True Story. My Author/journalist/landlady Took A Trip To The States, Met Up With My College Student Friend

misscounterfactual

2 years ago

Artemis ⅼ Launch l Kennedy Space Center

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” — John F. Kennedy's 1962 "moon" speech

l NASALive: 16 Nov. 2022 l photo: John Kraus

747 notes View Post

misscounterfactual

2 years ago

12 Great Gifts from Astronomy

This is a season where our thoughts turn to others and many exchange gifts with friends and family. For astronomers, our universe is the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve learned so much about it, but every question we answer leads to new things we want to know. Stars, galaxies, planets, black holes … there are endless wonders to study.

In honor of this time of year, let’s count our way through some of our favorite gifts from astronomy.

Our first astronomical gift is … one planet Earth

So far, there is only one planet that we’ve found that has everything needed to support life as we know it — Earth. Even though we’ve discovered over 5,200 planets outside our solar system, none are quite like home. But the search continues with the help of missions like our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). And even you (yes, you!) can help in the search with citizen science programs like Planet Hunters TESS and Backyard Worlds.

This animated visualization depicts Earth rotating in front of a black background. Land in shades of tan and green lay among vast blue oceans, with white clouds swirling in the atmosphere. The image is watermarked with the text “Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio” and “visualization.”

Our second astronomical gift is … two giant bubbles

Astronomers found out that our Milky Way galaxy is blowing bubbles — two of them! Each bubble is about 25,000 light-years tall and glows in gamma rays. Scientists using data from our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered these structures in 2010, and we're still learning about them.

This image captures the majestic “Fermi bubbles” that extend above and below our Milky Way galaxy, set against the black background of space. A glowing blue line horizontally crosses the center of the image, showing our perspective from Earth of our galaxy’s spiral arms and the wispy clouds of material above and below it. Cloudy bubbles, colored deep magenta to represent Fermi’s gamma-ray vision, extend above and below the galactic plane. These bubbles are enormous, extending roughly half of the Milky Way's diameter and filling much of the top and bottom of the image. The image is watermarked “Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration.”

Our third astronomical gift is … three types of black holes

Most black holes fit into two size categories: stellar-mass goes up to hundreds of Suns, and supermassive starts at hundreds of thousands of Suns. But what happens between those two? Where are the midsize ones? With the help of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, scientists found the best evidence yet for that third, in between type that we call intermediate-mass black holes. The masses of these black holes should range from around a hundred to hundreds of thousands of times the Sun’s mass. The hunt continues for these elusive black holes.

This cartoon depicts two black holes as birds, with a small one representing a stellar-mass black hole on the left and an enormous one representing a supermassive black hole on the right. These two birds appear on a tan background and flap their wings, and then a circle with three question marks pops up between them to represent the intermediate-mass black holes that scientists are hunting for. The image is watermarked “Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.”

Our fourth and fifth astronomical gifts are … Stephan’s Quintet

When looking at this stunning image of Stephan’s Quintet from our James Webb Space Telescope, it seems like five galaxies are hanging around one another — but did you know that one of the galaxies is much closer than the others? Four of the five galaxies are hanging out together about 290 million light-years away, but the fifth and leftmost galaxy in the image below — called NGC 7320 — is actually closer to Earth at just 40 million light-years away.

$A group of five galaxies that appear close to each other in the sky: two in the middle, one toward the top, one to the upper left, and one toward the bottom. Four of the five appear to be touching. One is somewhat separated. In the image, the galaxies are large relative to the hundreds of much smaller (more distant) galaxies in the background. All five galaxies have bright white cores. Each has a slightly different size, shape, structure, and coloring. Scattered across the image, in front of the galaxies are a number of foreground stars with diffraction spikes: bright white points, each with eight bright lines radiating out from the center. The image is watermarked with the text “Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.”$

Our sixth astronomical gift is … an eclipsing six-star system

Astronomers found a six-star system where all of the stars undergo eclipses, using data from our TESS mission, a supercomputer, and automated eclipse-identifying software. The system, called TYC 7037-89-1, is located 1,900 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus and the first of its kind we’ve found.

This diagram shows the sextuple star system TYC 7037-89-1, a group of six stars that interact with each other in complex orbits. The stars are arranged in pairs: System A, System B, and System C, each of which is shown as having one larger white star and one smaller yellow star. The two stars of System A, in the upper left, are connected by a red oval and labeled "1.3-day orbit." The two stars of System C, just below System A, are connected by a turquoise oval and labeled "1.6-day orbit." Additionally, these two systems orbit each other, shown as a larger blue oval connecting the two and labeled "A and C orbit every 4 years." On the other side of the image, in the bottom right, the two stars of System B are connected by a green oval and labeled "8.2-day orbit." Lastly, Systems A, B and C all interact with System B orbiting the combined A-C system, shown as a very large lilac oval labeled "AC and B orbit every 2,000 years." A caption at the bottom of the image notes, "Star sizes are to scale, orbits are not." The image is watermarked with the text “Illustration” and “Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.”

Our seventh astronomical gift is … seven Earth-sized planets

In 2017, our now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope helped find seven Earth-size planets around TRAPPIST-1. It remains the largest batch of Earth-size worlds found around a single star and the most rocky planets found in one star’s habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the presence of liquid water on a planet’s surface.

Further research has helped us understand the planets’ densities, atmospheres, and more!

his animated image shows an artist's concept of the star TRAPPIST-1, an ultra-cool dwarf, and the seven Earth-size planets orbiting it. TRAPPIST-1 is large and glows bright orange, while the planets are smaller and in shades of cool gray-blue. The image is highly stylized to look like glowing balls sitting on a shiny surface, and neither the sizes nor distances are to scale. The planets closer to TRAPPIST-1 have droplets of water standing on the surface around them, indicating that they may have liquid water. Planets further away have frost around them, indicating that those are more likely to have significant amounts of ice, especially on the side that faces away from the star. Our view pans across the system, from the center outward, and faint tan rings depict the orbits of each planet. The image is watermarked with the text “Illustration” and “Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC).”

Our eighth astronomical gift is … an (almost) eight-foot mirror

The primary mirror on our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is approximately eight feet in diameter, similar to our Hubble Space Telescope. But Roman can survey large regions of the sky over 1,000 times faster, allowing it to hunt for thousands of exoplanets and measure light from a billion galaxies.

Our ninth astronomical gift is … a kilonova nine days later

In 2017, the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo detected gravitational waves from a pair of colliding neutron stars. Less than two seconds later, our telescopes detected a burst of gamma rays from the same event. It was the first time light and gravitational waves were seen from the same cosmic source. But then nine days later, astronomers saw X-ray light produced in jets in the collision’s aftermath. This later emission is called a kilonova, and it helped astronomers understand what the slower-moving material is made of.

This animated illustration shows what happened in the nine days following a neutron star merger known as GW170817, detected on Aug. 17, 2017. In the first part of the animation, a pair of glowing blue neutron stars spiral quickly towards each other and merge with a bright flash. The merger creates gravitational waves (shown as pale arcs rippling out from the center), a near-light-speed jet that produced gamma rays (shown as brown cones and a rapidly-traveling magenta glow erupting from the center of the collision), and a donut-shaped ring of expanding blue debris around the center of the explosion. A variety of colors represent the many wavelengths of light produced by the kilonova, creating violet to blue-white to red bursts at the top and bottom of the collision. In the second part of the animation, we see the collision as it would appear from Earth, looking like a burst of red light in the lower left and a huge umbrella-shaped cascade of blue light in the upper right, representing X-rays. The image is watermarked with the text “Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab” and “Illustration.”

Our tenth astronomical gift is … NuSTAR’s ten-meter-long mast

Our NuSTAR X-ray observatory is the first space telescope able to focus on high-energy X-rays. Its ten-meter-long (33 foot) mast, which deployed shortly after launch, puts NuSTAR’s detectors at the perfect distance from its reflective optics to focus X-rays. NuSTAR recently celebrated 10 years since its launch in 2012.

