Space: Beautiful Sites

Space: Beautiful Sites

A possible future city on another world?

Not all need to be rocket scientists to appreciate the great beauty of the beyond. Take a look at some of these wondrous sites:

Stuff in Space
http://stuffin.space/
See everything that's around the Earth man-made and what-not.

Asterank
http://www.asterank.com/3d/
Truly beautiful asteroid visualizer.

Deep Space Network
https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) updated every 5 seconds. DSN is used by all NASA interplanetary spacecrafts.
 
ISS Interactive 3D Visualization
https://heavens-above.com/ISS_3D.aspx
See the International Space Station at any time and fully zoomable & rotatable.

Ofrohn's Celestial Map Github Project
https://ofrohn.github.io/
Adapatable celestial map done with the D3.js visualization library. Check it out! For instance, the celestial sky viewer: https://ofrohn.github.io/celestial-demo/viewer.html

Milky Way Halo
https://armchairastronautics.blogspot.com/p/milky-way-halo.html
With this site, you can see the whole universe in terms of galaxies, clusters, halos, etc.

[Astronomy] Superhabitable Worlds

Introduction

And when it comes to Earth, life has thrived, finding its way into every possible ecological niche, adapting itself through evolution to handle bitter cold, intense heat, the intense pressures at the bottom of the oceans, even cities, living right next to human beings. But could Earth be better? Could there be planets which are super habitable?

In a 2016 paper called Superhabitable Worlds accepted by the journal Astrobiology, two physics professors, Rene Heller and John Armstrong, run through the conditions that might make the most habitable possible planet. They propose that stars with less mass than the Sun, classified as K stars, are probably the best candidates for diversity since they’re long-lived and relatively stable. A K-type star will have a lifetime of 20-70 billion years without those pesky red dwarf megaflares.

You would want other planets in the star system, capable of redirecting asteroids and comets with their gravity to deliver water and other chemicals needed for life. Thanks for that, Jupiter.
And ideally, you want multiple habitable planets in the same system, capable of sending life back and forth. A process known as panspermia.

Planet Simulator Tool

Just for giggles and fun, NASA actually has an online software called ROCKE-3D general circulation model (GCM) which can study different points in the history of our own planet and other Solar System terrestrial planets, as well as exoplanets. Check it out!

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/rocke3d/maps/

[AERO] Constellations and Fun Sporcle Test

Recently, a friend showed me the wonderful site www.sporcle.com which has become a new time-waster, although it's a slightly productive time-waster. It's essentially fun quizzes of knowledge on just about anything you can think of. Some of them are quite cool since there's also visual appeal; I like those more. I happened to stumble across this very cool constellation quiz the other day which I just had to share:

http://www.sporcle.com/games/constellations_northern.php

I haven't regularly stargazed in a while and I shamefully admit that I only got 15 constellations: Orion, Auriga, Taurus, Canis Minor, Gemini, Perseus, Pegasus, Cygnus, Leo, Delphinus, Pisces, Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor, Ursa Major, and Draco. Given 8 minutes, I naturally cheated and managed to get most of the rest from looking up my star chart. However, I still missed a few. See screenshot: