So much light

4, yes. And here?

Each speck a galaxy, some nearly as old as the universe, hundreds of billions of them, all looking something like

Each galaxy containing billions of stars, and each star powered by fusion - the collision of atoms which produces just about everything.

Some of this we call light, and bless it with sight, and are defined by it.

I pledge

My pledge to you, dear reader, is to always mock flags. I get their symbolic function, but I laugh at it. Also, despair. Flags are tribe colors to designate sides, both to unite and divide. When you "pledge allegiance" you are of course proclaiming fealty to the political power that uses the flag as its tribe symbol. I pledge allegiance to all life, to the Universe as a whole, so what does a flag matter to me? Or, for that matter, what does the Flag Code matter to any Patriot? Violation, above. Violation, below.

So many Flag Code violations in today's American Empire.

lol america.

There has been an error

An error of some sort was required to create everything you see. For, there was matter and antimatter, and theoretically these two should cancel each other out, and yet they do not. By like 0.000001% for reference. But that 0.000001% was enough to create our entire Universe. Every star, every galaxy, every black hole, the sum remainder of an unfinished math set.

Imperfection is the source of Creation.

This being true, should we judge those who make mistakes? Or systems that crash?

Like this digital billboard with a Windows error in the fog?

Bow Shock

I like to think of stars as the basic building block of the Universe. Not sure if this is an accepted opinion, but I think it works. Everything revolves around stars - planetary systems like ours, and all life here on Earth and maybe on the 1000+ exoplanets discovered to date (there's billions more - current consensus is just about every star has planets).

Here, you see a star in its larger environment - ginormous gas clouds. Stars are born from these clouds, they shape and influence these clouds, and their death creates new clouds. Above you see a star affecting a larger gas cloud environment, creating a bow shock in the clouds - just like a boat creates a bow shock in water, or a wind turbine creates a bow shock in the air, stars are shaping the larger environments in which they find themselves. Here's another example.

Anywhere there are stars and gas clouds, you'll see bow shocks.

We exist in a sea of gas - we come from this gas. Gas!

These clouds are primarily hydrogen, but also contain everything that would make up a star and its planets - iron, silver, gold, carbon, everything.

Our Friend the Atom

Let us follow the human understanding of the Atom. Ja, man?

Here's all the conditions upon the Earth. What happens to minerals exposed to such?

Primary colors.

Praise The Feathered Raptor Lord!

Raptor Lord is a harsh God, but fair. He only eats when He's hungry. Which, admittedly, is often. But running the Universe  - including monitoring and influencing every single sporting event in the Universe in case one player/side is more fawning over Raptor Lord - is hard work!

Praise be unto Him. ROAR!

Happy Tree Paints

Yes, in this alternate Universe - one of many - Happy Tree paints Bob Ross, soothingly.

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?

Because that's why

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

Also:

Revelation.

To Serve and Protect

I must confess to being conflicted regarding the end game of the Boston Marathon bombing. First, let me make clear I harbor no confusion regarding the bombers themselves - evil deeds done for whatever reason are evil, and must be stopped/prevented. There's no gray area here. However, what has given me some pause is the police response.

First! I think the BPD and all involved agencies did a fantastic job in a difficult situation, and the same can be said for the local elected officials. That said, I've long bemoaned the militarization of the police, and you could see this militarization to clear affect during this past week:

This militarization comes from two "Wars": The so called "Drug War" and "The War on Terror". Each of which is in essence a tool for the powerful to control the powerless. The Drug War is especially pernicious, and was the genesis for the militarization of police forces across America. The WoT greatly added to this trend. And now we have both big and little cities with what are essentially armies, as police forces. In this particular example, it was beneficial, given the bombs.

And again, I've got no issue with the police actions of the past week. But this highlights the inherent contradiction.

Indeed, the police protect us from crazed individuals like these bombers, from psychopaths, from wacked out killers, from rapists, etc. It's necessary for a functioning society. On the other hand, the police also enforce the will of The Powers That Be. And so OWS protests will get smashed. Political protestors will get penned in and arrested. Random innocent folks will get their doors smashed in because the police think there's a drug dealer living there.

