Pretty interesting article

(ESO) – Using different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, two independent teams of astronomers have obtained the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate.

CLIK HARE

cool stuff :D so humanity only needs to survive another 10000years to see a daylight visible supernova. although this time the locals probably won't think it's a sign from a middle-eastern diety ;p~

oh I thought this was about the movie

cool stuff :D so humanity only needs to survive another 10000years to see a daylight visible supernova. although this time the locals probably won't think it's a sign from a middle-eastern diety ;p~

assuming 640 light years is far enough away for us to escape the GAMMA DEATH BLAST of a supernova!@#

Thats pretty damn awesome

assuming 640 light years is far enough away for us to escape the GAMMA DEATH BLAST of a supernova!@#

Let's hope so. But if not, it's been fun http://www.litschner.com/andrew/misc/wine_glass.gif

Now, a supernova may join the lineup. Firestone and West believe that debris from a supernova explosion coalesced into low-density, comet-like objects that wreaked havoc on the solar system long ago. One such comet may have hit North America 13,000 years ago, unleashing a cataclysmic event that killed off the vast majority of mammoths and many other large North American mammals. They found evidence of this impact layer at several archaeological sites throughout North America where Clovis hunting artifacts and human-butchered mammoths have been unearthed. It has long been established that human activity ceased at these sites about 13,000 years ago, which is roughly the same time that mammoths disappeared.

They also found evidence of the supernova explosion's initial shockwave: 34,000-year-old mammoth tusks that are peppered with tiny impact craters apparently produced by iron-rich grains traveling at an estimated 10,000 kilometers per second. These grains may have been emitted from a supernova that exploded roughly 7,000 years earlier and about 250 light years from Earth.
http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_news&task=detail&id=1726

That would be the end for most of us if it were happen again.
640 light years is a good distance unless it happened 640 years ago and we are about to feel the effects.

they need to l2focus, what a s***,, worthless,, pointless waste of millions of dollars

I don't find pictures of space impressive. Thought the same of the eclipse. Oh great it's a big ball of light I could have drawn in photoshop :/ We already knew it was a big ball of light. It is as expected. We've seen it in textbooks, on tv, at the planetarium, it's really nothing new - just that's it's a picture of a different ball of light - which means nothing because cameras make things look different than they are anyway.

I will be very intrigued when they snap a picture of something totally unexpected or something that cannot be understood without the picture.

I don't find pictures of space impressive.

Wow, really? You should subscribe to APOD and read the descriptions. Unless you mean actual, literal pictures of space. Which would be boring because it would just be like a black screen.

Thought the same of the eclipse. Oh great it's a big ball of light I could have drawn in photoshop :/ We already knew it was a big ball of light. It is as expected. We've seen it in textbooks, on tv, at the planetarium, it's really nothing new - just that's it's a picture of a different ball of light - which means nothing because cameras make things look different than they are anyway.

The eclipse, in addition to looking visually stunning, is also awesome because of its amazing applications in science and understanding the universe. Like when they used eclipses to try to verify some of Einstein's predictions about general relativity.

I love spacepix; they just make me realise how much awesome s*** there is out there in the universe and how much we need to get out there!@#

some people are perfectly happy to see hubble pics on the net & never look in a telescope which is fine. i prefer to verify things first hand at any available opportunity... otherwise you are just taking someone elses word for it. obviously spacepics from nasa are well verified by reliable sources but still it's not the same as seeing it for yourself imo.

even in a small cross-section of society like qgl we see the full range of this dichotomy. with casa down one end where he couldn't care less if thy sky was the inside of a giant ball painted blue... to guys like parabol who get a kick out of the first hand sighting. thermite is down casa's end, i am on parabols side & faceman is in his own parallel dimension with elves & pixies.

The eclipse, in addition to looking visually stunning, is also awesome because of its amazing applications in science and understanding the universe.

It's an awesome concept to think about, but seeing a picture of it was dissapointing. It wasn't visually stunning at all. It may as well have been any movie poster that has had a drawing of an eclipse on it, except smaller. I can do it in photoshop.

Type 'eclipse' into google. It's a black circle with some white haze around it. They've always looked like that and they always will. It's not like seeing a new waterfall or mountain which looks vastly different.

I would much rather be watching the shadows on the ground change during the eclipse which I hear is cool because 'half' of each shadow kinda eats itself so when you watch shadows of a tree, each leaf collapses in on itself halfway... then inverts and reforms the other way. Now there's a picture I'd like to see.

Demon, yeah seeing them yourself even if its nothing like a professional setup is awesome. My dad has a 20 odd cm Celestron 'scope and we were looking at the Moon the other night and decided to try taking a photo again, this time with his Canon S110 (not SLR) and ended up with this.

The Moon itself isn't photoshopped, just the dark background to make a wallpaper out of it.

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_czVhmd-zNwM/SnE0JTmjuMI/AAAAAAAAABo/FRkJ6KewUzk/s144/The Moon.jpg

From General

On a related note, Astrofest starts in a few weeks. Will probably be making my way up there again. Its a fantastic night if your into that sort of thing (Demon, Parabol ect)