Tech and Science Post

12/04/2024

12/04/2024

Amazing optical illusion in this AI generated image ! Close your eyes at 80-90% to see it.

Illusion d’optique bluffante dans cette étrange image générée par IA. Pour voir l’image cachée, plissez les yeux jusqu’à les avoir presque fermés.

13/09/2023

Jarvis, an Iron Man-inspired AI developed by CreaTools AI, redefines interaction with generative AI with the ability to interact solely through voice, emotional adaptability (and mood swings) as well as its role as a versatile assistant in our daily lives.

Jarvis, developed by CreaTools AI, is a new voice AI inspired by the famous assistant of Tony Stark (Iron Man). Equipped with innovative features, Jarvis can interact vocally, express emotions, and adapt to user preferences. Although currently in beta phase, with the inherent challenges at this stag...

09/04/2022

Seven Sisters versus California

Image Credit & Copyright: Neven Krcmarek

Explanation: On the upper right, dressed in blue, is the Pleiades. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and most easily visible open clusters on the sky. The Pleiades contains over 3,000 stars, is about 400 light years away, and only 13 light years across. Surrounding the stars is a spectacular blue reflection nebula made of fine dust. A common legend is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named. On the lower left, shining in red, is the California Nebula. Named for its shape, the California Nebula is much dimmer and hence harder to see than the Pleiades. Also known as NGC 1499, this mass of red glowing hydrogen gas is about 1,500 light years away. Although about 25 full moons could fit between them, the featured wide angle, deep field image composite has captured them both. A careful inspection of the deep image will also reveal the star forming region IC 348 and the molecular cloud LBN 777 (the Baby Eagle Nebula).



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09/04/2022

Earendel: A Star in the Early Universe

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, B. Welch (JHU), D. Coe (STScI); Processing: A. Pagan (STScI)

Explanation: Is Earendel the farthest star yet discovered? This scientific possibility started when the Hubble Space Telescope observed a huge cluster of galaxies. The gravitational lens effect of this cluster was seen to magnify and distort a galaxy far in the background. This distorted background galaxy -- so far away it has a redshift of 6.2 -- appears in the featured image as a long red string, while beads on that string are likely to be star clusters. The galaxy cluster lens creates a line of maximum magnification line where superposed background objects may appear magnified many thousands of times. On the intersection between the galaxy line and the maximum magnification line is one "bead" which shows evidence of originating from a single bright star in the early universe -- now named Earendel. Future investigations may include more imaging by Hubble to see how Earendel's brightness varies, and, quite possibly, by the new James Webb Space Telescope when it becomes operational later this year. Earendel's great distance exceeds that of any known stable star -- although the star that exploded creating GRB 090423 had a redshift of 8.2.



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08/04/2022

Messier 24: Sagittarius Star Cloud

Image Credit & Copyright: Gabriel Rodrigues Santos

Explanation: Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. When you gaze at the star cloud with binoculars or small telescope you are looking through a window over 300 light-years wide at stars some 10,000 light-years or more from Earth. Sometimes called the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, M24's luminous stars fill this gorgeous starscape. Covering over 3 degrees or the width of 6 full moons in the constellation Sagittarius, the telescopic field of view includes dark markings B92 and B93 just above center, along with other clouds of dust and glowing nebulae toward the center of the Milky Way.



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08/04/2022

Hale-Bopp: The Great Comet of 1997

Image Credit & Copyright: Stefan Seip (TWAN)

Explanation: Only twenty-five years ago, Comet Hale-Bopp rounded the Sun and offered a dazzling spectacle in planet Earth's night skies. Digitized from the original astrophoto on 35mm color slide film, this classic image of the Great Comet of 1997 was recorded a few days after its perihelion passage on April 1, 1997. Made with a camera and telephoto lens piggy-backed on a small telescope, the 10 minute long, hand-guided exposure features the memorable tails of Hale-Bopp, a whitish dust tail and blue ion tail. Here, the ion tail extends well over ten degrees across the northern sky. In all, Hale-Bopp was reported as visible to the naked eye from late May 1996 through September 1997. Also known as C/1995 O1, Hale-Bopp is recognized as one of the most compositionally pristine comets to pass through the inner Solar System. A visitor from the distant Oort cloud, the comet's next perihelion passage should be around the year 4380 AD. Do you remember Hale-Bopp?



