Opportunity Update

NASA will hold a press conference Wednesday at 2PM EST to share the results of its efforts to reestablish contact with Opportunity. All indications are that it won't be good news, and may very well mark the end of the mission.

It's been 9 months since communication with the rover was lost during a massive Mars dust storm.

Whatever happens, here's a beautiful piece about Opportunity and some of the lives it's touched by Shannon Stirone: https://medium.com/…/its-time-to-say-goodbye-to-our-beloved…. Expect a lot more pieces like this to be posted in coming days.

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Originally posted on Facebook and Twitter.

Last Light

"All these worlds are yours (except Europa)." *shrug* It seemed appropriate. 😌

This image is being called "last light," a bookend to the first full image from Kepler, captured a decade earlier (https://www.nasa.gov/content/keplers-first-light).

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/ames/kepler-s-final-image-shows-a-galaxy-full-of-possibilities

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Originally posted on Facebook and Twitter.

New Device Is Better Than Old Device

The new model Kindle Paperwhite has replaced an aging (if not *technically* broken) Voyage. It's an upgrade in every way - thinner, lighter, faster, better screen - but it's an incremental upgrade, not a revolutionary one.

I'm very happy with it, but Amazon...I'm pretty sure I know how to work a Kindle, and I'm frankly a little insulted that you think I need❗THREE⁉️ User Guides.... 😶

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Originally posted on Facebook and Instagram.

Just A Little Inspiration

Just a little inspiration, for me as much as for you, on a morning when I'm trying to write despite having the flu, and am gently kicking ACX over where the h*ck my audiobook is. 🤨

I couldn't find any attribution for the quote, but shout if you know who said it.

Hat tip to We Rate Dogs for teaching me how to keep my cursing clean. (Don't worry, this won't extend to the books, lol. Or any other part of my life. But We Rate Dogs is awesome.) 😋

Did anyone else immediately think of Akeso when they read the first two sentences?

 
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Originally posted on Facebook.

It's All Getting Better

A positive reminder that, though on any given day or even year it might not seem like it (and it's in the media's interest not to report it), humanity, the world, society - it's all getting better. We've made amazing progress over the last 200 years; the improvements began accelerating in the last 80 years, and a simple extrapolation from historical data suggests those curves are going to keep accelerating upward.

THIS is why we'll go to the stars. Better yet, this is why we'll deserve to. 🤗

Via Bill Gates: https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072

More information on the data behind the graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condi…

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Originally posted on Facebook and Twitter.

The Nika Show

OMG Nika, would you quit being such an attention whore and let someone else talk for five seconds! 🙄

(Okay, okay, this is actually totally normal. She is the glue that holds the story together and the thread that weaves through it from beginning to end. While I'm getting the core elements of the tale down, it's her story. But I don't think she minds....)

 
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Originally posted on Facebook.

Pale, Dusty Dots

From the author's Twitter post: "One of my favorite kinds of image is one where it doesn’t look like much… until you understand what you’re seeing.

For example: Just a bunch of dots, right? But every single one of those dots *is an entire galaxy*.

And there are a lot of dots. A LOT." (Tweet)

The image is from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey. And because the survey wasn't able to look at every point in the sky, for every dot you see here, there are 200 more across the sky Herschel wasn't able to see, for a total of some 17 million galaxies.

And even that is a pittance compared to the estimated 2 trillion galaxies filling the universe.

You know, somehow I don't think I'm going to run out of story ideas anytime soon....😋

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/pale-dusty-dots

 
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Originally posted on Facebook and Twitter.

Triangulum Galaxy

“Hubble takes gigantic image of the Triangulum Galaxy”: https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1901.

“The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of a close neighbour of the Milky Way — the Triangulum Galaxy, a spiral galaxy located at a distance of only three million light-years. This panoramic survey of the third-largest galaxy in our Local Group of galaxies provides a mesmerising view of the 40 billion stars that make up one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye.”

One of those 40 billion stars, of course, is host to the Kats’ homeworld, Katoikia :D.

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You can download a high-res copy of the image in a variety of sizes here. Note: at full resolution, the file is a whopping 1.67GB!

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Originally posted on Twitter.