LaydeeDem

I'm using Stock Visual Enhancements and Stock Visual Terrain on KSP 1.4.5. Not sure if they've been updated for KSP 1.5 yet.

Sent a resupply mission to my career mode space station. Burman, Siory, Madrigh and Bob now have 27 days of food, 58 days of water, 102 days of oxygen and 16 days of nitrogen. I forgot to undock my previous resupply so I deorbited it while I rendezvoused. Not very safe but it looked pretty cool! I juggled that with a mission from Minmus that was returning. The need to get Clauster and Maubart Kerman back before their oxygen ran out resulted in a rather... unorthodox reentry profile: Under normal conditions, the lander section is supposed to seperate... Thankfully the two managed to recover from G-LOC in time to deploy the parachutes. Successfully returning 742.9 science back to Kerbin.

Pretty decent video about Starlite and its history: There's definitely some dubious things about Starlite, but there's just enough plausibility to make me want to believe.

IIRC it's been gone since Take Two took over. Which is a shame because I really wanted a 3D printed Kerbal.

Not a stupid question at all. The answer is yes. It's a Venture RX-9 Newtonian reflector. Was built cheaply and there's zero way of collimating the primary mirror. It sucks.

They're phenomenal! It makes me wonder what I could pull out of my 4.5" Newt if it wasn't so terribly collimated. I'm in dire need of an upgrade.

My dream photo right here. Congrats! What gear are you using?

That depends largely on your location on Earth relative to the Moon, the position of the Moon in its elliptical orbit and the accuracy of your angular size measurement. I'd say you're well within the ballpark though.

It would definitely simplify the math. The triangle between us and the Moon would essentially be isosceles. Refraction, skyglow and moonglow would be an issue and my Western horizon is nothing but mountains. We'd have to use a decently bright star as well given the moonglow. It's raining tonight but we could try next full Moon on the 24th of October. The brightest stars in the field will be 73 Ceti and 65 Ceti, both at magnitude ~4.3. The November full Moon will be even better. The Moon comes within a few degrees of bright star Aldebaran which is magnitude 0.85.

Tonight's Harvest Moon: Attempted to pull as much detail out of my little 300mm lens as possible. Stack of 40 images. Aligned and cropped in PIPP, stacked in AutoStakkert! with 1.5x drizzle, sharpening done in Registax. Color correction, saturation to bring out subtle color differences and a slight enlargement done in Photoshop.

Semi-popular youtube debunk channel VoysovReason follows me on Twitter. Maybe something will come from that. Or maybe Scott Manley will see it somehow! (I can dream can't I?) I would make a video myself but I'm quite insecure about my voice.

Hi all. Hopefully this doesn't count as self-promotion but I recently had the opportunity to do a lunar parallax experiment with fellow KSPF member @cubinator. We measured the Mun's Moon's parallactic displacement against the star Theta Lyrae. After some spreadsheet wrangling and triple checking my math, I finally feel confident enough to share our results; Between my location in New Mexico and Cubinator's location in Minnesota, we measured a lunar parallax of ~283.6 arcseconds. This gave us a topocentric lunar distance of 390,775.4 km from cubinator's location and a topocentric lunar distance of 389,366.3 km from my location. Checking against the actual values given by the astronomy program Stellarium shows we have a percent error of only 0.42%! I've written up an article on Medium detailing the full methodology and the math that went into this here: https://medium.com/@DeeAlexandria/how-to-measure-the-distance-to-the-moon-a1e502440918 Please feel free to give it a read and some feedback! Cheers.

Might be too early to say it but Ryugu's surface looks to have similar properties to Lunar regolith. It's color seems to change depending on the angle of the sun, appearing brown at high sun angles and gray-ish at low sun angles. Probably not too surprising but it's neat!

In true Kerbal fashion our launch pad developed alongside the rockets. Our launch rod was being sticky and we were desperate for any sort of a launch that day so we removed it. We later replaced it with metal instead of wood which fixed the stickyness.

My car ran out of deltaV gas while on the way to get... gas.

Given Mars's potential past and present habitability, I think Martian colonization and heavens forbid terraforming has the potential to snuff out one of the greatest scientific discoveries in the history of our species. Imagine discovering Martian life only to watch in real time as Earth extremophiles out-compete with it and drive it to extinction. Mars has far more value as a place of robotic scientific research than it ever will as a "backup planet", especially given that we have the Moon right there in our cosmic backyard, which is far more suited as a "backup" than Mars. There's water ice and natural cryogenic conditions at the poles (perfect for a seed vault), the vacuum conditions make it ideal for in-situ production of solar panels, and it's only a four day trip back in case something goes wrong.

Awesome. Thank you!

Holy crap that's a monster! I was thinking about building a dobsonian mount for my 4.5" Newt. Do you have any advice that could point me in the right direction?

I'm reminded of Larry Niven's Integral Trees. Giant plants in space aren't too farfeched. (Okay, maybe they are.) Kerbals are green. Maybe they're descendants of Joolian plants. That would explain why they don't need to eat.

We need to go deeper.

Like @cubinator has already mentioned we recently did an experiment to measure the distance to the Moon via parallax. After some image analysis and spreadsheet wrangling the results are in: We estimated the Moon to be 389,303.9 kilometers from cubinator's location and 387,894.8 kilometers from my location. Checking Stellarium for the real values show we're in error of only ~0.045%! I'll have a full write-up describing our method along with a spreadsheet that does all the math later this month.

I bought the game before an official demo existed.

I remember when KSPF used to share some of the same emotes as the Orbiter forums. Hail probe! As for me I find both to be immensely fun. Orbiter is nice because I can play with total realism without the memory/loading problems KSP has.

The only successful flight from my brother's, his friends and I's completely homemade rocket program. From almost exactly a year ago: Homemade SRMs are hard! It's not enough to just fill a tube with explodium (KNO3) and let it fly. A big problem was that our clay nozzles kept blowing out which depressurized the motors causing them to stop producing thrust. We fixed this by adding a copper "nozzle" into the center of the clay. You can see the depressurization beautifully in this video of one of our launch failures here: I miss building rockets. It's like KSP but with more risk of losing an eye!

I also live in New Mexico. The monsoons have made things very beautiful. They're not without spectacle, though.