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04/04/2022

🔭 How much “magnification” is needed to see planets?⁠
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The occult is a great time to demonstrate this, but unfortunately, there are none happening soon. An occult happens when two celestial objects briefly align with the observer, causing one to appear to pass behind the other.⁠
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To simulate an occult, took his most powerful telescope and captured both the moon and Saturn with the same camera to ensure the scale is identical, then he combined the images as if they were touching in the sky. Saturn is absolutely tiny compared to the moon, and the moon is already a challenge to shoot clearly!⁠
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Unlike the deep-sky objects he captures, planets require a ton of “magnification” to view. Counterintuitively, he said that he can get more detailed shots of galaxies than he can of planets.⁠
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🎥 courtesy of:

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03/04/2022

🧪 "Gas Collection for Emission Spectra: a favorite demonstration using my set of pure samples of hydrogen, nitrogen, and five noble gasses are subjected to the high-frequency pulsed field of a miniature Tesla coil." ⁠
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"Each gas has a characteristic breakdown voltage and emission spectrum - note that Nitrogen has the highest breakdown voltage and only glows when very near the coil where the field is most intense whereas Neon and Helium have the lowest breakdown voltage and begin to glow many centimeters away from the coil."⁠
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"The color of each gas is due to a mix of the colors emitted from electron energy transitions specific to each element - the basis of spectroscopy. The Krypton tube also exhibits interesting oscillations with this particular Tesla coil."⁠
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(filmed and written by: )

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28/03/2022

Pluto at Night

Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute

Explanation: The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto, about 19 minutes after its closest approach. A denizen of the Kuiper Belt in dramatic silhouette, the image also reveals Pluto's tenuous, surprisingly complex layers of hazy atmosphere. Near the top of the frame the crescent twilight landscape includes southern areas of nitrogen ice plains now formally known as Sputnik Planitia and rugged mountains of water-ice in the Norgay Montes.

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28/03/2022

Titan Seas Reflect Sunlight

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, U. Arizona, U. Idaho

Explanation: Why would the surface of Titan light up with a blinding flash? The reason: a sunglint from liquid seas. Saturn's moon Titan has numerous smooth lakes of methane that, when the angle is right, reflect sunlight as if they were mirrors. Pictured here in false-color, the robotic Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 imaged the cloud-covered Titan in 2014 in different bands of cloud-piercing infrared light. This specular reflection was so bright it saturated one of Cassini's infrared cameras. Although the sunglint was annoying -- it was also useful. The reflecting regions confirm that northern Titan houses a wide and complex array of seas with a geometry that indicates periods of significant ev***ration. During its numerous passes of our Solar System's most mysterious moon, Cassini has revealed Titan to be a world with active weather -- including times when it rains a liquefied version of natural gas.



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06/03/2022

🦧 Saturday mornings be like:⁠
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Infant orangutans stay in close contact with their mothers for a long time. For the first two years of a young orangutan’s life, he or she is completely dependent on mother for food and transportation. A baby orangutan clings to his/her mother’s stomach, side, or back while she moves through the trees, and feeds on his/her mother’s breast milk.⁠
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🐒 Orangutan offspring will sometimes be carried until they are 5 years old and be breast-fed until they are 8 years of age! Even when young orangutans are too old to be carried and fed by their mother, they may still remain close to her, traveling with her, eating, and resting in the same trees, until they are about 10 years old. ⁠
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Once they become independent, they will be alone or in the company of other immature orangutans. In the case of females, they frequently return to their mothers to “visit” until they are about 15-16 years old. Studies indicate that Bornean orangutans may "grow up” faster than Sumatran orangutans and may become independent from their mothers at an earlier age.⁠
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🎥 courtesy of:

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27/02/2022

Three Clusters in Puppis

Image Credit & Copyright: Dave Doctor

Explanation: Galactic or open star clusters are young. The swarms of stars are born together near the plane of the Milky Way, but their numbers steadily dwindle as cluster members are ejected by galactic tides and gravitational interactions. Caught in this telescopic frame over three degrees across are three good examples of galactic star clusters, seen toward the southern sky's nautical constellation Puppis. Below and left, M46 is some 5,500 light-years in the distance. Right of center M47 is only 1,600 light-years away and NGC 2423 (top) is about 2500 light-years distant. Around 300 million years young M46 contains a few hundred stars in a region about 30 light-years across. Sharp eyes can spot a planetary nebula, NGC 2438, at about 11 o'clock against the M46 cluster stars. But that nebula's central star is billions of years old, and NGC 2438 is likely a foreground object only by chance along the line of sight to youthful M46. Even younger, aged around 80 million years, M47 is a smaller and looser star cluster spanning about 10 light-years. Star cluster NGC 2423 is pushing about 750 million years in age though. NGC 2423 is known to harbor an extrasolar planet, detected orbiting one of its red giant stars.



