Author Archives: Chompsky

Behold: a wide field view of the busy celestial neighbourhood of Monocerous – the Unicorn Constellation – containing the Cone Nebula, the Christmas Tree Cluster, and more besides. To wit:

Pictured as a star forming region and cataloged as NGC 2264, the complex jumble of cosmic gas and dust is about 2,700 light-years distant and mixes reddish emission nebulae excited by energetic light from newborn stars with dark interstellar dust clouds. Where the otherwise obscuring dust clouds lie close to the hot, young stars they also reflect starlight, forming blue reflection nebulae. The featured wide-field image spans over three times the diameter of a full moon, covering over 100 light-years at the distance of NGC 2264. Its cast of cosmic characters includes the Fox Fur Nebula, whose convoluted pelt lies just to the lower right of the image center, bright variable star S Mon visible just above the Fox Fur, and the Cone Nebula just to the left. Given their distribution, the stars of NGC 2264 are also known as the Christmas Tree star cluster.

(Image: Greg Gurdak)

apod

Of this photo he’s restored and colourised, Rob Cross tweets:

…the last known picture of the Titanic taken by Irish Jesuit priest Francis Browne on April 12, 1912 after she departed Queenstown, Ireland. Three days later 1514 people would lose their lives in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.

Previously: Trooping The Colour

Afraid of intimacy? Beset by anxiety? Searching for some kind of meaning? Self-isolate no more – the School Of Life knows how you feel. To wit:

“We are, a lot of us, a great deal sadder, more anxious, more incomplete and more restless than we really need to be because of something very large that is missing from our lives. What’s worse, we don’t even know what this thing is and how much we crave it, because we don’t have the right concepts, experience or encouragement to help us locate it. What we long for and are slowly dying without is: community.

Tough times ahead, so.

Previously: No One Cares

curiousbrain

Behold: the Citroën AMI Quadricycle – a tiny electric car that even 16 year olds will be qualified to drive (14 year olds in France).

On sale from this summer with a ‘light quadricycle’ designation that will not require a licence, the AMI is 2.4 meters long with a minimal interior, a top speed of 45km/h and 70km of range on a three hour full charge.

Dinky.

Yours for €6,000.

uncrate

Behold: zodiacal light – seen here as a band of illumination connecting the ground to the Milky Way in the sky above Chile. To wit:

Zodiacal light — a stream of dust that orbits the Sun in the inner Solar System. It is most easily seen just before sunrise, where it has been called a false dawn, or just after sunset. The origin of zodiacal dust remains a topic of research, but is hypothesized to result from asteroid collisions and comet tails. The featured wide-angle image shows the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy arching across the top, while the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way, is visible on the far left. The image is a combination of over 30 exposures taken last July near La Serena among the mountains of Chile. During the next two months, zodiacal light can appear quite prominent in northern skies just after sunset.

(Image: Roman Ponča (ht: Masaryk U.))

apod