This bit has been bothering me for years. It's oval-shaped and it doesn't match any imaging artifacts on the NAC that I've seen before. It's almost as if it's a bow shock in the E ring. Any ideas?

E-ring Shadow - From Gordan Ugarković (ugordan.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/8Hp3hH

Solar protons are really bad for space-based astronomy, m'kay?

Some food for thought.

Tempus fuckit.

Interesting video on how the "NATO phonetic alphabet" (you know, those Alfa, Bravo, November, Lima, Foxtrot, Yankee etc.) words you hear in aviation and in the military eventually got selected. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAT-...

Here is a fantastic summary by @fcain.universetoday.com of all the important and interesting findings that have been published about #3I/Atlas. And surprise surprise, none of them indicate that its an alien spaceship! 🔭 www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZWK...

I come back to this video time and time again www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc1S...

File this one into the "Today I learned" cabinet.

Freedom of speech. How it started: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFrk... How it's going: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdGL... #FCC

A distant shot of Saturn's system while Cassini was still was on its way. This was taken after they had resolved the condensation residue issue on the ISSNA optics by heating it, and still almost 2 years before Saturn arrival. Magnified 2x from original pixel scale. Taken on 2002-10-21 14:43 UTC

The sun was just 10 degrees above the horizon when NASA's Perseverance rover captured this morning view of Nili Planum yesterday. The rim of Jezero crater is casting a long shadow over the rover and foreground landscape. 🔭 Full res: flic.kr/p/2rt54pJ Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Simeon Schmauß

Natural color image of Titan taken by the Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera on 2013-06-10 15:17 UTC. Uncompressed quality image available at flic.kr/p/vQxGot

Cassini wide-angle RGB view taken 2011-09-13 11:31 UTC. Distance to Enceladus: 277 000 km Distance to Tethys: 213 000 km Phase angle: 135 deg

Artist: Hage

Voyager 1 launched OTD in 1977. Had its radio occultation of Titan failed, Voyager 2 would have followed the same trajectory and we'd get no Uranus or Neptune as a result. Nature cooperated (no rain above ground stations to mess with Titan radio occultation data). Let that sink in. (1/2)

In the shadow of the Starship program, Falcon 9 quietly achieved 2 milestones: the first booster to launch 30 times and the 400th droneship recovery. F9 is literally the U.S. workhorse rocket right now with reliability unmatched by any other SLV.

What an amazing image, the suppression of the star's brightness is so good, it makes it look like it's from ALMA.

Debating with myself whether or not to unfollow a number of accounts because their posts focus on Trump, Epstein and the general clusterfuck that is the U.S.of A right now, of which I just can't really be bothered to care about for my own psychological wellbeing.

Still can't get over @deschscoveries.bsky.social parodying Loeb, and Loeb straight-up playing out the parody a 3 days later. Is Desch a clairvoyant, or did Loeb read this mockery of him and think—hey, that's actually a great idea!—and just plagiarize him?!

Glad the Apollo 13 movie is getting reruns lately. This scene is even more moving today: right, Tom Hanks playing Jim Lovell; left, cameo appearance by actual Jim Lovell (1928 Mar 25 - 2025 Aug 7).

Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell has passed at 97 www.nasa.gov/news-release... One of my early young journalist memories was getting to interview him and Ron Howard on a red carpet in Austin for a screening of Apollo 13. I bragged about it for a while! (I'm the mop of brown curly hair)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=psMn... #30years

I predict the next interstellar object we detect will also be claimed to be an "alien probe" by Avi Loeb. Follow me for more deep insights like this.

This went completely below my radar at the time, JPL had a press release about a VIMS scan of Saturn's rings in 2019 and used my mosaic as a base. Hell, they even credited me. I feel humbled and honored. H/T to @tedstryk.bsky.social for inadvertently getting me to learn this. tinyurl.com/3cfhkfht

After more than a month of deferring my Samsung tablet update to OneUI 7 due to comments online, I can only say: yes, it's a piece of shit. So you've customized the UI to your liking? Tough luck, because we at Samsung have a whole department that focuses solely on overriding your preferences (1/2)

500th orbital Falcon 9 launch. 3 complete and 1 partial failure in total if I recall correctly. While the Starship program is in a bad place, I don't think there's a launch services provider in the world who wouldn't sign up for Falcon's launch success statistic in a heartbeat.

