cool pic

[videoholic]

Shuttle flying in front of the sun.  Pretty bitching.

I\'ll see your shuttle and raise you a hubble telescope

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/15/check-this-out-amazing-photo-of-the-sun/

[videoholic]

Yeah, I saw that too.  Pretty cool that the guy shot the pics in a split second from here on earth.  wild.

[Viper_Fujax]

awesome

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2006/12/27/the-top-ten-astronomy-images-of-2006/

was looking through phil\'s link. check out number 4

shit makes me want to play mass effect

[clips]

Amazing pic....i luv astronomy....it\'s amazing how massive the sun is.

I thought the sun was more firey like we see in the movies.  The above shot must be incorrect

[Viper_Fujax]

well that all just made my italian final seem a little insignificant

wooopss

[Evi]

Holy shit we\'re small. I knew there were stars bigger than our sun, but that\'s just fucking ridiculous. Seriously.

[Jumpman]

for fucks sakes viper did you have to quote the picture?

[Living-In-Clip]

Images are false.

We all know the sun is orange and fiery.
We also know that stars are small.
DUH.

[clips]

Damn...great pics joker!...i knew there were other stars and galaxies bigger than ours, but that is just mind-blowing. Just seeing those stars and galaxies on such a scale makes me believe that at the very least on a cellular level that life exists somewhere in one of these star systems.

Now as far as the pic goes,..i\'m having doubts....how can the shuttle be that close to the sun? (i know it\'s not actually right next to it)....in other words, even when the shuttle is in space, it\'s only maybe 80,000 - 90,000 feet above what the maxium percentage feet that a 747 can manage. For the sun to be that big, we on earth should be able to see it like that as well. Even on those hot summer days when the sun is going down at sunset...that is the biggest i believe anybody has ever seen the sun.

That has me thinking(offtopic a wee bit),...has anybody ever seen sometimes how incredibly large the moon looks sometimes right before sunset? i mean sometimes it looks like it\'s goimg to crash right into the earths atmosphere......i think i read somewhere that it\'s just the various gases in the atmosphere that makes the moon look that massive...it\'s still a bit scary when it\'s that big in the sky...

heres the explanation NASA gave about the pic clips - might not answer everything but it explains how the picture only existed for 0.8 seconds. The astronomer who took it has a lot of skill, and little a luck never hurts either

On Wednesday, May 13, two, tiny, fast moving spots crossed an otherwise featureless solar disk. Not sunspots though, the dark blemishes were silhouettes of the shuttle orbiter Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope side by side. To record this sharp picture of the orbiting pair against the face of the Sun, astronomer Thierry Legault carefully set up his camera and telescope near the center of a 5 kilometer wide path of visibility about 100 kilometers south of Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He opened the shutter for 1/8,000 second at 12:17 EDT, catching Atlantis and Hubble at a range of 600 kilometers while they were moving at 7 kilometers/second. The total duration of the transit (Sun crossing) was 0.8 seconds. Enlarged in the inset view, Atlantis (top) is approaching Hubble prior to capturing the space telescope. Thursday, astronauts began a series of spacewalks to perform the maintenance as part of the final mission to Hubble.



this thread seems like a good place to feature my favorite speech by Mr Carl Sagan (its actually an excerpt from his book, not a speech) which I have posted here on the boards I think at least 2 different times in the past.
But...it is my favorite video on youtube. One that I can find myself watching a few times a day, or once a week. I\'ve even been on my iPod for over a year heh. When I watch this video, usually the only thing I can think of is "my thoughts exactly..."





Look again at that dot. That\'s here. That\'s home. That\'s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we\'ve ever known. - Carl Sagan

[Titan]

These pics are amazing. I love astronomy. It shows how insignificant we really are. There are stars so massive its amazing, even compared to our sun. Those pics showing the comparisons are intriguing.

[clips]

Yup,...i see what you\'re sayin\' joker. The earth looks so peaceful and inviting, yet deep within is a race in a whirlwind of corrution,death, war, greed and is on a sure path to self-destruction. I\'m sure if somebody took snaphots of the earth at various times within various countries, and just witness the idiotic situations that we as a race do (fight/ kill each other/rape/abuse...etc) i\'m sure the said person would just shake their head.

Even if we were visted by some other race that might be inferior to us on some levels (i know....if they could travel to earth, they are already tecnically superior yada yada).....i feel we would still be ignorant enough to think they ARE superior to us.....and be in awe of their presence(maybe it would be a natural reaction, but the human race is such a naive and gullible one when it comes to things of the unknown)

IDK....the video just makes it seem like we should be living in some sort of utopian era, one free of violence and pain....or maybe it\'s just that we watch too many movies, in the sense that when we see other forms of alien life on a planet, the people are always technically superior and the society is always getting along, but who\'s to say for sure that that is the case on other planets with intelligent life such as our own? Their planet could very well have the same problems.

Look at the animals on earth....different species fight each-other and even animals or insects of the same species will even kill each-other...even down to the tiniest of living creatures..spiders/ants....maybe it was programmed in humans to behave in such a manner....there can never be an utopian era for humans....greed and power will ALWAYS get in the way.