Space Fragments - 230211

Dunes on the floor of the Endurance Crater on Mars, November 16, 2004.

(Planetary Society)

SPARTH Collapsing Empire - Preliminary Sketch Digital

Another beautiful space painting from my friend Steve R Dodd. ‘The Beacon’. Originally displayed in NASA’s 25th anniversary art show, Cleveland Museum of Natural History (1980s)

Weird Anomaly by Edmund Chan  

Wispy remains of a supernova explosion hide a possible ‘survivor.’ Of all the varieties of exploding stars, the ones called Type Ia are perhaps the most intriguing. Their predictable brightness lets astronomers measure the expansion of the universe, which led to the discovery of dark energy. Yet the cause of these supernovae remains a mystery. Do they happen when two white dwarf stars collide? Or does a single white dwarf gorge on gases stolen from a companion star until bursting? If the second theory is true, the normal star should survive. Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to search the gauzy remains of a Type Ia supernova in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. They found a sun-like star that showed signs of being associated with the supernova. Further investigations will be needed to learn if this star is truly the culprit behind a white dwarf’s fiery demise.

 This supernova remnant is located 160,000 light-years from Earth. The actual supernova remnant is the irregular shaped dust cloud, at the upper center of the image. The gas in the lower half of the image and the dense concentration of stars in the lower left are the outskirts of a star cluster.

Image credit: NASA, ESA and H.-Y. Chu (Academia Sinica, Taipei)

Me irl

Jet pack - Faraz Shanyar

Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong loads rocks into the lunar module, as painted by Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean in 1985.

Rick Sternbach’s 1976 cover for Under Pressure, by Frank Herbert

USS Sulaco Military Starship

Movie: Aliens UI Design: Fantasy II Film Effects, L.A. Effects Group, Stan Winston Studio