In September, Justin Majeczsky caught the Milky Way moving through the night sky. What a gorgeous time lapse video. A sexy reminder that we are currently nestled within a galaxy floating through space. The universe churns around us. Through us. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy (a blog of incalculable awesomeness), puts it in crazier perspective:

From our vantage point 25,000 light years or so out, you can see the central bulge of the galaxy moving across the sky. That’s the combined might of billions of stars and octillions of tons of gas and dust!

It’s absolutely fucking mind blowing. My fat simian mind attempting to comprehend it, fails. Fails hard. Imagine if there’s life on other planets, can you imagine how fucking tired Santa Claus must be? Hit the jump for the video.

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Salutations. Welcome to Spaceship Omega. We are currently orbiting the Intangible Wunderverse, pausing to observe and report. Our environment is sustained off of lewd comments, caffeinated beverages, popculture references, and lots of comic books. Happy as fuck to have you with us today. The space-steward or stewardess will be by momentarily to make sure your stay aboard the ship is pleasant. They’ll be offering you your preferred services, cultured from psychic imaging and personality analytics.

Here’s some reports from the preferred satellites.

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Hoe Moaners’ Holiday
“Me and the Night Slugs decided to strike out on a crisp winter’s evening and take some night shots of some of the houses within my immediate kill zone. My blast radius, if you will.”

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No black dudes, bring your own TV
“Now, this guy is FUCKING SERIOUS about his COD LAN Party. No getting your dick out, if you bring weed, bring enough for everybody. Jesus, what do you think he is, man, Some sort of fucking TV Outlet!?”

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It’s been proven: You’re either a hypocrite or delusional
“I love it when science explains why human beings are awful. A recent set of experiments proves the punishment you dole out to people is always worse than what they did to you.”

2011 preview: Expect Earth’s twin planet
“Earthlings will surely thrill at finding their planetary double: our calculation suggests the discovery could happen next year.”

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Quote of the day | President Obama’s Spider-Sense is tingling
“Sounds like he won’t be crumpling his sensible suit and tie in the trash and saying “President No More!” anytime soon.”

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Behold the Power of the Blood Qu’ran!
“I mean…I don’t even know where to start with this thing. Apparently in the 90′s Saddam Hussein decided he had to up his evil ante, and what’s more weird/perverse than etching a major religious text in blood?”

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Today, Bad Astronomy posted this picture of the Lunar Eclipse by Francis Anderson. What exactly is causing the gorgeous effect? Phil Plait over at BA explains:

[The picture was taken at] a small town located at the bone-chilling latitude of 69 ° north, inside the Arctic Circle. That explains the visibility of the gorgeous aurora borealis, the glow from solar subatomic particles as they slam into our atmosphere. Guided by the Earth’s magnetic field to the geomagnetic poles near the north and south geographic poles, these particles shear electrons off the molecules and atoms of air, causing it to glow.”

Outstanding. For more on the picture, including what is causing those columns of light, hit up Bad Astronomy.

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Behold! The Lunar Eclipse as captured from space shuttle Discovery. Pretty.

Via.

Last night was a lunar eclipse. It was also the darkest day in 372 years. Did you miss it? I sure did. I was tired man! Tired! Lay off. Thankfully William Castleman has brought the world a beautiful time lapse video of the event.

Hit the jump for the video.

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Thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we have the most detailed reliefs of the far side of the moon. Ever! Ever! Oh, technology. The Orbiter was capable of capturing the surface down to thirty-meters. G’damn. The trippy colors? False colors used to denote the various heights. The reds are the highest areas, the blues are the lowest.

Hit the jump for the psychedelic space porn.

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Bad Astronomy posted a link to a recently posted picture over at the Hubble website. This gorgeous red ring is a celestial bauble, and the remnants of a particularly righteous supernova.

Hubble:

The delicate shell, photographed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, appears to float serenely in the depths of space, but this apparent calm hides an inner turmoil. The gaseous envelope formed as the expanding blast wave and ejected material from a supernova tore through the nearby interstellar medium.

