Spaaaaace (Part 1)

Dad jokes - in spaaaaace!

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I believe they will exist soon—perhaps in two or three decades.

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Down-to-Earth but my home state couldn’t even get a high-speed rail line built in that time span and that’s a proven technology which has been in actual existence since the 1960s. A space elevator sounds nice but I will be absolutely shocked if I see one in my own lifetime.

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AKA The Orville

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And you thought Starlink was bad enough…

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image

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Today on APOD:

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More JWST image processing, this is NGC1566 (“the Spanish Dancer”). I think this is my best one yet. Click to embiggen.

Proposal: 2107
Observation title: A JWST-HST-VLT/MUSE-ALMA Treasury of Star Formation in Nearby Galaxies
Instrument: NIRCam
Filters: 200, 300, 335, 360

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Is the dot in the middle an artifact?

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Yes, artifacts or maybe that area was too bright for the sensor. I can tell because they’re still black in the raw image when I grab the full data range:

I’ve increased the white-level clipping here to illustrate this. There are lines on the histogram to the right of the white-level slider – these are pixels that are “too white” and would be removed when I export. They are marked in green in the image preview. As you can see, the center dot is still black. If there were data there, those pixels would be marked green as well.

If I move the sliders so no pixel values are clipped (which I always do, since all my processing is done in Photoshop), the black central dot is still there:

The JWST raw data is surprisingly dirty. Here’s another image from the same observation series, but with a different instrument (MIRI):

It’s full of holes

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ETA question

What If Earth oceans were poured on Mars?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/54/

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