Thanks! Yes, it is a photo. The moth was chilling on a window after sunset. The blue dots are out of focus apron lights.
They sure don't tend to do that, but there are still mundane explanations for this. An unintentional collision between the satellite and another object being one of them.
"I find it hard to believe they would use such a big satellite as an ASAT target," McDowell said.
Not because of Kessler syndrome, just your run of the mill space debris reentering the atmosphere and increasing the amounts of certain metals up there that contribute to ozone depletion. In other words, that may well happen even if we're lucky and avoid Kessler syndrome.
This one turned out a bit more blurry, but the aurora itself is too good not to post here.
These guys danced accross the sky, reaching quite far into the southern sky as well. Picture taken on 4.4.. I'm just mad that while I had hauled my tripod with me, I had left the camera mount back home :))). I stuck a bench into the snow and steadied my hand against that. A couple of these turned out surprisingly well.
Cirrus and Cirrostratus progressively invading the sky are a telltale sign of an approaching warm front. In this case it was an occluded front that was rolling in. It snowed that night.
Don't be decieved by the anvil like shape, heavy looking precipitation and icy look of this cloud! This is far from the size and power of an actual Cumulonimbus. But it is interesting in that it fits every criteria of a Cumulonimbus capillatus incus, except the bit about considerable vertical extent for the genus. I'm quite sure that this guy didn't raise its head much above 2 km AGL.
I suppose it could be classified as a Cumulus of some sort, but it really doesn't fit well under any genus. Our systems of classification are just something that we made up. Clouds are under no obligation to conform to them. The same is true for everything else in the universe as well.
Picture taken in August 2022. Fluctus, also known as Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds, form when wind shear causes instability in the (usually the upper) surface of a cloud. The formation is short lived and relatively rare. It can also only be seen well from the side like here. This video contains a good explanation of the physics involved here.
Taken last summer from Riisitunturi, Posio, Finland.
Some of the Cc is of the variety undulatus. Miscellaneous Cirrus in the lower part of the image.
Picture taken on 25.6.2023 at 01:27 local time.
A sun pillar is formed when horizontally floating hexagonal ice crystals (in this case within the Cirrus) reflect light. Kinda like the reflection of the setting sun over wavy water, but in this case upside down.
The thing to remember is that air is a great insulator. Air at 100°C isn't nearly as bad as say water or metal at the same temperature against the skin. In fact, the air that comes in contact with the comparatively cold human skin will cool down rapidly, forming a layer of cooler air around you and lessening the sensation of heat further.
Water is everywhere.
Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.
The headline is clickbait since you don't even need to get past the paywall to see that "The website does not appear to be linked to Hamas". That domain is registered under Wix.Com Ltd., an Israeli software company. There is no hacking involved here, just an Israeli site masquerading as a Hamas site gloating with attrocities.
I think that this is part of a propaganda effort by Israel to capitalize on the October 7th attacks by maximising the emotional response from it. It's all in English, so clearly directed at western audiences. It's also quite on the nose with the caricaturistic portrayal of evil terrorist baby killers who do not understand PR.
If an actual Hamas site was hacked by Israelis, I'd expect the hackers to flaunt their victory by posting something the islamists clearly wouldn't (like idk pictures of ~~bacon,~~ a woman's ankles or maybe some dudes kissing).
As for an actual Hamas site, I'd expect a lot less displays of gore caused by Hamas and a lot more displays of gore caused by the IDF.
Summer is the time of the year with endless days at high latitudes. That's when the rule "don't eat when the sun is up" becomes a problem.
Gravity is not your friend. Getting stuff into LEO is still expensive af. A kinetic projectile dropped from space might have the same energy as a nuke, but it's still going to be a lot more expensive. Additionally, you don't have options on how that energy is released. It's going into the ground and that's that. A nuke (or any other explosive device for that matter) on the other hand can be detonated at a chosen altitude, or as a bunker buster if that's what you want.
The heavier the object, the more it's going to take to push it out of that orbit. If your weapon system is in LEO, you can realistically only drop a rod on a small envelope along the future trajectory of the weapon system. Polar orbits would have the best coverage, but fly over a target outside of polar regions only twice a day. In order to get a wider range of firing solutions, the projectile needs considerable deltaV for orbital changes. And again, gravity fucks you over here because deep within Earth's gravity well, changing the orbit of a massive tungsten rod takes a lot of fuel. Higher up these deltaV costs wouldn't be as prohibitive and you'd have more options for using the weapon, but that would increase the time from launch to impact into the regieme of hours, way too slow for anything.
The best solution would be to have a huge amount of rods in different orbits (akin to the spacejunk that is Starlink) to maximize the chances of at least one being able to fire on a target at any given place at any given time, but because those rods are still heavy af, such a plan is completely unfeasable.
Rods from gods will never happen, at least not around Earth.
This.
Also applies to the eyes sort of, as tilting the head offers a different axis for the stereo vision to try to make sense of whatever it's looking at.
IIRC, animals often do this movement instinctually when they're puzzled by something because the additional sensory information could be helpful.
Hey guys, Peter Griffin here to explain ~~the joke~~ the image.
The image taken in Yunnan (China) 16 Aug 2022 by JiaQi Sun displays a Cumulonimbus calvus with the accessory cloud pileus on top. A pileus is formed when a rising cloud pushes the air above it higher which causes it to cool down adiabatically. When sufficient humidity is present in that higher layer of air, the humidity condenses into a pileus.
Here the pileus displays quite magnificent iridescence. The sun is behind the cloud. When sunlight passes through the very small and evenly sized cloud droplets of the pileus, diffraction takes place. Different wavelengths are diffracted in different angles and thus the white light of the sun is broken down into separate colours. While the cloud droplets are similar in size, there is still some variation there. The size of the droplets also affects the ammount of diffraction and thus the colours are somewhat disordered.
If you want to see cloud iridescence yourself, look for clouds passing in front of the sun that aren't opaque enough to block it completely. Lenticular clouds, Cirrocumulus lenticularis in particluar are good candidates for iridescence as they are formed in a similar manner to the pileus here and have an even distribution in droplet size.
There have been a number of viral photoshops circulating the internet since the original pictures were taken where the cloud has been added to wide angle shots and made to appear like it takes up half the sky. These however are easily debunked with basic knowledge about clouds and the optical phenomena in question as the colours here are impossible at wider angles.
I've seen the term misused a lot recently, so I'll state that a wet-bulb is a part of a measurement instrument. Wet-bulb temperature is a measured quantity (along with dry-bulb temperature, pressure etc.) and an Extreme wet-bulb temperature event is what actually kills people.
Thanks!