This animation shows an artist’s concept of the NuSTAR X-ray observatory orbiting above the blue marble of Earth and deploying its 10-meter-long (33 foot) mast shortly after launch in 2012. NuSTAR is roughly cylindrical, with a shiny silver covering and a pair of blue solar panels on each of its sides. As we pan around the spacecraft, silver scaffolding extends from inside, separating the ends of the telescope to the right distance to begin observing the universe in X-rays. The image is watermarked with the text “Illustration” and “Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.”

Our eleventh astronomical gift is … eleven days of observations

How long did our Hubble Space Telescope stare at a seemingly empty patch of sky to discover it was full of thousands of faint galaxies? More than 11 days of observations came together to capture this amazing image — that’s about 1 million seconds spread over 400 orbits around Earth!

This animated image zooms into the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, showing how a tiny patch of “empty” sky turned out to contain about 10,000 galaxies. The sequence begins with a starry backdrop, then we begin to zoom into the center of this image. As we travel, larger and brighter objects come into view, including dazzling spiral and elliptical galaxies in reds, oranges, blues, and purples. The image is watermarked with the text “Credit: NASA, G. Bacon and Z. Levay (STScI).”

Our twelfth astronomical gift is … a twelve-kilometer radius

Pulsars are collapsed stellar cores that pack the mass of our Sun into a whirling city-sized ball, compressing matter to its limits. Our NICER telescope aboard the International Space Station helped us precisely measure one called J0030 and found it had a radius of about twelve kilometers — roughly the size of Chicago! This discovery has expanded our understanding of pulsars with the most precise and reliable size measurements of any to date.

In this simulation of a pulsar’s magnetic fields, dozens of thin lines dance around a central gray sphere, which is the collapsed core of a dead massive star. Some of these lines, colored orange, form loops on the surface of the sphere. Others, colored blue, arc away from two spots on the lower half of the sphere and vanish into the black background. The image is watermarked with the text “Simulation” and “Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.”

Stay tuned to NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with what’s going on in the cosmos every day. You can learn more about the universe here.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

1K notes View Post

misscounterfactual

2 years ago

GUYS!!!!! IT'S GOING TO LAUNCH IN FIVE MINUTES!!!

I'M BEING SERIOUS

35 notes View Post

misscounterfactual

2 years ago

20-12-22

243 notes View Post

misscounterfactual

2 years ago

Adobe steals your color

When a company breaks a product you rely on — wrecking decades of work — it’s natural to feel fury. Companies know this, so they try to deflect your rage by blaming their suppliers. Sometimes, it’s suppliers who are at fault — but other times, there is plenty of blame to go around.

For example, when Apple deleted all the working VPNs from its Chinese App Store and backdoored its Chinese cloud servers, it blamed the Chinese government. But the Chinese state knew that Apple had locked its devices so that its Chinese customers couldn’t install third-party apps.

That meant that an order to remove working VPNs and apps that used offshore clouds from the App Store would lock Apple customers into Chinese state surveillance. The order to block privacy tools was a completely foreseeable consequence of Apple’s locked-down “ecosystem.”

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

In 2013, Adobe started to shift its customers to the cloud, replacing apps like Photoshop and Illustrator with “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”) versions that you would have to pay rent on, every month, month after month, forever. It’s not hard to understand why this was an attractive proposition for Adobe!

Adobe, of course, billed its SaaS system as good for its customers — rather than paying thousands of dollars for its software up front, you could pay a few dollars (anywhere from $10-$50) every month instead. Eventually, of course, you’d end up paying more, assuming these were your professional tools, which you expected to use for the rest of your life.

For people who work in prepress, a key part of their Adobe tools is integration with Pantone. Pantone is a system for specifying color-matching. A Pantone number corresponds to a specific tint that’s either made by mixing the four standard print colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, AKA “CMYK”), or by applying a “spot” color. Spot colors are added to print jobs after the normal CMYK passes — if you want a stripe of metallic gold or a blob of hot pink, you specify its Pantone number and the printer loads up a separate ink and runs your media through its printer one more time.

