Redshirt's Lament 1999th Post Gif Spectacular!

Gosh.

1,999 posts. Where has the time gone? So many laughs, and so many gifs. Here's a bunch!

Upper body strength is a must!

See?

Although a gun compensates for upper body strength nicely.

Like maybe a fake beard could too, if you were Riker or Evil Riker.

Regardless, the lesson of the last 6 freaking years is this:

But isn't that always the lesson?

The Future of Space Travel

Since science is boring, and no one is going to make any money in space for at least a hundred years, the future of human space travel is sex. In space. The ultimate in male fantasy.

That'll get the "Dot Com" money flowing.

Tiny Worlds

Behold Saturn in her absolute magnificence. There are much larger pictures available on the Internet, fans, than here. Seek them out if you need a new desktop.

Look just outside Saturn's brightest inner rings at 9:15 o'clock  - there is a white dot. That white dot is Earth, and that dot contains our entire species, now, then, and seemingly forever.

We regress, while we know such wonders await us.


Blame Republicans.

In search of color in space

Not my shot - I wish. I've been looking for the Northern Lights for years, but never caught a glimpse. I'm pretty far North, but not far enough. I might have to travel to Iceland one day to remedy this - seeing colors dance across the sky is the kind of religious experience I want to try.


That's the ISS streaking overhead, with 6 people on board living and working in space. And here's what the Northern Lights look like from the ISS:

As you can see, the Northern Lights are a thin band of radiation at the edge of space. This is actual solar matter that has slammed into Earth's magnetosphere and spiraled down towards the Poles, producing the lights as the solar matter strikes the highest portions of the atmosphere.

Magic!

Reality is an Illusion

It appears the stars are spinning through the night. There's nothing your senses can detect that says otherwise. You also know the sun moves, and have built a monument to showcase this movement - every Winter and Summer the sun will shine precisely so.

But this is all illusion.

It is we who are spinning, though you could never tell - do you feel like you're spinning at a thousand miles an hour?

So here's the amusing truth of it: You must have faith that science is true, or at least is the path of truth. That it is not the stars or sun spinning, but us, goes against your common sense. It goes against all intuition. It goes against our language - we say the sun rises and sets, when in truth it does no such thing. But you can't tell, you can't feel or see or hear the Earth whirling around in space.

And so you must have faith. In Science. Amen.

Eyes of a Robot

It's cool visuals, but not realistic. There's no way we could ever smash all the cameras they'll deploy. In the sky, on the sides of buildings, on street poles, on power lines, etc. Drones flying overhead. Satellites far above. Cameras everywhere.

Curiosity, on Mars. Not sure how this photo is made, since Curiosity is all alone on Mars.

Of Interest Perhaps Only To Me

Click for big! My discovery, simple minded as it is, was that the Sun moves all over the sky.

Having lived in cities for many years, I never saw the path of the Sun through the seasons. But now, high up in New Gondolin, I see the Sun go from Winter left to Summer Right, booking across the sky. Of course it is we - The Earth - that is moving, not the Sun, but hard to deny the illusion.

So you see above half my year. That is the Winter Sun, 2011. The dates above the other mountains cover the sunsets to come/gone. Spring/Fall is a magical spot there in the hollow of the closest mountain.

 Seeing the rhythms of our planet play out every night, every year, is awesome. Man.

Stuff in the Sky

Moonrise! Bright as a star. Fun fact to ponder - the light from the Moon is reflected light from the Sun. This light was created in the center of the Sun millions of years ago, finally escaped, streamed across space, hit the moon and bounced off, right into your eye. Where it bounces off again, but the energy is translated by your brain as... Moonlight.

The ISS, racing across the sky. There's six people up in there! Also, that sure looks like the Northern Lights, but I didn't see it with my eyes. So that's either a trick of light and clouds, or the Northern Lights can appear below my vision's threshold, but can show up on a longer exposure.

Moonset, an hour after an August Sunset. Fun project if you have a view of the Western horizon and some time - note how Moonset shifts over the year. You might be surprised!

All photos, once again, Redshirt Inc. Click for big! Prints available! I also can DJ weddings and Bar Mitzvahs.

Stone Age Future

Wind and Moon and Star is all I need to power my crystal - what about you?

All the jazz you need is straight above.

All these photos are mine, by the by. But I offer them up to you, tonight.

Spacebat we salute you

Back when the US had a manned space program, a bat hitched a ride on one of the last flights. Hidden agenda? Secret mission? Suicidal devotion? Who's to say why bats do things - they are a mystery. But the Internet, of course, came up with some tributes to this brave bat.

Where were you the day that bold bat rocketed up into the sky?

He/She's with Laika, and all the other animals  - like space chimps - we shot into space and now orbit the Earth, forever.

Excelsior, our animal ambassadors!