In a formula: "To Serve" - the Authorities. "To Protect" - the people. I'm for the latter, against the former. I'm anti-authoritarian, in all forms. Thus, my conflict.

And to end on a downer, as I'm wont, I ALWAYS find flag waving to be disconcerting. It's too tribal, and the only Tribe I belong to is "Matter in this Universe". Represent! However, it's hard to get upset with images like this:

Asian college students with an American flag posing with joyous (non-militarized) cops. Incredible. However, let us not mistake this:

As little more than college students finding a good reason to go party on the streets. It's justified in this case, no doubt, but oh-so closely related to the parties that happen after sports championships.

All that said, here's one image that fuses everything I was just trying to lay out:

A militarized police officer delivering milk to a family with kids trapped in their house during lockdown. Amazing.

I'll confess further, all this has left me confused.

Everything is Information

Think about it, really. Stop whatever it is you're doing (when you read the end of this paragraph), and think of this: Everything you see, touch, hear, know, think, remember, feel, is but some form of information. But more! Everything that is or could ever be - every atom, every molecular gas cloud, every star, every planet and person and even dog that has ever or will ever live is but a collection of information - ones and zeroes. Dots and dashes. Numbers on scales. Literally. Consider vision - an important human sense. Witness above how the human eye gathers light. Once focused, it strikes a collection of differentiated cells of the optic nerve, and that nerve transmits data to the brain. The data? Lightwave frequencies. The brain takes this data and transforms it into red, or green, or blue, or some combination thereof, and that in turn is what we see. And remember. It's a wicked cool trick!

Colors exist because the material through which light passes and strikes differs. Water is different than stone, a tree different than a car. Low different than high, hot different than cold, and so on. These differences give birth to all color, as the light is reflected, refracted, blocked, twisted, or otherwise changed in different ways based on the conditions. Above you see the spectrum in part, based on the density, temperature, and speed of the water, coupled with the differing angles of light. Below,

an amalgamation of movie poster colors by year - oldest at the top. Notice the color shift! And consider it - you see this shift through a screen over the internet, clearly nothing but data which comes alive with meaning in your mind. Hence!

False color astronomy. Defined as the addition of color where there was no color in the original image. This is an X-Ray shot, after all, and alas! We humans cannot see in X-Ray. The original image is greyscale, but in that scale is revealed the different frequencies of X-Rays, and if you follow the following logic: Low end of frequency equals red and high end equals blue than here you are - false color, but real in its way. It represents something very real and meaningful - especially meaningful to us, viewers of color, as we can tease meaning out of an image in color that we cannot in grey. For the best example:

The CMB: Cosmic Microwave Background. These globes represent the temperature of the UNIVERSE at approximately 300 million years old, which is a trifling number when you consider the estimated age of the Universe (14Billlion give or take). It is near this point that light first escaped the cosmic creation soup and traveled freely across space. And thus the map - different areas of hot and cold. Where the differences are like miniscule but enough over time to shape the infinity of galaxies that make up our ever expanding reality - red areas represent places of higher density and thus matter was attracted and here was built, everything. Blue less dense areas, now representing interstellar space, and it is vast and only getting ever vaster.

Once again, but numbers, which we translate into colors, shapes, texture, form. We are the creators of everything, since everything is but a bunch of numbers and long ass formulas n' shit. Consider in closing this image - our star, "The Sun"! In neutrinos, captured by a "telescope" buried deep under a mountain. You see, neutrinos don't care about our matter so much, and pass right through. Right now there are trillions upon trillions - seriously! - streaming right through you. Yet we found a way to measure them, and so here's the sun in False Color, neutrino style. Pretty dang sweet, science. Also too, eyes!

Finally, yay art! Previous post photo setup - not my picture, but alas I don't know who to credit. Whoever you are, rock on!

It's awesome what people can make out of all this information.

Forever Young

Io, 4th largest moon of Sol's System. It's just a bit bigger than our Luna, yet oh so different.

For you see, Io is literally HELL in space. A moon of fire and magma, roiling land exploding, pits of burning damnation, etc. As such, the surface of Io is continually made anew, and thus has the fewest impact craters of any object save Sol itself.

This is a difference of 5 months. Huge zit out of nowhere - just before Space Prom, too.

