory, not a ground based telescope.
The new large solar telescope to which you refer saw first light in January. It is in Hawaii, but is not sited at the Mauna Kea location that is the focus of dispute. It is, rather, one island north, on Maui’s Haleakala.
oldster
If we could take a picture of all of the electrical activity in a human brain when it is thinking intently — all of the neurons firing, all of the intra- and extra-cellular chemical activity with bonds being made and broken, ions transferred and captured, at every step of the process —
then it might look something like this.
A boiling mass of high-energy activity, whose meaning cannot be understood merely by looking at the surface. Where “I love grandma” and “I hate broccoli” both look like inscrutable frothings of electrical action. Where chaos on the surface belies the order underneath.
The human brain may be the most complex and intricate system in the cosmos. And stars may just be cosmic h-bomb bonfires. But if the stars are actually thinking, then their thoughts might look like this.
OldDave
One of my favorite Berkeley Breathed comics addressed the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image.
The Parker and the Solar Orbiter are indeed two different efforts. The Parker was created at Johns Hopkins APL, the Solar Orbiter from ESA.
ETA: the Parker’s mission is a bit more dangerous, as it will get six times closer to the Sun (10 solar radii for the Parker, vs. 60 solar radii for the Solar Orbiter).
Ken
@Ken: OK, after reading more carefully I see my confusion. Parker became the closest-ever probe to the Sun in 2018. Solar Orbiter was launched in 2020 and is now in a closer orbit than Parker, but Parker’s orbit is still being changed. So they’re leapfrogging.
NotMax
Through whatever convoluted means, what immediately came to mind? If Marlon Brando had a deep Boston accent:
“Stellar!”
:)
mrmoshpotato
That first picture is very sunny.
Lapassionara
Thank you for this respite.
James E Powell
From Wikipedia:
Totally worth it. I love looking at Hubble photos, though I’m sure that filling me with awe and amazement was not among the project’s objectives.
Yutsano
@Cermet: The cost is shafting the Hawai’ian native population AGAIN about building telescopes on sacred grounds. I understand the scientific community gets great use out of these sites, but every time a telescope is proposed, another chunk of mountain top gets taken for it. There has to be a balance at some point. It’s not like there wasn’t a concentrated effort to eliminate the Hawai’ian language or anything.
But I can’t wait until the James Webb telescope goes up next year (hopefully). Hubble has been a wonderful workhorse, but if the Webb does what it says on the tin…wow won’t even cover it.
J R in WV
Great post, Tom, thanks so much. Anything to distract we jackals from the maelstrom we’re roiling in here on Earth!!!
Have tried to find a local place to see the recent comet, to no avail. Too many trees and hills. Neighbor said “Look for a pipeline crossing a ridge top road — or a really big strip job with a broken out gate!” Naw, I know where there are both of those, but in the dark you can slip off a ridge top, or sink into a mud pit on a strip job.
trollhattan
STILL have not spotted Comet Neowise #TooLazyToDriveIntoTheSticks but it’s reportedly still in viewing range. Its now visible to those in the Southern Hemisphere. Its discovery was from yet another space-based observatory, from which it takes its name.
Has Trump’s Space Force given us anything cool yet?
smedley the uncertain
Thanks Tom, thoroughly thought provoking as ‘What if…. It interests me that the jackals are more focused on who got the picture and how. There seems little interest in the information and knowledge to be gained from the image content. I can only follow Sagans mantra ‘Billions and Billions….’
Yes, I’m sure my use of mantra is incorrect.
NotMax
@Tom Levenson
Can see it from my house.
Short video includes a close look at ol’ Sol.
Yutsano
@smedley the uncertain:
Eh. Language is flexible. And if anything Sagan was understanding the actual universe.
It does depress me a bit that if we actually do make it out beyond our solar system via FTL drive, we’ll never get to those far away galaxies. Curse you expansion of the universe.
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: Hasn’t it moved out of view? (I haven’t looked for it in Chicago.)
Has the Kremlin’s bitch sold the Moon to the Russkis yet?
ETA – Correction – have the Kremlin’s bitches, the traitorous Trump trash mobster crime family sold the Moon to the Russkis yet? Because they’ve all sucked the Kremlin’s asshole for decades.
Honus
Going out at 10:15 to watch the space station pass over. In central Virginia. Here’s the link to see when you can see it from your house:
https://spotthestation.nasa.gov
NotMax
@trolhattan
A dull and derivative logo and crappy motto.
trollhattan
@Honus:
Know people who have photographed it transiting the sun and moon and I was not prepared for how fast that sucker is moving. You either need to videotape it or operate the camera at 50 or 60 fps to get a decent sequence.
Have to remind myself it’s the biggest manmade orbiting object ever, by far.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Frankensteinbeck:
That actually sounds really good!
Never played any tabletop RPGs, but I’ve heard of of some themed after the Cthulhu mythos.
An idea that’s been banging around my head was an Lovecraftian RPG set in the Depression-era United States, specifically the early 1930s. Tentatively called, “Capos and Cthulhu”, gangsters would feature prominently as a character type players could choose from. Hoover-era FBI agents as well as maybe Prohibition agents would be another choice. Private detectives working for clients eager to secure the artifact, in addition to some rich British nobility/explorer types. The gangsters, along with several other factions, would be hot on the trail of an otherworldly artifact located in the swamps of Louisiana the capo wants his hands on.
raven
@NotMax: Well it’s not on Milokai then is it?
Honus
@trollhattan: its just fun for us to watch passing over and think ”there’s people in there”. I always feel like waving to them.
Anotherlurker
I was on the phone with a lifelong friend on the East Coast, this afternoon. A good deal of our conversation centered on his immense pride that his daughter, who is in an Astrophysics PHD program, had her first credit as 3rd author of a published article.
Proud Daddy is very rightfully proud!
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Would have to be limited to the early 30s, then, as Prohibition went bye-bye in late ’33.
raven
Sunrise from up there. Eight years, shit.
Kelly
Our respite today was gorging on sun warmed blackberries between swims in the river :-)
different-church-lady
Far less spectacular, but much easier to see: tonight Saturn, Jupiter and the Moon are forming a neat triangle. They’ll be doing this dance throughout the rest of the year, and on Dec. 21 they’ll be coming together in a very tight little packet.
Ken
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Both Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu and Pelgrane’s Trail of Cthulhu use the 1930s setting. That is after all when Lovecraft was writing.
Both games also suggest gangsters as a possible investigator (character) background. I can’t offhand remember Lovecraft using such protagonists. There were thieves in The Terrible Old Man, but they were not portrayed as heroic or even sympathetic.
frosty
@raven: Nice. Was that Hawaii? I’m with you on “Eight years, shit.” A vacation we took just a couple of years ago turns out to have been in 2014. Shit.
debbie
Nice to know there must be something better out there than we puny beings here.
Jeffro
@Honus:
@trollhattan: I usually wait for the 4+ minute transits to set an alarm, but I’m always out there (here in central VA too!) whenever it works, early a.m. or late night. =)
@Honus: and yes, I wave too…never fails to amaze, never fails to give me hope!
NotMax
@Ken
Can easily see a mash-up of Doc Savage and Lovecraft working without too much fiddling with either canon.
Another Scott
Neat stuff.
I had visions of being an astronomer when I started college, then discovered that there were only a few dozen jobs in the field, then discovered I really wasn’t that good at physics… It’s good I discovered that early!
In other news, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/thousands-demand-netanyahu-quit-coronavirus-handling-200802000808674.html
Gradually, and then suddenly.
Cheers,
Scott.
Redshift
@Honus: Thanks for the reminder! I went out and saw it. Though the long ISS passes are the best, the cool thing about the shorter passes is seeing the station fade out in the middle of the sky as it goes into the Earth’s shadow.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
So, my respite along the lines suggested by Mr. Levenson here has been to re-read The Order of Time by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (fairly new book, just published a couple years back, which is when I first read it). Just finished it today after working on it over the past 4 days (as a respite to my “job” — together with my lovely wife — as full-time pandemic daycare for our two pre-school age granddaughters, sweet but very tiring darlings that they are).
Best book of “science for the layman” I’ve ever read, on a topic (time, of course) that is endlessly fascinating to me and is, I think, one of the most important “big questions”. Goes pretty deep into the science, while also being deeply humanistic (he delves into our consciousness — our very identities — as an intrinsic aspect of our experience of time). Highly recommend to the crowd hereabouts.
Frankensteinbeck
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The idea driving Younger Things is that all cosmic horror agrees that their reality and ours is incompatible. So, presumably US breaking through into THEIR world would be just as destructive as their breaking through into ours. We would bring order and reason and envelop their world in light.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Honus:
@trollhattan: There may be something about ISS in “On The Road” next week.
I just returned from a mission to find Moose and Squirrel.
SFBayAreaGal
I wish NASA would send another rover to Mars with a microphone. I would love to hear the sounds of Mars.
mrmoshpotato
@different-church-lady:
They are conspiring against us. We should blast them out of the sky.
