Alright then kids, it's time for a bit of space porn.
First up we have this beauty. It's an image of the spiral galaxy NGC 5907 surrounded by what the boffins call a stellar tidal stream (made up of what's left of another galaxy that was gobbled up by 5907), but to me it looks more like some aliens have been flying some big-assed loop-de-loops in their flying saucers.
A little closer to home, our old friend Mr Hubble is still working away, and he recently picked out Jupiter's growing collection of red spots, this fucking big space ribbon and a nice collection of galaxies, known as the Coma Cluster.
I can't really bang on about the Hubble telescope without mentioning the Hubble Deep Field, which is probably my favourite photograph, at least in this universe. If I remember rightly, the boffins pointed the telescope towards Ursa Major, at a patch of sky narrower than a grain of sand held at arm's length, and held it there for 10 days. The vast majority of the 3000 or so points of light in the picture are galaxies, and the light from the most distant of these galaxies took about 12 billion years to reach earth. I think it's the single most breathtaking thing I've ever seen.
Finally, we have the news that Voyager 2 has recently reached the edge of the solar system, about 8 billion miles away. I find all this endlessly fascinating and awe inspiring, but it also makes me a little sad, because sometimes I think I'd like nothing so much as to see all that for myself, and without either (a) my own rocket ship or (b) some really strong drugs, something tells me that isn't going to happen any time soon.
And to round off on a completely unrelated note, here is today's song of the day: The Time Is Now by Moloko
First up we have this beauty. It's an image of the spiral galaxy NGC 5907 surrounded by what the boffins call a stellar tidal stream (made up of what's left of another galaxy that was gobbled up by 5907), but to me it looks more like some aliens have been flying some big-assed loop-de-loops in their flying saucers.
A little closer to home, our old friend Mr Hubble is still working away, and he recently picked out Jupiter's growing collection of red spots, this fucking big space ribbon and a nice collection of galaxies, known as the Coma Cluster.
I can't really bang on about the Hubble telescope without mentioning the Hubble Deep Field, which is probably my favourite photograph, at least in this universe. If I remember rightly, the boffins pointed the telescope towards Ursa Major, at a patch of sky narrower than a grain of sand held at arm's length, and held it there for 10 days. The vast majority of the 3000 or so points of light in the picture are galaxies, and the light from the most distant of these galaxies took about 12 billion years to reach earth. I think it's the single most breathtaking thing I've ever seen.
Finally, we have the news that Voyager 2 has recently reached the edge of the solar system, about 8 billion miles away. I find all this endlessly fascinating and awe inspiring, but it also makes me a little sad, because sometimes I think I'd like nothing so much as to see all that for myself, and without either (a) my own rocket ship or (b) some really strong drugs, something tells me that isn't going to happen any time soon.
And to round off on a completely unrelated note, here is today's song of the day: The Time Is Now by Moloko
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All that talk of space makes me want to dig my telescope out.
...I'm so, so sorry
If you saved Steel Paintbrush's site my Japanese sleeve is on there (in badly photoshopped colour)