by Grover Schrayer – click to embiggen
via BuzzFeed
Archives for category: look over here!
If you enjoy Perez Hilton, or have heard of him, and also enjoy early American history, boy do I have a site for you. Making the rounds on Facebook and the rest of the blogosphere this week (crap I can’t believe I used the word ‘blogosphere’; I am such a cliché): Perez Hamilton. A (clean) example:
So FUNgasmic!! We’re already really smart, but can we go too?!?!
Now men in the New World have a place to go in Massachusetts if they want to formally learn. John Harvard donated his whole entire book collection and half of his fortune to the new college so the founders named it after him.
We could donate our favorite feather quill if they want to name it after us instead. Hamilton College sounds sooooo much better!
Just a thought!
Today’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar:
click to embiggen, click again to super-embiggen
The Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. What resemble dainty wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour. A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. […] The glowing gas is the star’s outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The “butterfly” stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
More info about the nebula at HubbleSite
Via NOTCOT:
The window promised to house “ten sleazy ‘Lords a Leaping’, twelve ‘Wild haggis drumming’ to, three ‘Giant snails’ pretending to be French hens to a lone partridge in a cucumber plant”. […] the display was a proper cabinet of curiosities featuring work from a number of artists all curated by Matthew Killick and including plenty of twists on James Halliwell’s 1842 classic Christmas carol.
the whole window display
12 haggis drummers drumming
My friend Lacey pointed me toward the Atlantic’s Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, which I’m loving. Every day, Alan Taylor posts a beautiful photo taken by the Hubble space telescope. Yesterday’s image is of the Retina Nebula, a dying star.
click to embiggen, click again to super-embiggen
A dying star, IC 4406, dubbed the “Retina Nebula” exhibits a high degree of symmetry; the left and right halves of the Hubble image are nearly mirror images of the other. If we could fly around IC 4406 in a starship, we would see that the gas and dust form a vast donut of material streaming outward from the dying star. From Earth, we are viewing the donut from the side. This side view allows us to see the intricate tendrils of dust that have been compared to the eye’s retina. In other planetary nebulae, like the Ring Nebula (NGC 6720), we view the donut from the top. The donut of material confines the intense radiation coming from the remnant of the dying star. Gas on the inside of the donut is ionized by light from the central star and glows. Light from oxygen atoms is rendered blue in this image; hydrogen is shown as green, and nitrogen as red. The range of color in the final image shows the differences in concentration of these three gases in the nebula. Unseen in the Hubble image is a larger zone of neutral gas that is not emitting visible light, but which can be seen by radio telescopes. One of the most interesting features of IC 4406 is the irregular lattice of dark lanes that criss-cross the center of the nebula. These lanes are about 160 astronomical units wide (1 astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and Sun). They are located right at the boundary between the hot glowing gas that produces the visual light imaged here and the neutral gas seen with radio telescopes. We see the lanes in silhouette because they have a density of dust and gas that is a thousand times higher than the rest of the nebula. The dust lanes are like a rather open mesh veil that has been wrapped around the bright donut. The fate of these dense knots of material is unknown. Will they survive the nebula’s expansion and become dark denizens of the space between the stars or simply dissipate?
More info about the nebula at HubbleSite
Eric directed my attention to this excellent blog: Texts From Bennett.
These are text messages I exchange with my 17 year old cousin Bennett. He is a white boy that thinks he’s a Crip, works at Amoco, has a girlfriend named Mercedes, and is one of the most unintentionally funny and brilliant souls on the planet.
He has no idea I do this blog. Yes, this is 100% real.
Probably the cleanest one:
I want.
via Eric
A dad made his son a Rocketeer costume! Fantastic – maybe for next year? This kid is the cutest ever. If he came to my door at Halloween I’d give him all my candy and probably some cash.
more photos over at Sweet Juniper – click any photo to go to the gallery