The scene: I’m in my closet-sized cabin, inside a white dome built to house a crew of six for four months as part of an isolation experiment. As a crew, we are working and living as ‘explorers’ stationed on the surface of ‘Mars’. Our colony is lifelike and NASA-funded, but it is situated in a place quite a bit closer to home, on a remote slope of a Hawai’ian volcano.
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Yesterday, the sun spewed out an X-class solar flare. It hit its angriest peak just before 8pm last night, and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory—which is on sun watch 24/7—caught it on camera through six different wavelengths.
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Humans can only see visible light—the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye. That’s why so hard to study celestial objects hidden behind cosmic dust. But radio astronomy reveals those parts of the Universe that can’t be seen in visible light—and the secrets of dust-shrouded galaxies like our lovely Milky Way.
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Jeff Highsmith is an amazing dad. The proof is right here. He built this awesome Mission Control desk for his oldest son. His kid needed his own desk so he could do his homework, so he used MDF (medium-density fiberboard) to construct a basic desk. Then, he designed a control console that is loosely based on NASA examples.
He used Arduino and Raspberry to program the numerous lights, LEDs and switches. It even makes all sorts of cool noises when flipping its switches and pushing its buttons. As you can see from the video below, it isn’t going to be easy, but you can follow along and create something similar if you want a cool desk of your own.
Good luck concentrating on your homework, kid. Don’t worry, it won’t be too much of a distraction. The top of the desk folds down and covers the controls for study time.
[Make: via Kotaku via Nerd Approved]
Reach for the stars every time you touch your ears with these Constellation Earrings. They feature none other than one of the most well-known constellations of all time: the Big Dipper and Little Dipper.
The earrings are crafted using sterling silver, with white topaz chips adorned in all the right places as the stars. You can wear them so that they rest on your lobes or wear them as dangle earrings to change things up a bit.
The Constellation Earrings available from ThinkGeek for $24.99(USD). Here’s to hoping that they’ll make an Orion pair soon.
[via Incredible Things]
Mobile devices let us look up practically anything we want to know about anywhere and anytime, but there’s nothing like looking at the real deal. Relics and artifacts invoke a sense of wonder and fire up our imagination. Product designer Hans Fex thought of a brilliant way for us to experience that spark anytime and anywhere with his Mini Museums.
Hans says he’s wanted to make the Mini Museum since he was seven years-old. He got the idea from his father, a research scientist. In 1970 the elder Fex brought his son some artifacts that he embedded in clear resin, perhaps to protect them from his child’s curious and unsteady hands.
Now in his forties, Hans has gathered 33 very rare specimens that he’s chopping into tiny bits to share with you. These include a meteorite from the Moon, a T-rex tooth and even a 4,568,200-year old object, the oldest piece of matter ever collected.
Help Hans feed his growing beard. Pledge at least $99 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a Mini Museum as a reward. Pledge at least $230 if you want to get the Mini Museum that has all 33 specimens.
[via NOTCOT]
One Moon "day" is approximately 29 1/2 Earth days. This rotation coincides with its orbit around the Earth so that we only see about 59% of the surface of the Moon from Earth. When the Moon first formed, its rotational speed and orbit were very different than they are now. Over time, the Earth’s gravitational field gradually slowed the Moon’s rotation until the orbital period and the rotational speed stabilized, making one side of the Moon always face the Earth.
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For the first time since 1994 the Great Lakes are almost completely covered in ice, with only 12 percent remaining unfrozen. And now, thanks to NASA satellites, we can look upon this icy plain and despair—except that it’s actually quite beautiful.
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On April 8th, the New York City branch of Bonhams will be hosting a "Space History" auction, and Gizmodo has been given a preview of the some of the historically unique, space age artifacts that will be for sale. From full-body Soviet space suits to a control panel once used on the space station Mir, the range of objects is pretty extraordinary; earlier space history-themed auctions at Bonhams have even included Neil Armstrong’s own flight notes taken to the surface of the moon.
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When the Universe came into being, it was a kind of hot soup of elementary particles—and now scientists believe it could have been rumbling with thunder caused by Higgs boson bubbles.
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