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Astronomers have concluded that the explosion was an example of an especially energetic and bright variety of supernova. Known as Type Ia, such supernova events are thought to result when a white dwarf star in a binary system robs its partner of material, taking on more mass than it is able to handle, so that it eventually explodes.

See kids. Don’t be greedy douches, or you’re going to explode in a wonderful, gorgeous red-ring of death. Let your brother have his toys this Christmas season! If you want to know more about how such a glorious celestial form comes to be, check out Phil Plait’s explanation over on Bad Astronomy. It is the mind warp.

Randy Kirk thinks that there’s an ice volcano on Saturn. And dammit, I hope the guy is right. Tell us more, New Scientist!

Named Sotra, the volcano is nearly 1 kilometre tall and has a 1.6-kilometre-deep pit alongside it. Surrounded by giant sand dunes, it is thought to be the largest in a string of several volcanoes that once spewed molten ice from deep beneath the moon’s surface.

“We think we have found the strongest case yet for an ice volcano on Titan,” said Randy Kirk, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona. “What we see is not just a flow like we see in other places, it’s like a volcanic field would be on Earth.”

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The team cannot be certain if the chain is active, but described the find as the best evidence found so far for a cryovolcano, or ice volcano. Previously, bright spots seen in low-resolution satellite images have been interpreted as volcanic flows and craters. However, once those areas were mapped in 3D, it became obvious they weren’t volcanoes.

“We had noted Sotra Facula as a candidate cryovolcano before,” said Rosaly Lopes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “But it was only when Randy got the topography done that we realised, wow, this is it.”

Righteous. But what is even more righteous? The concept of a fucking cryovolcano. You can’t just call that shit an ice volcano. That sounds pedestrian! Cryovolcano! A volcano that shoots molten ice. I have a space-dork chubby. This shit ounds like something I absolutely need to cast in an RPG.

This is fucking marvelous. An entire hemisphere of the sun explodes which then ignites another region. According to io9, this was an event previously thought impossible:

In this ultraviolet light video taken by NASA, you can watch a phenomenon that scientists didn’t believe could exist until a few months ago. An entire hemisphere of the sun explodes, one region igniting another. What does this discovery mean?

It turns out that the sun doesn’t just spurt out gouts of gas in isolated spots. In fact, our star’s magnetic field brings many regions of Sol’s surface into direct relationships with each other, so areas separated by millions of miles can literally spark each other up. The results are called “sympathetic flares.”

G’damn amazing. Hit the jump to watch the explosion in action.

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Every space junkie knows how fucking sexy Saturn’s rings are. But fuck, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know this. Saturn’s rings are the remnants of an exploded moon. What? Awesome.

io9:

Saturn’s rings are among the most iconic sights in the solar system, but where did they come from? Long ago, an icy moon was ripped apart by Saturn’s gravity, creating rings once a 100 times bigger than they are now.

100 times bigger? Good lord. how big are they now? I looked that shit up for us, and they’re 275,000 kilometers which is “is a little less than the distance between the Earth and Moon.” Fantastic.  

4.5 billion years ago, as the solar system was still in its primordial stages, Saturn was likely home to a number of large moons. These days, Titan is its only really big moon, as its lost siblings were likely pulled into Saturn by its gravity and destroyed. Most of the moons would have exploded within Saturn’s giant gaseous atmosphere, leaving no trace of their former existence. But the last moon to be pulled apart would have left a remarkable memorial behind: Saturn’s ring system.

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But as huge and remarkable as Saturn’s rings are, an explosion of that size would create much, much bigger rings. A Titan-sized moon would probably create a ring system anywhere between 10 and 100 times bigger than what we see today. It’s hard to imagine just how awe-inspiring it would be to look upon Saturn all those billions of years ago with a sight like that waiting for us.

Over the eons, the rings would have steadily shrank, as parts of the ice fell back into Saturn and others drifted out into further orbits, where they would have clumped together and began to form new moons. Saturn’s inner moons all have masses and compositions that fit in with such an explanation very nicely, which is a good boost for the veracity of this new theory.

Goddamn fantastic.