July’s night skies feature Mars opposition on the 27th, when Mars, Earth, and the Sun all line up, and Mars’ closest approach to Earth since 2003 on the 31st.
If you’ve been sky watching for 15 years or more, then you’ll remember August 2003, when Mars approached closer to Earth than it had for thousands of years.
It was a very small percentage closer, but not so much that it was as big as the moon as some claimed.
Astronomy clubs everywhere had long lines of people looking through their telescopes at the red planet, and they will again this month!
If you are new to stargazing, this month and next will be a great time to check out Mars.
Through a telescope, you should be able to make out some of the light and dark features, and sometimes polar ice. Right now, though, a huge Martian dust storm is obscuring many features, and less planetary detail is visible.
July 27th is Mars opposition, when Mars, Earth, and the Sun all line up, with Earth directly in the middle.
A few days later on July 31st is Mars’ closest approach. That’s when Mars and Earth are nearest to each other in their orbits around the Sun. Although there will be a lot of news focusing on one or the other of these two dates, Mars will be visible for many months.
By the end of July, Mars will be visible at sunset.
But the best time to view it is several hours after sunset, when Mars will appear higher in the sky.
Mars will still be visible after July and August, but each month it will shrink in apparent size as it travels farther from Earth in its orbit around the Sun.
On July 27th a total lunar eclipse will be visible in Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and South America.
For those viewers, Mars will be right next to the eclipsing moon!
Next month will feature August’s summer Perseids. It’s not too soon to plan a dark sky getaway for the most popular meteor shower of the year!
have y’all seen that nasa pic of the earth with the sun behind it on the night time side it really really fucked me up my own soul became solid and like………….. weeped!
who wouldn’t see this and then look deeply into their own emotional playing field to see what improvements could be made purely inspired by the vulnerable earth. this is the face of all literal gods
Not to critique evolution, but I would think orange and black stripes wouldn’t be as good for camouflage in a forest as, say, green and black would.
It turns out a lot of animals can’t see the difference between orange and green! Elephants, for instance, have dichromatic vision (two types of cones, rather than three like most humans.)
Check out this diagram from ResearchGate. It deals with the color vision of horses, who are also generally dichromatic. (I think, though I’m not sure, that zebras would have the same color vision as horses.) See how orange and green look to them?
Not to critique evolution but I think prey animals should be better at telling when their predator is dressed like a traffic cone.
It doesn’t matter what zebras see, because tigers are not native to Africa and do not naturally hunt zebra. Tigers are Asian and mostly hunt animals like deer, elk, and buffalo. These aren’t animals with great color vision. They don’t need to have it because they don’t eat fruit and so don’t need to know when the berry is ripe vs when it’s not. Good color vision is too expensive to have if you don’t need it. Deer put their vision stats in a wide field of vision that is sensitive to motion, low light capabilities, and possibly seeing UV light. They don’t have great color and lack a lot of acuity, but have a great sense of smell and good hearing. That’s way more useful if you’re prey. Deer see well in the blue end of the color spectrum and less well in the red. This makes sense because deer are most active in the dawn and dusk periods, when there is more blue in the light. Tigers are taking advantage of deer eyesight by being orange.
We see tigers are being obviously colored because tigers are fruit colored to our tree ape brains.
I don’t know what the best part of this is: implying that deer chose their attributes on a character sheet, or the fact that we get to see tiger colors because they look like a snack.
Ok but like, I think you underestimate just how well they blend in when actually in the environment. Like, just using tigers as an example.
or how about a leopard?
It’s called ‘disruptive colouration’ because the markings help to break up the animal’s outline against the grasses or rocks. And the rosettes on leopards and jaguars? Sun spots shining through the trees and leaves on the ground.
And this is how hard it is to spot them WITH colour vision. Now imagine the above images but with the limited coloured mentioned above?
I’m sorry but there is not an animal in that first leopard picture
Are you, sure about that?
“Tigers are fruit colored” is my new favorite phrase.
Yup, that’s the point you just stay still and let it do whatever the fuck it wants that doesn’t involved you getting eaten.
REALLY FUN FACT for big cats cheetahs are fucking docile as shit
my grandfather ran a cheetah sanctuary in south africa and he’d just lie with them and sleep among them and they’d rub against him and chirp at him they’re big fucking babies
Another Fun Fact: Cheetahs are incredibly nervous animals. One of the (many) reason’s they’re going extinct is that cheetahs are so sensitive and nervous, some of them are literally too nervous to breed. Others will breed, but stress themselves out so much, they’ll lose their cubs.
So zoos with breeding programs had to figure out how to make cheetahs comfortable enough to first of all, get laid and secondly – not spazz themselves into miscarrying.
So what’d they do? They gave the cheetah’s their very own Service Dogs!
