Green Baron

Space battleships are easier to discuss ;-) I see it like this but i don't pretend that this is right: I assume that they wanted to keep the probe from diving through the rings during the mission to minimise risk of destruction through collision, so they had to choose orbits that are somehow synchronized with Saturn's rings and moons but nevertheless take the probe to the interesting spots. Since almost every orbit's apsides, in respect to the parent body (in this case that includes the rings), precess (that grammatically ok ?) the probe would have sooner or later ended up diving though the rings if (one of) the apsides had been lower than the rings' radius and the orbit wasn't changed (limited dV-wise). I can't figure out why just 63° are a nice orbital inclination, and they don't tell whether this is toward Saturn's axis or its ecliptic around the sun (Saturn's axis has a tilt of 27° towards its ecliptic) to achieve that goal because i lack the math knowledge. Guesses me, but maybe somebody with the right math background shows up and develops this better.

Hilarious. Even battleships at sea have come out style with the development of all sorts of self guiding stuff. A single cheap rocket could switch it out. A few are still around for display, latest designs from the last centuries 30s and 40s. The idea is less far future but recent, sub-historic past ...

The effects of radioactivity is often underestimated due to bad information. In 1978 a nuclear (reactor core containing enriched uranium) powered satellite crashed over Canada, distributing its debris over more than 100.000 square miles kilometers. Only a very few parts were found, still some had enough radioactivity to kill a person. Imagine what would happen if it crashed into populated areas. I do not know if newer satellites of the likes of these are "better" but i doubt it. Together with the three mile island incident It changed the public perception of nuclear power in northern America in the late 70s. p.s.: don't pick up things that look scorched, lying on the ground in northern Canada ;-)

Material science uses laser and plasma cutting/drilling/ablating/converting/blabla for various purposes. What exactly happens when a high energy laser hits a surface can easily be researched there. To bring this a little bit into a sciency direction ... ;-)

Oh, i didn't know that ... @kunok linked the site at the beginning of the thread ;-)

Too late ... Edit: link corrected

Galaxies are DSO-stuff as well. Besides nebulae, clusters, ... So, there are none ;-) Everything away from our solar system are "deep space objects", i'd say, in contrast to solar, planetary or all kinds of terrestrial/meteoroli..metoro..mot..weather. There may be other notions. It's personal taste and different equipment.

Nice try :-) Inner dynamics of the earth, gravitation, seismics ... Oh, btw., i've flown the polar route once, Dubai/LA. No hole there :-) Edit: as a passenger, of course.

These cuneiforms are actually long deciphered. Mostly official stuff, like storage records, law publications, stuff like that ... Sorry couldn't resist ... :-)

Ah, it was nice, but now you're overdoing it ... :-) Were there no Morlocks ?

Hehe, i'm waiting for that ...

I thought the same. But it fits perfectly to the story :-)

I don't think. Some say, that's my main problem ... :-) Apart from that, nice story. Psst, must have been a hole in the water ...

In case of the link above it is assumed to be the nucleus of a former white dwarf. The formerly binary system consisted for a while as a fast rotating neutron star that stripped the atmosphere from its companion, the mentioned white dwarf. It is assumed that the white dwarf's orbit partially took place below the roche limit, so that the volatile parts were absorbed by the neutron star. The solid, dense carbon (diamond ;-)) core of the white dwarf stayed intact and now orbits very close to the neutron star; it has, so the conclusion, converted into a planet. Was that more or less correct ? I haven't read through the whole article because there's a lot of math in it and that takes too much time for me to understand.

Like this one: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6050/1717 Uncategorized ;-)

Not specially ... I make my view more clear. I mean the classification schemes we have now are basically based on mass, where possible on further derived "features" as denstity, eqilibrium temp. ... I don't think that a classification based on qualitative, value implying prepositions (super, hyper, jupiter-, neptun-, earth-like, ...) is helpful as it reflects a momentary view ready to be overthrown and is anthropo-cenrtic, which should be avoided ;-) Hope thaw wasn't too provocative, but it is my opinion.

Thanks a lot ! So my doubts might be pointless; will try next time the weather is suitable. Right now we have Calima again, 35°, a yellow/grey sky and a dull sun ... :-/

Comparing other planets to our own system may be a natural reaction ("stamp collection" in a Rutherford meaning :-)) but as we have seen in the Trappist-1 system for example (or systems with multiple suns, or gas giants close to their sun) our own solar system is a bad example for comparison. That is why i think that these prepositions are not exact enough to describe reality which we until now have only a strongly biased view of, due to the methods we can use. Also, there is a lot of anthopo-centricity in these designations ...

Impressive, thanks ! Which colour have you mapped the oxygen to (i miss the usual greenish blue) ? You said the moon was shining bright, for that it is an extraordinary outcome. Did you do that with the background extraction tool in pixinsight ? Here the moon overshines the whole sky, only the very brightest stars are visible. I doubt i could take any useful photographs from nebulae during full moon. Otoh, landscape might be nice :-)

It is a nice habit among scientists to write an abstract ;-) We should wait for refinements of the methods. Ours are coarse and observations are strongly biased towards large planets. Mega-, hyper-, giant are all prepositions that stimulate the mind but in the long run it'll probably end up with some letter/number classification scheme that is easier to handle and better suited for reasonable comparisons. For now mass (and maybe estimated equilibrium temp) is the only element for categorization and small planets are a lucky case and grossly underrepresented. Then how about micro-, tiny, and baby preposition :-) ? We probably can relax until then and use the designations from the catalogues the observations are based upon. Thinks me ... :-)

Venus, i assume ? (before somebody asks if its Pluto)

Certainly.

I had to look that one up :-) Will be stored in my active English treasury of words.

Didn't know where to put it, so i put it here. Climate isn't exactly weather but nevertheless ... Swiss glacier melting is, as the high arctic glaciers already are since a few years, thought to be irreversible now even if warming was stopped (which is unlikely, to say the least). This is a newspaper announcement in German, i read a publication is in preparation by the university of Zurich. Irreversibility is due to glacier dynamics, once the insulating reflecting snow cover is gone and replaced by darker dust and soot and surrounding areas are exposed and free of snow and ice, taking up heat of the sun instead of reflecting, then the melting accelerates in a positive feedback. It is thought that 90% of the Swizz glacier's ice mass - compared to the maximum in the early 19th century - will be gone until 2100; more than 50% is already lost. I remember paraglading over the Aletsch and Oberaar in the early late 90s/2000s when one could see the change from year to year. They were an impressive sites (and produced bumpy thermals), a pity that the younger ones won't see that because they already retreated and gave way to mountain lakes. High resolution satellite images give an impression of the former outlines. Greenland is probably next, the same process has already begun there. It might go faster than is thought now once the tops of mountains peek through :-/ I felt like noting that :-)

Maybe i am writing nonsense and i know nothing about php, but a little c and c++. Analyzing other people's code is too tedious for me :-) A little specification would help i think. How should it work ? What exactly is the fabric of the datastructure you put into the algorithm and what exactly happens to it ? If the algorithm is the formula you posted in the wikipedia link than that is trivial. If not, a thorough description of that would help. What happens to the data; shall the algorithm simply put out a value of -1 to 1, i understand somehow that 0/null values aren't interpreted correctly, but what would be correct ? I am sure programmers will show up soon ... sorry if that didn't help ... Edit, oh, i see you did yo, I simply don't understand the jargon. Nevermind ...