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27/02/2022

Peculiar Galaxies of Arp 273

Image Credit & Copyright: Jason Guenzel

Explanation: The spiky stars in the foreground of this backyard telescopic frame are well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. But the two eye-catching galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way, at a distance of over 300 million light-years. Their distorted appearance is due to gravitational tides as the pair engage in close encounters. Cataloged as Arp 273 (also as UGC 1810), the galaxies do look peculiar, but interacting galaxies are now understood to be common in the universe. Nearby, the large spiral Andromeda Galaxy is known to be some 2 million light-years away and approaching the Milky Way. The peculiar galaxies of Arp 273 may offer an analog of their far future encounter. Repeated galaxy encounters on a cosmic timescale can ultimately result in a merger into a single galaxy of stars. From our perspective, the bright cores of the Arp 273 galaxies are separated by only a little over 100,000 light-years.



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26/02/2022

👨‍🔬 "Poly Density Puzzle: favorite science brain teaser - white beads and blue beads "float" oddly separated beneath the surface of a clear liquid. If the contents are mixed by shaking the container, the white beads gather at the top and the blue sink to bottom! Adding to the mystery - after about 30 seconds the two layers of beads will have slowly moved back to the middle."⁠
What is your guess as to the physics behind this behavior?⁠
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🎥 ✍️ courtesy of:

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26/02/2022

Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 4945

Image Credit & Copyright: Dietmar Hager, Eric Benson

Explanation: Large spiral galaxy NGC 4945 is seen nearly edge-on in this cosmic galaxy close-up. It's almost the size of our Milky Way Galaxy. NGC 4945's own dusty disk, young blue star clusters, and pink star forming regions stand out in the colorful telescopic frame. About 13 million light-years distant toward the expansive southern constellation Centaurus, NGC 4945 is only about six times farther away than Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. Though this galaxy's central region is largely hidden from view for optical telescopes, X-ray and infrared observations indicate significant high energy emission and star formation in the core of NGC 4945. Its obscured but active nucleus qualifies the gorgeous island universe as a Seyfert galaxy and home to a central supermassive black hole.



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26/02/2022

Aurora Over White Dome Geyser

Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Howell

Explanation: Sometimes both heaven and Earth erupt. Colorful auroras erupted unexpectedly a few years ago, with green aurora appearing near the horizon and brilliant bands of red aurora blooming high overhead. A bright Moon lit the foreground of this picturesque scene, while familiar stars could be seen far in the distance. With planning, the careful astrophotographer shot this image mosaic in the field of White Dome Geyser in Yellowstone National Park in the western USA. Sure enough, just after midnight, White Dome erupted -- spraying a stream of water and v***r many meters into the air. Geyser water is heated to steam by scalding magma several kilometers below, and rises through rock cracks to the surface. About half of all known geysers occur in Yellowstone National Park. Although the geomagnetic storm that caused the auroras subsided within a day, eruptions of White Dome Geyser continue about every 30 minutes.



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25/02/2022

Perseverance Sol 354

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Processing; Kenneth Kremer

Explanation: This Navcam mosaic from Perseverance looks out over the car-sized rover's deck, across the floor of Jezero crater on Mars. Frames used to construct the mosaic view were captured on mission sol 354. That corresponds to Earth calendar date February 17, 2022, nearly one Earth year after the rover's landing. With a mass of over 1,000 kilograms, six-wheeled Perseverance is the heaviest rover to touch down on Mars. During its first year of exploration the rover has collected six (so far) rock core samples for later return to planet Earth, served as the base station for Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, and tested MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), converting some of the Red Planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen.



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25/02/2022

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Explanation: Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a modest central bar. Prominently barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217, featured here, was captured in spectacular detail in this image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. Visible are dark filamentary dust lanes, young clusters of bright blue stars, red emission nebulas of glowing hydrogen gas, a long bar of stars across the center, and a bright active nucleus that likely houses a supermassive black hole. Light takes about 60 million years to reach us from NGC 6217, which spans about 30,000 light years across and can be found toward the constellation of the Little Bear (Ursa Minor).



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25/02/2022

Beautiful Albireo AB

Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Eder

Explanation: Beta Cygni is a single bright star to the naked eye. About 420 light-years away it marks the foot of the Northern Cross, famous asterism in the constellation Cygnus. But a view through the eyepiece of a small telescope will transform it into a beautiful double star, a treasure of the night sky in blue and gold. Beta Cygni is also known as Albireo, designated Albireo AB to indicate its two bright component stars. Their visually striking color difference is illustrated in this telescopic snapshot, along with their associated visible spectrum of starlight shown in insets to the right. Albireo A, top inset, shows the spectrum of a K-type giant star, cooler than the Sun and emitting most of its energy at yellow and red wavelengths. Below, Albireo B has the spectrum of a main sequence star much hotter than the Sun, emitting more energy in blue and violet. Albireo A is known to be a binary star, two stars together orbiting a common center of mass, though the two stars are too close together to be seen separately with a small telescope. Well-separated Albireo A and B most likely represent an optical double star and not a physical binary system because the two components have clearly different measured motions through space.



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23/02/2022

Orion over Green Bank

Image Credit & Copyright: Dave Green

Explanation: What will the huge Green Bank Telescope discover tonight? Pictured, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) on the lower right is the largest fully-pointable single-dish radio telescope in the world. With a central dish larger than a football field, the GBT is nestled in the hills of West Virginia, USA in a radio quiet zone where the use of cell phones, WiFi emitters, and even microwave ovens are limited. The GBT explores our universe not only during the night -- but during the day, too, since the daytime sky is typically dark in radio waves. Taken in late January, the featured image was planned for months to get the setting location of Orion just right. The image is a composite of a foreground shot taken over a kilometer away from the GBT, and a background shot built up of long exposures during the previous night. The deep background image of Orion is fitting because the GBT is famous for, among many discoveries, mapping the unusual magnetic field in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.



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23/02/2022

Illustration: An Early Quasar

Illustration Credit & License: ESO, M. Kornmesser

Explanation: What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to involve supermassive black holes in the centers of active galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious, though. Featured, recent data has enabled an artist's impression of an early-universe quasar as it might have been: centered on a massive black hole, surrounded by sheets of gas and an accretion disk, and expelling a powerful jet. Quasars are among the most distant objects we see and give humanity unique information about the early and intervening universe. The oldest quasars currently known are seen at just short of redshift 8 -- only 700 million years after the Big Bang -- when the universe was only a few percent of its current age.



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22/02/2022

The panther chameleon can change colors in as fast as one to two minutes to court a female or face a competitor.

Chameleons are known for the remarkable ability to perform complex and rapid color changes during social interactions. Chameleons can adjust a system of nanocrystals in their skin cells, called iridophores. Better yet, chameleons have two layers of these iridophores, and the second layer reflects infrared light. These two layers can be controlled independently of each other, enabling chameleons to put on their colorful displays.



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15/02/2022

Earth at Night

Image Credit: NASA, Suomi NPP VIIRS; Data: Miguel Román (NASA GSFC); Processing: Joshua Stevens

Explanation: This is what the Earth looks like at night. Can you find your favorite country or city? Surprisingly, city lights make this task quite possible. Human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, including the seaboards of Europe, the eastern United States, and Japan. Many large cities are located near rivers or oceans so that they can exchange goods cheaply by boat. Particularly dark areas include the central parts of South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The featured image, nicknamed Black Marble, is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures remade in 2016 from data taken by the orbiting Suomi NPP satellite.

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15/02/2022

In the Heart of the Heart Nebula

Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Jensen

Explanation: What excites the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. Its shape perhaps fitting of the Valentine's Day, this heart glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: excited hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula's center. In the heart of the Heart Nebula are young stars from the open star cluster Melotte 15 that are eroding away several picturesque dust pillars with their energetic light and winds. The open cluster of stars contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, many dim stars only a fraction of the mass of our Sun, and an absent microquasar that was expelled millions of years ago. The Heart Nebula is located about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of the mythological Queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia).