Another Scott
@SFBayAreaGal: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-insight-hears-peculiar-sounds-on-mars
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
SFBayAreaGal
Unfortunately where I live, summer brings in the fog. Makes it hard to see anything in the night sky.
different-church-lady
@Honus: Ah, thank you. I’d been meaning to look that up, and you’ve saved me the trouble.
I think the last time I saw an ISS viewing chart it was still on monospaced web pages.
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck:
I don’t mean to tell you your business, but publishers keep buying books about why the President is great and deserves a second term, so I’m pretty sure what you’re describing is not too weird to sell.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@SFBayAreaGal: They just sent one with a helicopter.
NotMax
@Another Scott
Professor teaching an astronomy class I took liked to use different colors of chalk to sketch out various items cosmic and their properties on the blackboard during the lecture portions of the program. There was one day he all of a sudden stopped mid-sentence, turned his head to one side and to the other several times, then tersely announced, in his heavy German accent, “No more class for today. I cannot find mine blue light!”
Jeffro
Also, speaking of respites…go check out all the #LisaBonet madness on Twitter, y’all. F’n hysterical :)
Ken
@Another Scott: “Ulla! Ulla! Ulla!”
Adam L Silverman
@Tom Levenson: That picture is clearly the eye of Sauron over Barad-dur, which is being circled by Nazguls.
different-church-lady
@mrmoshpotato:
Well why the hell else would we have a Space Force?
Adam L Silverman
@Tom Levenson: It could also be Brother Eye.
mrmoshpotato
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
Tease!
Redshift
@Honus: I usually wave, and often call out “hello, astronauts, Привет, cosmonauts!” There’s also a tradition among Twitter space fans of the #ISSWave.
patrick II
I was at a park today sitting alone and reading a book. A couple of young boys came to the playground near me, the older one looked a little old for the equipment, maybe ten or eleven. He climbed up on top of a piece and looked like he was about to jump down. He was a little overweight and I was worried that he might hurt himself with what appeared to be about a five-foot drop. He came to the edge, jumped, did a flip with a half-twist, and landed facing the equipment, turned, and walked away like it was nothing. Life’s little surprises.
Tom Levenson
@Adam L Silverman: Curses!
Found out!
Adam L Silverman
@Tom Levenson: Or it could be the central power battery on Ryut in the Forbidden Sector.
Tom Levenson
@Adam L Silverman: I believe I am witnessing a replay of a well-spent misspent youth.
mrmoshpotato
@SFBayAreaGal: Hehe, here you go
NotMax
@BillinGlendaleCA
Additionally the just launched Perseverance includes two microphones, one of which is intended to survive the landing. The other’s function is to record the sounds of the descent.
Another Scott
@NotMax: :-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: He would deliver Israel to Hamas and Iran before he’d step down.
Ken
I’m kind of surprised Philip Jose Farmer didn’t work Lovecraft into his Wold Newton crossovers. Most of Lovecraft’s protagonists aren’t all that heroic, I suppose.
Crossovers of Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft are common. James Lovegrove and Lois H. Gresh have both written trilogies, and many authors have done short stories. The collection The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes has several examples.
Redshift
It’s an endless source of wonder for me that every object in the Hubble Deep Field is a galaxy.
mrmoshpotato
@Adam L Silverman: LOL Well played.
SFBayAreaGal
Deleted
Adam L Silverman
@Adam L Silverman:
frosty
@Frankensteinbeck: This sounds like a neat concept. I would read it.
Adam L Silverman
@Tom Levenson: Actually the whole Blackest Night different colored Lantern Corps is from the early to mid aughts. Basically, bubblegum reading while spending almost all of 2009 on Temporary Duty traveling around the US for meetings, operational planning team meetings, conferences, war-games, did I mention meetings?
Ken
@Redshift: If you look very closely at the center-lower-left, you’ll see that one is actually a Type III Kardashev civilization. But there’s a galaxy inside the shell.
Adam L Silverman
@Ken: Did Kim Newman work any of the Lovecraft stuff into his later novels in the Anno Dracula universe? I’ve only ever read and re-read Anno Dracula and The Bloody Red Baron. Deity knows he managed to cram just about everything else in there. Not that I’m complaining, I really enjoyed all the call outs to the other genre characters.
Raoul
We had a couple friends over last evening for an appropriately distanced take-out dinner on the townhouse association pool patio, followed by a swim.
I happened to glance up at the sky right about 10pm here in Minneapolis and saw a very bright object moving towards the ESE (or so) from out of Arcturus (I had to look that up after the fact, so don’t be impressed). I pointed it out and guessed it was the ISS.
It was the ISS! I checked heavens-above and indeed we had a pass at a -3.3 brightness between 9:59 and 10:03 last night. It was lovely to see.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: He was a fan of Weimar cinema?
