Wandering Spirit: In Defense of Friendship
Allow me to get on my soapbox for just a moment. Don’t worry; this isn’t a rant or a rage or anything like that. It’s just that I’ve been getting some questions asking me what exactly it was that I meant when I had said that I both ship and not ship Sherlock and John at the same time, and I’d…
Love this <3
ISS Astronauts Returned Safely to Earth.
“After inspiring all of us on Earth, Commander Chris Hadfield and crew have finally re-joined us here. The Soyuz space capsule landed safely at 10:31 PM EDT in Kazakhstan. Hadfield had spent 144 days on the ISS, 2,336 orbits around the planet and totaled up around 62 million miles. That’s a lot of miles!
The Soyuz capsule landed vertically, which is the preferred position. The crew, which includes Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield, NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, are back on Earth and reportedly all feeling good as they re-adjust to the gravity. Marshburn was one of the astronauts who performed the awe-inspiring emergency spacewalk to fix the leak of ammonia coolant two days ago.
The landing of the capsule comes a little over three hours since the capsule undocked from the ISS. It marks the end of the ISS’ Expedition 35 Crew in space. The crew will head over to the medical tent to get all properly tested and fixed for normal Earth life. Or as normal life can be in the eyes of men who were in space.” via Gizmodo
“On Sunday, Hadfield handed over command of the space station to Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov.
As part of his personal farewell to the space station, Hadfield released a video of his version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, which NASA said is the first music video made in space.” via CBC
This Hubble image shows the galaxy cluster Abell S1077. Galaxy clusters are large groupings of galaxies, each of them including millions of stars. They are the largest existing structures in the Universe to be held together by their gravity.
The amount of matter condensed in such groupings is so high that their gravity is enough to warp the fabric of spacetime, distorting the path that light takes when it travels through the cluster. In some cases, this phenomenon produces an effect somewhat like a magnifying lens, allowing us to see objects that are aligned behind the cluster and which would otherwise be undetectable from Earth. In this image, you see stretched stripes that look like scratches on a lens but are, in fact, galaxies whose light is heavily distorted by the gravitational field of the cluster.
Astronomers use tools like the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the effects of gravitational lensing to peer far back in time and space to see the furthest objects located in the early Universe. One of the record holders is MACS0647-JD, a galaxy seen by Hubble (heic1217) and the Spitzer Space Telescope with the help of a gravitational lens much like this one in the galaxy cluster MACS J0647.7+7015. Its light has taken 13.3 billion years to reach us.
This image is based in part on data spotted by Nick Rose in the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition.
(via scinerds)
favourite pilot episodes ❤ SherlockModern-day version of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is a self-proclaimed high functioning sociopath (barely kept in check by his friend Dr. John Watson), often hired by Scotland Yard as a consulting detective. He solves crimes through sheer intellect, and has no patience for incompetence. The series incorporates 21st century forensic technology, computers, smartphones, and Google searches, but at the same time it’s very faithful to Doyle’s original stories in style and content.
My new favorite show… watching through it for the third time in a week. I’m going to go crazy waiting for all my shows to return this fall. (except Dexter which will premiere the last season this Summer, yay!)
(via nicowanderer)