The dogs make them feel safe, protected and secure!
AJHHHHFDDGHH SO PRECIOUS
this post just got so much better
THIS IS OFFICIALLY MY FAVOURITE POST
God makes cheetas, god kills cheetas, god makes man, man makes dogs in order to live, man gives dog to cheeta in order for them to live, god is dog backwards
theres a big martian dust storm rn and its not clear if opportunity will survive
sci fi writers: humans dont care about robots
me, crying: OPPORTUNITY HONEY YOU CAN DO IT I BELIEVE IN YOU
Important clarification
1) Mars Rovers have to run heaters constantly (especially at night) because Mars is cold and they have sensitive electronics. Opportunity has had to shut down its heater because it hasn’t been able to draw enough power over the past few weeks; the danger is that Opportunity may not survive the few days its expected for the dust storm to clear up. The other currently operating rover, Curiosity is younger and has more advanced panels, batteries, and, most importantly, an onboard RTG (tl;dr: nuclear power source) that means dust storms aren’t as threatening to it. Opportunity has some radioactive heaters too, but they’re older, smaller, and have less power output. It’s survived dust storms in the past but every one is always a risk.
and 2)
THEIR OFFICIAL TWITTER CALLS IT OPPY, OPPY I BELIEVE IN YOU!!!
This is why I constantly say the whole trope of “robots as slaves to humans” and all that is bullshit because the instant one of our cute idiot mechanical children is in danger we have a goddamn conniption, even WITHOUT AI.
Oppy has stopped responding as of last night (it’s currently Wednesday, June 13, 2018). There is some hope that he will recharge when the dust storm passes, but that’s going to take a while
“this baby came out of you but im not 100% sure its yours”
Funny thing – a woman who applied for welfare after her husband left her hadto supply DNA evidence he was actually the father. The results: he was definitely the father, but she wasn’t the mother. Her children were removed from her custody and she was sued for fraud, even though she insisted they were her children.
Turns out, she wasn’t a surrogate or a kidnapper (the two most obvious explanations) – she was a chimera. As an embryo, she fused at a very early stage with her twin, forming one individual. Her ovaries apparently developed from cells that had originally belonged to her vanished twin. Later on more tests showed that while the woman’s skin and hair DNA did not match her childrens, DNA taken from her cervix did.
WHAT THE FUCk
This went from stupid to really interesting in point 5 seconds.
There’s multiple cases of this very thing
Idk weird stuff man
Science doing random shit to fuck with your head
We don’t actually know how many human chimeras there are because most of the time you can’t tell.
However, some cases of intersex and even some trans individuals may be chimeras that result from the fusion of two embryos that have different genetic sex. This may also explain why some female athletes fail a sex test. (Other possibilities include genetic transcription that resulted in the loss of the SRY gene from the Y chromosome. The SRY gene is the actual switch that results in the development of a male phenotype).
Chimerism is also seen in animals.
This is Dunbar’s Gold. As you can see he looks like a brindle dog.
At one point he was bred to a mare called Sharp One, who also had the same brindle pattern, in the hope that they could breed more brindle horses – which are vanishingly rare.
Both horses are Quarter Horses, and the breeder sent in a gene sample from the foal for typing to allow him to be registered.
The test showed that the foal was related to neither his sire nor his dam.
They even did the test twice. Most cases of failed genetic testing are a sample mixup (either the hair or the semen used to produce the foal).
It turned out Dunbar’s Gold had had to be tested three times to get a good sample – and the third time was a blood test not the hair follicle test normally done. On top of that, when they looked at his gene type again they realized something rather important to a stallion was missing – he had no Y chromosome.
It was eventually established that both horses were chimeras and that in Dunbars Gold two different gene types existed in his skin and coat (one male, one female, just to prove that happens). Each gene line had a different set of color genes, but both matched properly to his parents. His foals, of course, all matched to the male gene line.
When they tested Sharp One’s other foal they discovered she was producing eggs from both of her gene lines. (Something which could also happen with a human chimera).
A star created 1,800 years ago after the collision of two distant suns is set to appear in the night sky for the first time – as the light from the crash finally reaches the Earth.
Scientists predict that for six months in 2022, stargazers will be able to witness the birth of the new star, by fixing their telescopes near the Pisces and Cygnus constellations. Dubbed the Boom Star, it has taken nearly two millennia for its light to reach earth — where it will be able to be seen by the naked eye. Astronomers expect the collision to increase the brightness of the pair ten thousand fold, making it one of the brightest stars in the heaven for a time. The explosion, known as a Red Nova, will then dissipate and the star will remain visible in our skies as a single bright, but duller, dot.
Your not going to want to miss this appear in our sky as it’s a once in a lifetime event! Source
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