N12 Turbo Forums

Inspired by a thread from another forum, I though I would bring some of the threads ideas here to see what the 'Locals' think about this stuff.

Galaxies are incomprehensively huge, and our Milky way is a typical spiral one. It had been suggested for the past 30 years that at its center there is a very VERY large Black hole. Unfortunately, there are no present devices to actually detect BH's, but we are able to assume their presence by how they effect things around them. Have a looky and a bit of a read:
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/astro80 ... l8_p7.html

This second site shows individual stars orbiting the center. S02 being one of the fastest accelerating and moving body of mass 'we' have seen. 5000km per second! 17.5million kmh.
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~ghezgroup/gc ... ovie.shtml

Damo

the most fun you can have

http://htwins.net/scale2/

VY Canis Majoris freaks me out.

"It is so large that if it was placed in our solar system, it would extend beyond the orbit of saturn. It would take a plane 1200 years to circle it once."

shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

It's actually pretty damn crazy, there is so much more to learn about space and our universe, we have barely scratched the surface.

My brother's a bit of an astronomy nut so early this year we got the opportunity to fly over to Hawaii and drive up Mauna Kea to see the observatories. Infact we were quite lucky the Gemeni observatory company gave us special permission to go inside and see how the whole thing works.

The obsevatory itself was a spectacular piece of engineering. The way the thing was designed to move so that it focus on particular coordinates, quite quickly too considering the size. and the size of the lens was massive.

Fascinating to see the technology and the level of constant communication going on between the base station and the observatory... The amount of time they have to use the observatory however is quite limited each day (requires specific light conditions) so it was like every second was so precious.

Got to chat to a university professor who was talking about the nebula that they were observing at the time. He showed us some rocks from asteroids and what not that he had collected over the years and sell for crazy amounts of money per gram, its incredible. He even gave each of us a tiny meteorite token to keep as a momento.

Haha that's just my little spiel on what i can remember. I think i was more intrigued by the engineering than the science (that was probably for my brother).

Wow, that would have been an exclusive experience, envy right here! Pics or it didn't happen.

The great thing about space exploration wether it be in actual space, or observation and modeling, is that the technology and engineering has to improve for the exploration to expand and improve. So a lot of the tech and engineering improvements in general come from space exploration. Battery power tools anyone?


Damo

The answer is simple:

42!!!!!

If you try to get your head around the grandiose scale of what goes on up there just beyond the blue, your brain will subsequently boil, liquify and eventually explode.
Just like the martians heads did in the moofee "Mars Attacks" when they played that yodelling music!!

Oracle

Want to feel a little smaller:



Damo

Damo wrote:Wow, that would have been an exclusive experience, envy right here! Pics or it didn't happen.

The great thing about space exploration wether it be in actual space, or observation and modeling, is that the technology and engineering has to improve for the exploration to expand and improve. So a lot of the tech and engineering improvements in general come from space exploration. Battery power tools anyone?


Damo

Yeah i was quite lucky to have had the chance, haha it definately happened otherwise i would have not said. I just took some pictures (as best as i could with a phone) of the small meteorite that i have. The other pictures of the day i don't have on me, but i might set up a dropbox with my uncle to get them and then post them up

The experience was quite scary though, being so high on this mountain the oxygen levels were quite low, and not being used to them you had to move around very slowly as not to use it all up. We then got to watch the sunset to on the mountain that was absolutely amazing.

Speaking of how engineering has to improve for space exploration to improve... the professor at the university was talking about how the first pictures of space were in like 8bit, so astronomers had to take a picture, which would take a long time to get back to earth, and then somehow join all these small 8bit photos in order to map space as best as they could. Obviously quite time consuming. And now we have gradually improved to the extent where we can take a nice photo quite easily.

EDIT: Sorry forgot to add the photos...
Heres the information that comes with it:



and the rock itself:

For those whom have never seen (or think they have never seen) Jupiter with their own eyes. Poke your head outside tonight and have a look at the moon. The brightest 'star' which is a little to the left and slightly higher in the sky (at my latitude at least) is actually Jupiter. Now, anyone with a pair of binoculars or even a decent camera with a zoom lense can make out 4 of its moons also. Go on, have a look you mugs!


Damo

for those that wanted to see, here are the photos of my little adventure...

the drive up mauna kea is so steep and dangerous that no company will give you insurance to take a rental. Thankfully the people taking us up there had a car and drove us up. This part is the easy part with tarmac but the rest was all dirt. Some of the observatories are in the backround, i think there are either 9 or 11 in total at the summit.


As you can see, the shear size of this thing, it was impossible to get a shot to encapsulate it all.




and the magical sunset!