Solar eclipse in close-up

Neil deGrasse Tyson - Spark Arena, 9th July 2017

The good: Interesting tangents about everything from McDonald's, to mining gold on asteroids, to the timeless existence of photons, to the simulated universe theory. 

The bad: An overly lengthy Q+A session marked by people insisting on either trying to outsmart Neil deGrasse Tyson on a subject he doesn't (and shouldn't be expected to) know about (like the guy who responded to "I don't know the answer to that" with "Oh, so you're not an expert on that then.."), or using their "question" as an opportunity to talk about how great they are. Classy. 

(Photo credit to RGK)

Pale Blue Dot

"We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

[...] To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

- Carl Sagan, 1994

Full ride on the Space Shuttle boosters

The Saturn V rocket

"...that was the problem and this is how we solved it...and we solved it really well."

Engineering FTW. So impressive.

Aurora GIFstralis

Aurora, Dunedin, July 2016

(c) dpod 2016

Milky Way

Otago Peninsula

(c) 2016 dpod

Aurorarotica

Dunedin Aurora (05/06/2016)

(c) dpod 2016

Dunedin Aurora (05/06/2016): a more assertive edit

(c) dpod 2016

How fast are we moving right now?

(via here)