Pantone wants to license this system out, so it needs some kind of copyrightable element. There aren’t many of these in the Pantone system! There’s the trademark, but that’s a very thin barrier. Trademark has a broad “nominative use” exception: it’s not a trademark violation to say, “Pantone 448C corresponds to the hex color #4a412a.”

Perhaps there’s a copyright? Well yes, there’s a “thin” database copyright on the Pantone values and their ink equivalents. Anyone selling a RIP or printer that translates Pantone numbers to inks almost certainly has to license Pantone’s copyright there. And if you wanted to make an image-editing program that conveyed the ink data to a printer, you’d best take a license.

All of this is suddenly relevant because it appears that things have broken down between Adobe and Pantone. Rather than getting Pantone support bundled in with your Adobe apps, you must now pay $21/month for a Pantone plugin.

https://twitter.com/funwithstuff/status/1585850262656143360

Remember, Adobe’s apps have moved to the cloud. Any change that Adobe makes in its central servers ripples out to every Adobe user in the world instantaneously. If Adobe makes a change to its apps that you don’t like, you can’t just run an older version. SaaS vendors like to boast that with cloud-based apps, “you’re always running the latest version!”

The next version of Adobe’s apps will require you to pay that $21/month Pantone fee, or any Pantone-defined colors in your images will render as black. That’s true whether you created the file last week or 20 years ago.

Doubtless, Adobe will blame Pantone for this, and it’s true that Pantone’s greed is the root cause here. But this is an utterly foreseeable result of Adobe’s SaaS strategy. If Adobe’s customers were all running their apps locally, a move like this on Pantone’s part would simply cause every affected customer to run older versions of Adobe apps. Adobe wouldn’t be able to sell any upgrades and Pantone wouldn’t get any license fees.

But because Adobe is in the cloud, its customers don’t have that option. Adobe doesn’t have to have its users’ backs because if it caves to Pantone, users will still have to rent its software every month, and because that is the “latest version,” those users will also have to rent the Pantone plugin every month — forever.

What’s more, while there may not be any licensable copyright in a file that simply says, “Color this pixel with Pantone 448C” (provided the program doesn’t contain ink-mix descriptions), Adobe’s other products — its RIPs and Postscript engines — do depend on licensable elements of Pantone, so the company can’t afford to tell Pantone to go pound sand.

Like the Chinese government coming after Apple because they knew that any change that Apple made to its service would override its customers’ choices, Pantone came after Adobe because they knew that SaaS insulated Adobe from its customers’ wrath.

Adobe customers can’t even switch to its main rival, Figma. Adobe’s just dropped $20b to acquire that company and ensure that its customers can’t punish it for selling out by changing vendors.

Pantone started out as a tech company: a way to reliably specify ink mixes in different prepress houses and print shops. Today, it’s an “IP” company, where “IP” means “any law or policy that allows me to control the conduct of my customers, critics or competitors.”

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That’s likewise true of Adobe. The move to SaaS is best understood as a means to exert control over Adobe’s customers and competitors. Combined with anti-competitive killer acquisitions that gobble up any rival that manages to escape this control, and you have a hostage situation that other IP companies like Pantone can exploit.

A decade or so ago, Ginger Coons created Open Colour Standard, an attempt to make an interoperable alternative to Pantone. Alas, it seems dormant today:

http://adaptstudio.ca/ocs/

Owning colors is a terrible idea and technically, it’s not possible to do so. Neither UPS Brown nor John Deere Green are “owned” in any meaningful sense, but the companies certainly want you to believe that they are. Inspired by them and Pantone, people with IP brain-worms keep trying to turn colors into property:

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

The law is clear that colors aren’t property, but by combining SaaS, copyright, trademark, and other tech and policies, it is becoming increasingly likely that some corporation will stealing the colors out from under our very eyes.

[Image ID: A Pantone swatchbook; it slowly fades to grey, then to black.]