A few other months. As you can see, in the blink of a geologic eye Io changes before us. Such is the temptation of HELL. Like Enceladus's CRYOVOLCANOES, Io's heat comes from tidal friction between Jupiter and the other large moons in the system. But the force on Io is far greater than on any other, and so it burns. I suppose one day it will be ripped apart, and then form a pretty ring. But already, Io has its ring:

Due to close proximity, Io interacts with mighty Jupiter in surprising ways. It's joined to its magnetic field, affecting the shape of that field. It creates a huge torus of plasma in a giant ring around the planet, made up of Io's atmosphere. It also dumps an enormous amount of material onto Jupiter, much of which falls at the North and South Pole, as witnessed in this Jovian aurora:

Ganymede and Europa are also bound directly to Jupiter's magnetic field, creating a loop of material exchange. As noted before, the 4th moon, Callisto, is not bound. And thus is free of the ravages of Jupiter's radiation to a great degree, and thus, our future space depot. But anyway, Io:

Some real time super massive volcano action in progress. You can see why it gives Jupiter 1 ton of material every second. Have it!

Technically, Io is the fifth moon out from Jupiter, but really is the first, since the inner 4 pale in size comparison. As do the rest of Jupiter's near 70 moons - most are irregular lumps of rock a few hundred miles wide, whereas the 4 big moons of Jupiter are all dwarf planet sized - two of them bigger than Mercury, and the other two just below. It's a mighty collection of moons, discovered way back in 1609 by Galileo. Here's how they look through an average telescope today:

From left to right: Europa, Io, Jupiter - King O' the Planets, don't ya ken - Ganymede (biggest moon) and my dear Callisto. Twas an amazing discovery, since it immediately raised a lot of questions - IF moons could orbit other planets, than we could be orbiting the Sun rather vice versa, and the Sun could in turn orbit another star, and that way lies infinity, and the opening of the human mind to something far, far bigger than himself, or Earth: The Universe. Praise be.

Venus and Luna

Another redshirt shot of Venus and The Pleiades, with a very special guest "Ring around the Moon (w/ cloud)"! Not a shop in any way, just some funky clouds making it all spectral and astral n' stuff. Word. Click for big. Bonus ring pic:

I'm ashamed to admit I don't have a big enough lens to capture phenomena like Ye Olde Moon Ring in their entirety. This was the best I could do to fit it all in one pic - no dice. It was a huge ring around the Moon, and striking to behold, especially with the bright planets to the lower right. The night sky is amazing when you can finally see it, free of interference.

The source of myth in fact - consider, even ancient pre-humans understood the movement of stars and planets. They understood this "cage" we live in - with the stars far, far away, disappearing during the day when a giant fireball awakened. Which some figured out, way, way back when, was just another star, like all the lights of night. That will blow even an Erectus mind.

Also too: As I've said before, we need to call our moon a name, not "The Moon". The word "moon" refers to any natural satellite in orbit around a planet. Our moon is but one of hundreds (millions really when you consider Saturn's rings are made up of pieces of ice and each piece is technically a moon) of moons in our Solar System, and one of hundreds of billions in our galaxy, and mayhaps of trillions across the Universe. As you see, referring to the awesome object orbiting Earth as "The Moon" is no descriptor anymore.

I propose Luna, which is a cheat, sure, but Latin is classy. I am open to suggestions, though of course I will have no role whatsoever in naming our moon. Thank you for your support.

Screaming Trees

All things fade in time. You, me, Rome, Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the entire Universe, some trillion trillion years from now. Not my fault, nor my picture. Lovely though, is it not? The power of entropy?

An abandoned factory in Japan, nature reclaiming the space. As entropy is nature, all order will be deconstructed, torn down, eaten up, broken into pieces and spread all about. Entropy is the way of things. All our deeds are but acts holding back the tide, so ever briefly.

Our end is inevitable. The only true questions are when and how. Probably asteroid, sometime in the future. But there's so many other options! Nuclear bombs, earthquakes, global warming, solar radiation, magnetic shift, name your apocalypse, and you'll find the likelihood is not insignificant. Ignore the possibility we do at our own peril. Life is fragile, we exist on the surface of a reality of harshness. Prepare yeself, mortal!