09:24 on Saturday July 5th, over the Red Sea

American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history The largest brain drain in history was when thousands of scientists left Nazi Germany; it became known as "Hitler's gift." America's current assault on science is set to surpass that. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #science

Not gonna lie, it felt kinda surreal to see my countryman, Dr. Željko Ivezić be the Director of Vera Rubin Observatory construction since 2021. and the major talking head while releasing the first Rubin imagery to the public a few days ago.

Watched a keynote by Jim Keller and he showed a graph of CPU transistor count over the years. It was a logarithmic plot. My first machine was a Commodore 64 which had a variant of the MOS 6502 chip with a whopping 3500 transistors. We're now in the 100 *billion* transistors territory. (1/2)

PSA: I know it's trendy to hate on Musk, but the undeniable fact is he built a space launch organization that delivered the most reliable launch vehicle in U.S. history, ever: the Falcon 9. The F9 family has launched over 500 flights (unprecedented for U.S., comparable only to the Soviet R-7 family)

(1/2) Europa's color and contrast varies greatly depending on the viewing geometry, even when the illumination geometry doesn't change much. Here is a particularly striking example using Galileo G1 and E14 images.

www.dpreview.com/.../worlds-a.... John S. was kind enough to include one of my images in his article showcase about the ins and outs of planetary photography by our interplanetary spacecraft. Spoiler alert: it takes way more thought and planning than you'd think.

Totalling around 120 hours of observing time, this is the longest the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has ever focused on a single target. The deep field aims to probe the Cosmic Dawn, when the Universe was only a few million years old. Read more 👉 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed... 🔭 🧪 ☄️

Contrast-enhanced views of Tethys, Dione and Rhea, as seen by Cassini's narrow-angle camera on 29 June 2008. RGB filters, magnified 1.5x from original pixel scale. Not to relative scale, but representing the angular diameter as seen by Cassini at the time. live.staticflickr.com/3574/3415420...

Cassini, seven narrow-angle image RGB footprint mosaic of the unlit side of the rings on 2 Jun 2007 from a distance of 2.24 mil km and at a phase angle of 54 degrees. Details at: www.flickr.com/photos/ugord... live.staticflickr.com/3257/2693436...

Scott Manley's video on the tedious and amazing effort to fix Voyager 1 youtu.be/p0K7u3B_8rY?...

holy SHIT you need to watch this video notice what happens about 14 seconds in (trust me, you'll see it) www.youtube.com/watch?v=77ub...

Reason I only posted that centerpiece is because that was the only *full* resolution RGB WAC footprint taken of that mosaic, the rest was 2x2 binned. IIRC. photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA0... 7 years later, the Cassini ISS team knocked it out of the park with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day...

Centerpiece of the first Cassini Saturn eclipse mosaic, taken on Sept. 15, 2006, wide-angle camera view. RGB data with some gapfill using methane and violet filters where the sun's glare caused bad CCD charge bleed. live.staticflickr.com/1343/1140188...

Current challenge: Work out the workings of ESA Rosetta VIRTIS imaging spectrometer's EDR format and attempt to calibrate the Earth flyby #1 (2005) data spectral cube into an sRGB color image. Prospects: VERY UNCERTAIN. How it's going:

One of my favorite images from the Cassini era. H/T to John Spencer, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO for reminding me of it. live.staticflickr.com/6193/6209087...

youtu.be/9UX7NJLYyb4?... 🚀🥩🔥 h/t @joebarnard.bsky.social

Stephen Fry's argument against God and His morals.

"They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay the longer hours the reduced benefits the end of overtime and the vanishing pension" ~George Carlin

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs. (“Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, or LOTR)