To celebrate the “Super Flower Blood Moon” eclipse on Wednesday (May 26), the company behind Bagel Bites says it’s giving away lunar real estate to 100 social media fans. During the 14 minutes of totality — when the moon will be in Earth’s dark, inner shadow, known as the umbra — Twitter users will have a chance to win a “moon deed” and own an acre of property on the moon — at least that’s what Kraft Heinz, the company that makes Bagel Bites, is claiming. “In honor of the…
Read MoreMonth: May 2021
New NASA Earth System Observatory to Help Address, Mitigate Climate Change
NASA will design a new set of Earth-focused missions to provide key information to guide efforts related to climate change, disaster mitigation, fighting forest fires, and improving real-time agricultural processes.
Read MoreSpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience is pictured shortly before undocking from the International Space Station’s Harmony module.
Read MoreDark Frames and Bias Frames Demystified
The road to clean, easy-to-process data begins with proper image calibration, and the first step is to take dark and bias calibration frames. The post Dark Frames and Bias Frames Demystified appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Read MoreFinding life on alien worlds? PBS Nova’s Exoplanet Lab game tells you how!
Rescue aliens and cats in distress while learning about the search for life on alien worlds in a new game from PBS! Part of the science series NOVA, the “Exoplanet Lab” game helps tweens and young teens to better understand what makes exoplanets habitable like Earth. Players will learn about the conditions that allow exoplanets to have liquid water, which is essential for life as we know it to exist, NOVA said in a statement emailed to Space.com. The game is free to play and available immediately in your web…
Read MoreScientists track meteor shower to unusual comet seen every 4,000 years
Meteor showers are the dazzling result of cometary debris building up along well-worn paths through the solar system, then burning up in Earth’s atmosphere as our planet crosses that dust trail. It’s hard to call a path well-worn when something passes by only once every 3,967 years. But it turns out that type of long-period comet can still be tied to a specific meteor shower, as scientists have done with Comet C/2002 Y1 Juels-Holvorcem and the UY Lyncids shower. The research that connected the long haul ice ball and the…
Read MoreGPS satellites can provide faster alerts when big earthquakes strike, scientists say
A global GPS-based earthquake monitoring system can provide timelier and more accurate warnings than traditional seismic networks when powerful earthquakes strike, a new study suggests. It could also reduce frequency of false alerts. In the new study, published this month in the Bulletin of Seismological Society of America, a team of researchers detailed new progress in the development of a global earthquake warning system that measures the displacement of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite receiver stations when an earthquake deforms the Earth’s crust. The system assesses the magnitude of an…
Read MoreWatch this stunning Starforge simulation of a star being born
Astrophysicists have developed the first high-resolution 3D model of a gas cloud coalescing to form a star — and it’s mind-blowing. The “Starforge” model (which stands for “star formation in gaseous environments”) allows users to fly through a colorful cloud of gas as it pools into stars all around them. Researchers hope that the visually stunning simulation will help them to explore the many unsolved mysteries of star formation, such as: Why is the process so slow and inefficient? What determines a star’s mass? And why do stars tend to…
Read More‘Super Flower Blood Moon’ webcasts: How to watch the supermoon eclipse of 2021 online
The full moon on Wednesday (May 26) will be something to behold, as the only total lunar eclipse of 2021 arrives together with the year’s biggest “supermoon.” Skywatchers in much of the world will have a chance to see a slightly larger-than-average full moon temporarily appear red during the so-called “Super Flower Blood Moon.” But for those in parts of the world where the eclipse isn’t visible — or where clouds foil the view — there will be several free webcasts showing live views of the eclipse online. During the…
Read MoreStephen Hawking: Everything you need to know about the thesis that ‘broke the Internet’
Scribbled in pencil on one of its early pages is “no copying without the author’s consent”. In October 2017, Stephen Hawking allowed his PhD thesis — Properties of Expanding Universes — to be made available online through the University of Cambridge’s Apollo portal. The website crashed almost immediately under the sheer weight of traffic. It was downloaded almost 60,000 times in the first 24 hours alone. Hawking was 24 years old when he received his PhD in 1966 and, despite being diagnosed with motor neurone disease at just 21, could…
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