Ken
@Adam L Silverman: I only read through the third novel, the one set in Rome and full of Italian cinema crossovers. No Lovecraftian crossovers to that point.
EDIT: Wikipedia says that one was Dracula Cha Cha Cha. It also doesn’t mention any Lovecraft crossovers.
However it does remind me of one of my favorite Holmes-Lovecraft crossovers, Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald. That would be an interesting background for role-playing.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
G’nort rulez!
(Yes, know he predates the saga you cite by some years. In space no one can hear artistic license.)
:)
CaseyL
A photo of the sun that absolutely enthralled me came out a few years ago. I don’t remember how it was taken, but it was quite a closeup of the solar surface. Showed bright glowing gas whirlpools almost hexagonally arranged with darker matter between them, over the entire surface.
I’m not sure why that specific image did it, but I suddenly had an absolute sense of the sun not as a single solid “ball of gas.,” but as a chaotic, roiling ball-shaped storm of superheated gas clusters. Well, yes, of course I already knew that – intellectually. This was like getting it viscerally.
Hard to explain; sort of like the first time I saw Saturn in a telescope rather than as an image on a page or computer/TV screen. It was really, really there, live and in person.
ETA: I remember now part of what got to me: the translucency of the surface. The immediacy of realizing those storms and chaos went all the way down.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Guy’s first name was Wulff. Can’t get much more Germanic than that.
;)
SFBayAreaGal
@mrmoshpotato: Lol, I love Marvin
mrmoshpotato
@different-church-lady: Exactly! 🤣
SFBayAreaGal
@Another Scott: Thank you. Hearing the wind was so cool
Gin & Tonic
Doc Savage, boy, I read a ton of those back when Bantam was issuing the paperbacks. Don’t remember much, but I went through a lot of them.
Adam L Silverman
@Ken: I really need to read beyond the second one. I just re-read the first one as an e-book and it has all sorts of supplementary material at the back. It has the alternate final chapter from the novella Red Reign that he expanded into Anno Dracula, it has the script treatment he wrote from when it was being pitched to the movie studios, and two more items which I haven’t read yet as the dogs wanted to be walked. And he’s annotated them to explain why he made certain changes.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@mrmoshpotato: I found Moose and Squirrel.
mrmoshpotato
@Tom Levenson: Please Natasha, this is kiddie show.
Ken
If you’re expecting one of us to reply “The falcon flies at midnight” and hand you a self-destructing tape with your next mission, you’re posting in the wrong blog.
NotMax
@BillinGlendaleCA
Your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to track down Ponsonby Britt.
:)
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: Don’t forget Ch’p!
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Too obscure of a reference?
mrmoshpotato
@SFBayAreaGal: Everyone loves Marvin – except Bugs and Daffy.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Not at all. Assumed you were working in The Blue Angel.
Adam L Silverman
@SFBayAreaGal: @mrmoshpotato:
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
We’re fresh out of kaboom. Would you settle for kabong?
:)
Sure Lurkalot
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: I can recommend “The Age of Entanglement” by Louisa Gilder. Takes license but is very engaging.
Jerzy Russian
@Redshift:
There are a few Milky Way stars in there. For example, look near the upper left, just below and left of the reddish galaxy.
CaseyL
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: Thank you for that recommendation! I’ve put in a hold request at my local library.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: No. The Blue Light – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022694/
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Very nice. I’ve added that to my liked videos.
mrmoshpotato
Cubs win! Good night.
cope
@Redshift: Almost everything is a galaxy. As a point of clarification, HST has taken a few different “deep field” images: Hubble Deep Field North, Hubble Deep Field South, Hubble Ultra Deep Field, Hubble Deep Field Infrared, Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Ultraviolet.
In the original Hubble Deep Field N (actually a composite created from four different images taken with two different cameras), there are three or four Milky Way stars characterized by the diffraction spikes they exhibit.
That said, these images are amazing as much as for how far back in time they look as for how many galaxies they reveal.
Science is good.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
Babylon 5. No boom today.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: Boom tomorrow!
PAM Dirac
@Sure Lurkalot:
I would say “takes license” is a pretty big understatement. The subject is really interesting, but the author tries way too hard to turn it into a “brave mavericks fight the closed minds” story.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@Sure Lurkalot: I will be sure to check it out. I went into engineering for my career, but minored in physics (which I loved, though couldn’t pursue further since I knew the math was beyond me).
glc
First two image links appear bad.
The first takes me back to the post, the second to 404 land.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Big Brother Eye! This is hysterical, what is this from?
Carol
Don’t know how anyone can look at that last photo and still believe we humans are alone in the universe.