What a difference a week makes 🌞🥶
Arrived in Helsinki yesterday to blowing snow & temperatures >30°C below those I was in in Bangalore last week 😬✌️
Am at @aaltouniversity in Espoo for the annual Finnish Winter Satellite Workshop, giving an invited talk tomorrow about ESA’s space science missions 🇫🇮
[#]SpaceScience
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Anonymous white goods – name the airline ✈️😬✌️
(Yes, I’ve deleted the registration to make it harder 😛)
[#]Photography 📷
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When you look up at the night sky, the photons arriving from distant stars & galaxies have experienced no passage of time during their journey to your eye 💫
From their perspective, they arrive at exactly the same moment that they left & they have travelled no distance ⏰📐
You may now continue your sub-light speed day 🤷♂️
(Yes, my train to Mannheim was late & I made it on to my connecting ICE to Frankfurt Airport thanks only to the conductor who kept his door open for me 🚅😰)
[#]Relativity
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This quote from Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” seems particularly appropriate today:
“The task facing American statesmen over the next decades, therefore, is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to "manage" affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.”
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If a convicted, despotic narcissist takes the most important position in the world through divisive, populist, regressive rhetoric, that does not mean they are a great man.
It means the world is deeply FUBARed.
The decline & fall of empires is always messy, often hastened by opportunist sociopaths who gorge from the trough after setting fire to the barn.
And while we’ve been here before, perhaps not in a way that is so dangerously interdependent on a global scale.
Good luck everyone.
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Mad dogs & Englishmen go out in the evening chill 🥶
Pretty parky out there today, with the valleys around Heidelberg & Ziegelhausen partly hiding the Sun. And as soon as it set, things got proper cold quickly.
Still, better on the bike than off it, I say, & it only took half an hour for my toes to defrost after 😬👍
43km to Ladenburg & back.
[#]CyclingLife 🚴♂️
[#]Photography 📷
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“What a sad excuse for an apex predator you are, monkey boy. Now feed me.” 🙈😼
[#]Tigger 😽
[#]Bengals 🐅
[#]Photography 📷
[#]CatsOfMastodon 🐈
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The short horizontal spikes either side of the head of the comet are artefacts due to saturation of the detector. The comet was very bright & even in these short 4 second filtered exposures, slightly over-exposed.
The 17 sec clear / white light images also taken show the tail better but are heavily wiped out in the head region.
The green diagonal spike from the head is real though & must indicate a specific ionised gas emitting brightly in the LASCO Orange filter (shown as green in the RGB).
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I make no claim that this is a scientifically accurate representation of the comet.
It was changing shape as it moved rapidly around the Sun during its perihelion passage & the three filter images were taken separated by roughly 30 mins each.
Thus after downloading the images as FITS files from the SOHO archive & processing them to maximise the dynamic range, I simply shifted & rotated them to align. No image scale or distortion terms were used.
So it’s close, but certainly not perfect 🤷♂️
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Earlier this week, Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) made its closest approach to the Sun.
While doing so, it made a dramatic appearance sweeping through the wide-field LASCO C3 coronagraph of the ESA/NASA SOHO mission over a few days.
Here’s my take, a triplet of Deep Red, Orange, & Blue filter images taken over an hour around 09:00UTC on 14 January, as an RGB composite.
[#]C2024G3 💫
[#]CometATLAS ☄️
[#]Perihelion 🌞
[#]Photography 📷
[#]SpaceScience 🛰️
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A Tigger triptych 😽😺😼
As it’s cloudy & grey today, I thought I’d share a few more pictures of our boy enjoying some winter warmth yesterday 🌞
[#]Bengals 🐅
[#]Photography 📷
[#]CatsOfMastodon 🐈
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His films were also often equally radical, of course, and just imagine how different the Star Wars universe might be if he had accepted the invitation to direct Return of the Jedi.
I mean, it simply doesn’t compute & yet if he had been allowed to apply his vision, it would have been something marvellous to behold 🙂
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I missed the news last night, but was very sad to wake today & read of the passing of David Lynch.
His films are remarkable, but it is Twin Peaks that will stay with me forever. I was living in the US when it was first broadcast & I was astonished by its strange & glorious mood.
From the bizarrely slow pacing & icy acting to the unsettling subterranean soundtrack, then the genuine terror of the final reveal.
It changed television forever.
Ad astra, David ✨
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/16/david-lynch-twin-peaks-and-muholland-drive-director-dies-aged-78
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Quite chilly this evening under clear skies, with a few shady corners on the edge of ice. And lots of traffic around 5pm as well, unsurprisingly 🤷♂️🚗🚕🚌🚙
But I’ll take a 46km ride under such conditions here in Germany vs the same distance in India at 25°C any day. How anyone would consider cycling there is beyond me 😱
[#]Ladenburg 🏛️
[#]CyclingLife 🚴♂️
[#]Photography 📷
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Content-scrapers publishing space imagery without proper credit is very frustrating, but it’s even worse when august scientific organisations like The Royal Society do it as well 🙄
How does anyone gain from this? It’s vital that the public knows how their money’s being spent, not least in the UK & Europe where many still think only NASA “does space”.
FYI, Huygens was an ESA-led spacecraft with participation from NASA & ASI, part of the NASA-led Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn & its moons.
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Face-on & profile: Tigger’s mugshot, chiaroscuro-style 😽
Nice to be home, especially on a sunny day. Might even go for a cycle ride, though it’s pretty cold out 🚴♂️🥶
[#]Photography 📷
[#]CatsOfMastodon 🐈
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I was lucky enough to work alongside the Gaia team at ESA’s ESTEC, including the project scientist Timo Prusti, to work a little on some of the results including the first Gaia all-sky images.
I was at ESA’s ESOC Mission Control in Darmstadt for the launch in December 2013, speaking in the press & public event.
And I also had the privilege to see Gaia up close in its EADS Astrium Toulouse clean room as it neared completion – I’ll post some of my pictures tomorrow.
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As just one metric of its influence, there are far more papers published annually based on Gaia data than from any other astronomical telescope or mission, over 2000 per year.
https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/peer-reviewed-journals#
To dip your toes into the wide range of scientific discoveries enabled by Gaia, take a look at this archive of result summaries:
https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/image-of-the-week
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By measuring the positions & motions of billions of stars, Gaia has revolutionised our understanding of the dynamics & evolution of our home galaxy.
But it has also enabled a wide range of other science, including fundamental physics, star formation, asteroids, & more, & its catalogues provides the best basic distances & other parameters used across many studies.
Its final catalogues will also enable the discovery of huge numbers of new exoplanets.
It is indispensable to modern astronomy.
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Although Gaia lasted years longer than originally planned, its life was always going to be limited – it uses a cold gas propellant to maintain its extremely precise spin rate as it scans the sky & that has nearly now run out.
There are no meaningful science operations to be done if the spin rate can’t be maintained, hence the end of mission.
For some insights into the tech tests yet to be done & how those may help deliver better calibration for Gaia’s data:
https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/technology-tests
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