507 notes View Post

misscounterfactual

1 year ago

My largest piece yet! Turkey tail stumpwork by Humorii

1K notes View Post

misscounterfactual

2 months ago

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft launches on the Artemis I flight test, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The body of the rocket is orange, and it has two white boosters and a white spacecraft sitting on top. As the boosters ignite, they illuminate the launch pad, the water towers, and the lightning towers. The night sky is black in the background. Credits: NASA/Keegan Barber

Moonbound: One Year Since Artemis I

On this day last year, the Artemis I rocket and spacecraft lit up the sky and embarked on the revolutionary mission to the Moon and back. The first integrated flight test of the rocket and spacecraft continued for 25.5 days, validating NASA’s deep exploration systems and setting the stage for humanity’s return to the lunar surface.

On Nov. 16, 2022, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket met or exceeded all expectations during its debut launch on Artemis I. The twin solid rocket booster motors responsible for producing more than 7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff reached their performance target, helping SLS and the Orion spacecraft reach a speed of about 4,000 mph in just over two minutes before the boosters separated.

The interior of the Orion spacecraft, bathed in a soft blue light. The back of Commander Moonikin Campos’ head can be seen from behind the commander’s seat. He is wearing an orange Orion Crew Survival System spacesuit and is facing the display of the Callisto payload, Lockheed Martin’s technology demonstration in collaboration with Amazon and Cisco. A Snoopy doll can be seen floating in the background. Credit: NASA

Quite a few payloads caught a ride aboard the Orion spacecraft on the Artemis I mission: In addition to a number of small scientific satellites called CubeSats, a manikin named Commander Moonikin Campos sat in the commander’s seat. A Snoopy doll served as a zero-gravity indicator — something that floats inside the spacecraft to demonstrate microgravity.

On flight day 13 of the Artemis I mission, Orion captured this view of Earth and the Moon on either sides of one of the spacecraft’s four solar arrays. The spacecraft is white and gray and stands out against the blackness of space. Credit: NASA

During the mission, Orion performed two lunar flybys, coming within 80 miles of the lunar surface. At its farthest distance during the mission, Orion traveled nearly 270,000 miles from our home planet, more than 1,000 times farther than where the International Space Station orbits Earth. This surpassed the record for distance traveled by a spacecraft designed to carry humans, previously set during Apollo 13.

After splashing down at 12:40 p.m. EST on Dec. 11, 2022, U.S. Navy divers help recover the Orion Spacecraft for the Artemis I mission. NASA, the Navy and other Department of Defense partners worked together to secure the spacecraft inside the well deck of USS Portland approximately five hours after Orion splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

The Orion spacecraft arrived back home to planet Earth on Dec. 11, 2022. During re-entry, Orion endured temperatures about half as hot as the surface of the Sun at about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Within about 20 minutes, Orion slowed from nearly 25,000 mph to about 20 mph for its parachute-assisted splashdown.

Inside the Multi-Payload Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, engineers and technicians opened the hatch of the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission after a 1.4-million mile journey beyond the Moon and back. Technicians extracted nine avionics boxes from the Orion, which will subsequently be refurbished for Artemis II, the first mission with astronauts. Contents include a video processing unit, GPS receiver, four crew module phased array antennas, and three Orion inertial measurement units. Credit: NASA

Recovery teams successfully retrieved the spacecraft and delivered it back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for de-servicing operations, which included removing the payloads (like Snoopy and Commander Moonikin Campos) and analyzing the heat shield.

Artemis II astronauts, from left, NASA astronaut Victor Glover (left), CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman stand on the crew access arm of the mobile launcher at Launch Pad 39B as part of an integrated ground systems test at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, Sept. 20. The test ensures the ground systems team is ready to support the crew timeline on launch day. Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

With the Artemis I mission under our belt, we look ahead to Artemis II — our first crewed mission to the Moon in over 50 years. Four astronauts will fly around the Moon inside Orion, practicing piloting the spacecraft and validating the spacecraft’s life support systems. The Artemis II crew includes: NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

As we look ahead to Artemis II, we build upon the incredible success of the Artemis I mission and recognize the hard work and achievements of the entire Artemis team. Go Artemis!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

1K notes View Post

misscounterfactual

2 years ago