Entropian

I highly suggest you take a course in, or read a book about planetary astrophysics in this context (e.g. Lane-Emden equation/polytropes, basic equations of state) and really get an idea of how unrealistic the planets are. This seems like a minimization of a pretty serious aphysicality IMO. You're trying to physically justify a low-order approximation to reality; an outcome like "black holes that miraculously balance themselves" is totally expected when one takes such a path.

The whole astrophysics community is dying for a few of those - with JWST up and running now, aperture fever is at an all-time high

They very much released information within the last 20 years - it's just that they found that the thing doesn't work at all and the idea is fundamentally flawed.

Rockets are flying. These hypersonic aircraft are not. I think it is incredibly naive to presume that a novel system will go from not even having a single flight test to "obsolete" a flight-proven design... all by the end of next year. It could happen, but certainly not over such a minuscule timescale.

The rocket is called "Superheavy." I highly doubt he has a problem prefixing the word "super" to things

This chain has really made me uncertain about my expectation value for relevance, now I'm not sure what diraction this is going to go...

This is what amateur astrophotographers do - the process is called "stacking." There's many, many ways to eliminate unwanted pixels from individual images before stacking. In professional astronomy, stacking is less prevalent for a variety of reasons (mostly because temporal information is lost), but the data analysis and sorting is far more advanced generally.

Merely having one, or even multiple satellites in an image does not mean that it's "destroyed." It may look unsightly, but the area of the image covered by the satellites is generally small. Most often, the object you actually care about is missed entirely by the satellite(s), and even if it isn't, you can simply remove the (small amount of) pixel data saturated by the satellite and use data from another image. While this is certainly true, actually building and operating space telescopes is expensive, which doesn't match well with the small amount of funding the astronomical sciences generally get. I'd love it if ground-based astronomy was shunned in favor of space-based astronomy, but ultimately the capacity and funding for it isn't present yet for it to even begin to become feasible.

I'd like to point out that there are many professional astronomers who have no real concern about Starlink, mostly because it's not "destroying" ground-based astronomy. Even in fields where satellites are having an impact, there are systems both in place and in development for minimizing their effect.

Early observation, photometry, and spectroscopy of supernovae is very much a growing field and has only recently become more common. I'm sure a lot of people would really appreciate more detailed photometry of eruptions like that, but ultimately the systems for automatic detection and response have only come up in recent years. To somewhat back up my words, I actually work in research on data collection and analysis of young supernovae.

It's only around 800 parsecs away; if SNEWS ever actually triggers for once, then it'll be in a case like this.

I did some photometry on it in H-alpha, OIII, and SII a while back. I'm not sure if I still have the data, so I'll pick up some more when it's clear here so that once it goes nova I can get a nice rise and plateau light curve. Hopefully the weather here will be good when it does actually outburst.

I have been testing and triple-checking all my equipment for tomorrow. All systems are go and I hope the eclipse gods smile upon me. GL to everyone!

I'm in Montreal now, looks pretty clear to me. Weather has me driving out east for 3ish hours past Sherbrooke, but it's looking good.

I was in Bend, Oregon for 2017 and now I'm off to Montreal for this one; I had my eyes on Dallas but after these forecasts, Montreal is looking a hell of a lot more promising. Hopefully it will go as well as 2017 did. I'm hauling along 7 years of accumulated equipment with me, so I really hope I won't have to wait until 2026.

Talk about beating a dead horse - at this point y'all are knocking on a skeleton Last I checked, SpaceX was doing perfectly fine without needing to check arbitrary boxes set by not-SpaceX on SpaceX's own missions.

Yeah. Well I was already interested in spaceflight since I had seen the launch of STS-125 in person, but my dad is somewhat of a disappointed physicist. He graduated top of his class at one of the best universities in the world for physics, but is in a different field now (life happens, etc.), so he was able to teach me a lot. It's not just about him though; I have a younger brother and after some help from me he was able to dock independently when he was 7. So far as I can tell it really just boils down to interest and effective teaching. I have really strong spatial reasoning so I assume that's the main reason. I'm not sure if maneuver nodes were even a thing then though, it was ages ago.

Well I guess I should give y'all an update: I'm now attending college and am having a blast. I knocked out my first quarter with great grades under twice the normal courseload, so I think I may be able to graduate in three years instead of four. I've also been able to get into research for next quarter on observing the early behavior of supernovae and perhaps other transient events. I'm still super into engineering and spaceflight though - to satisfy that, I've been working on portablizing my homemade fusor. Hopefully I'll have that done in a couple months.

Hey guys and thanks for the TOTY! I didn't expect anything at all from that thread and I'm happy that people felt moved by it. I guess it may be time for an update of sorts to that thread...

it does now

At this rate they could just keep launching and have the rockets build the trench for them xD

Am I crazy or was there a noticeable tilt when it was lifting off?

That was the most Kerbal launch I've ever seen The engine failures and the ridiculous spin was awesome, I'm mindblown that it didn't break up from aero forces when it was practically perpendicular to the airflow xD

I'm here with Joe on this one - your answers are nearly always well thought-out, informative, and detailed in many ways. It's really great when you take the time to answer interesting questions

I'm glad to hear you liked them!