Don't shed too many tears though, for these courageous animals knew what they were signing up for, and gladly accepted the risks. I mean, who doesn't want to go to space?

Send a Dog

Laika, the first Earthling to leave the planet. How greater could be the glory? Laika, SPACEDOG!

Glory enough to make the art for a pack of Soviet smokes. That smooth flavor and gentle smoke reminds one of the heroic sacrifices from our dog friends on our behalf. Thank you, dogs, for all you do for us!

Of course, dogs have been used in war from the day war was invented, I bet. Or thereabouts. Here we have a dog bomb - a little terrier packed with explosives, trained to run under tanks. You wouldn't trust a job like this to a monkey, or a cat. Only dog will deliver, and BOOM.

But a dog can be trained in the hippy as well, out protesting in the street and fightin' The Man! Kanellos has inspired (and probably fathered) the next generation of Anarchy Dogs.

Special K

Know your Kryptonite! Sure, we all know about Green K, but did you know about Red K? Superboy sure does:

Also called "plot generation Kryptonite".  I mean the horrors of "Bearded Superman" should be obvious to all.

Speaking of horrors, check out the progressive nature of pre-destruction Krypton:

They were so alien they had "highly developed blacks".  That's some sci-fi shit right there man.

Shells

Let me drop some more perspective on you. Here's our old friend, the Oort Cloud. Picture billions upon billions of icy little comets tumbling around in a vast sphere, such that our entire solar system is enshrouded in a cloud of ice. A shell, like the electron shell.

It's big - extending almost a light year in all directions from the Sun. And then as you see, far closer in, is another sphere, or shell, of icy bodies, but also rocky bodies too - like Pluto. The Kuiper Belt, another shell - also like the electron shell.

So again picture this from far away in space, looking towards the Sun. First a giant cloud of white ice, floating lazily in a vast sphere. And another sphere of ice and rock far within that, and then tucked inside that shell are planets, and a star.

Every star with planets probably has something similar. And so now look up into the dark sky and picture every star you see as a white egg of ice shells, within beats the bright nucleus of a galactic atom. Together these atoms join with vast clouds of gas to create galaxies, and galaxies join other galaxies strung along in necklaces of dark matter, grouping in vast clouds of millions of galaxies, stretching.... forever?

Is a shell forever?

Star Scales

Apologies for the slow speed of this gif, but do stay till the end, where you'll visually grasp the incredible scale of star sizes. Our Sun is fairly normal size wise, but oh how much bigger do stars get! So big that the Sun is but a speck compared to the biggest.

But like with rock and/or roll, the bigger a star is, the brighter and faster it burns away. Our star will last about 10 billion years on the main cycle; the biggest stars last but a few million years then go KABLOOM, leaving behind a neutron star, or a black hole.

Behold this scale and know the glory and the rapture of our reality.

Because that's why

A billion, trillion, gazillion stars, and God cares whether you masturbate or not. Laugh while you can.

Also:

Revelation.

Otherman

Can Superman even get drunk off Earth alcohol? I think not. But maybe some alternate universe Superman could. Like

Nic Cage could drink the actual alcohol clouds that span light years. Seriously, and literally, alcohol clouds in space. Now, if there were obvious punchline clouds, too, all would be complete. But there ain't, ain't there?

The greatest hero of all, but you'll never hear about him, since he's always busy saving Singapore rather than Metropolis or Gotham.

What's next in Rockets

Sadly, or not, it's private enterprise - IN SPACE! Above is SpaceX's Falcon, which is already supplying the ISS, using this nifty little ship:

The Dragon! The Dragon has made a few trips to the ISS (just splashed down a few days ago) to deliver supplies and take back trash/experiments. It's automated to date, but is entirely ready to deliver people to space as well.

SpaceX is frankly awesome. They're working on their next rocket, which could revolutionize human access to space (in terms of cost - but this is a major barrier):

Here's a test launch. Check out the legs:

This rocket is designed to blast off, reach space, deliver its cargo, then fly back to Earth and land vertically, on those legs. This is the revolutionary part - the reusable rocket. Long a goal, and the original idea behind the Space Shuttle - check out this prototype from the 60's that never had a chance thanks to Nixon and Vietnam:

The rocket itself was not reusable, but this design was far more efficient than the Shuttle design that we finally got.

Anyways, SpaceX's Grasshopper is a reusable rocket, which greatly reduces the cost of any individual mission. Additionally, it can handle more cargo. Here's the cargo module, which would sit on top of the Grasshopper:

This is huge, relative to other rockets delivering stuff to space today.

Again, SpaceX seems like a kick ass success story, and their success will lead to more success. Good luck Elon!

Oh, and Branson's "Virgin Galactic"? Tourist trap only. Cool, but for rich thrillseekers and not much else.