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15/02/2022

Terminator Moon

Image Credit: NASA, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, SVS; Processing & Copyright: Jai & Neil Shet

Explanation: What's different about this Moon? It's the terminators. In the featured image, you can't directly see any terminator -- the line that divides the light of day from the dark of night. That's because the image is a digital composite of 29 near-terminator lunar strips. Terminator regions show the longest and most prominent shadows -- shadows which, by their contrast and length, allow a flat photograph to appear three-dimensional. The original images and data were taken near the Moon by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Many of the Moon's craters stand out because of the shadows they all cast to the right. The image shows in graphic detail that the darker regions known as maria are not just darker than the rest of the Moon -- they are flatter.



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10/02/2022

T Tauri and Hind's Variable Nebula

Image Credit & Copyright: Dawn Lowry, Gian Lorenzo Ferretti, Ewa Pasiak and Terry Felty

Explanation: The star with an orange tint near top center in this dusty telescopic frame is T Tauri, prototype of the class of T Tauri variable stars. Next to it (right) is a yellow cosmic cloud historically known as Hind's Variable Nebula (NGC 1555). About 650 light-years away, at the boundary of the local bubble and the Ta**us molecular cloud, both star and nebula are seen to vary significantly in brightness but not necessarily at the same time, adding to the mystery of the intriguing region. T Tauri stars are now generally recognized as young (less than a few million years old), sun-like stars still in the early stages of formation. To further complicate the picture, infrared observations indicate that T Tauri itself is part of a multiple system and suggest that the associated Hind's Nebula may also contain a very young stellar object. The well-composed image spans about 8 light-years at the estimated distance of T Tauri.



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07/02/2022

🔎 Spark Science (via ): "the bright flashes of light emitted from a common sparkler are tiny bits of burning iron metal which can be caught and collected with a simple piece of paper as a net. ⁠
These tiny metal bits are hot (more than 1000 °C, 1800 °F) and become molten where surface tension then pulls them into spheres before they cool- seen here at 300x magnification. Although the sparks are very hot, they can’t burn paper (or skin) because they carry very little thermal energy due to their tiny mass- they cool very quickly."⁠
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07/02/2022

Symbiotic R Aquarii

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/R. Montez et al.; Optical: Data: NASA/ESA/STScI, Processing: Judy Schmidt (CC BY-NC-SA)

Explanation: Variable star R Aquarii is actually an interacting binary star system, two stars that seem to have a close symbiotic relationship. Centered in this space-based optical/x-ray composite image it lies about 710 light years away. The intriguing system consists of a cool red giant star and hot, dense white dwarf star in mutual orbit around their common center of mass. With binoculars you can watch as R Aquarii steadily changes its brightness over the course of a year or so. The binary system's visible light is dominated by the red giant, itself a Mira-type long period variable star. But material in the cool giant star's extended envelope is pulled by gravity onto the surface of the smaller, denser white dwarf, eventually triggering a thermonuclear explosion, blasting material into space. Astronomers have seen such outbursts over recent decades. Evidence for much older outbursts is seen in these spectacular structures spanning almost a light-year as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope (in red and blue). Data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (in purple) shows the X-ray glow from shock waves created as a jet from the white dwarf strikes surrounding material.



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07/02/2022

🪐 "Saturn and Jupiter, my clearest photo of each so far. Shown here in their respective sizes in the sky. Saturn is only slightly smaller than Jupiter without those rings, but over twice as far away! You can also see the moon Io in frame. These are also the first images captured from my new backyard in Arizona, showing me how much better the skies are now that I’m out of the Sacramento Valley."⁠
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✍️🔬 by: ⁠
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🍔🥒🥔 is proud to partner with our sponsor this month 🎉🎉 LINK IN BIO. See why over one million members love Thrive – shop 6,000+ products, including all your favs you normally find in grocery stores In 2021, over 70% of U.S. households placed at least one online grocery order. Stop overpaying for organic groceries. Organic Brands. One-Stop Shop. All without ever having to leave your house!⁠
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And we're even more excited to be able to offer our awesome followers an EXTRA 40% OFF their first purchase 🤯 AND a 🎁 FREE 🎁 gift!! Just 📲 CLICK THE LINK IN OUR BIO and we'll hook ya up! (Sidebar -- It's US-only right now!)

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