Space and The wonders/mysteries of The Universe

{{ I was wondering if youd get chance to nab the comet Lance. Nice picture. With that greenish glow its somewhat remiinscent of the capsules from Mars in War of the Worlds }}

yep its a bit spooky. If it glows red we are getting into GoT territory.

I thought they were cracking good photos. Great for me as I miss every event that goes on in the sky.

I have a hard time with that photo of people sitting in the mirror. Deformation!

Just saw a clickbait headline from the Daily Mail saying "scientists find "no signs" of life are studying 10 million star systems."

I obviously read the article after seeing a couple of responses from people that clearly hadn't and had decided they knew exactly what the scientists did and what signs they were looking for.

Basically, please read articles fully and look at any sources they refer to. Then try and find other commentary from other sources to see how they interpret the same original sources.

Most journalists seem to not know what the fuck they are on about while trying to get people to read them by incorrectly titling and paraphrasing everything.

There should really be a law against that type of inept reporting.

Yeah, it's even more prevalent in political reporting. Just about anything written about Trump or his administration is skewed to be clickbait. He isn't completely off base when he complains about being treated unfairly - even if he distorts more than they do.

I dont think he is unfairly treated in that there is just as much crap about his rivals from the other side.

I think they are probably all unfairly treated in terms of reporting versus reality though.

The "Great Conjunction" is happening tomorrow!

For those that don't know, Saturn and Jupiter will appear super close to each other in the sky and will be bright. Happens once about every 800 years!

{{ Well its been pouring with rain here every night for about a month! Sadly the chances of me seeing anything but clouds in the night sky is pretty thin. So hope youve got your telescope and camera at the ready Lance so you can share it with us. }}

Raining here all day too I think.

Also, I dont have my telescope or cameras at the moment. Big house work going on so a lot of that stuff is at my parents at the moment.

Their gonna crash and things will 'splode and we'll never know it!

Looked good using the app. Sky view.

2 days to go.

Gonna find them aliens!

So many cool things in that: the long term plan to send back samples, the microphone, and they have a friggin' helicopter!

If all that's found is fossils it would be amazing but excruciating - we need the actual bio-chemistry to learn something new.

Happening today! I'll be tuned in for sure. I wonder how long it will be before they turn on that microphone?

And she's down. First pics are all gray-scale so no point in posting.

I watched the NASA livestream. Very exciting watching a bunch of people sitting at their desks calling out some stats every now and again!

{{ I find it hard to get excited now I know that they delibretely dont go where the interesting stuff might be for fear of contamination- almost every Mars misison therefore is almost guaranteed to find nothing much more than same old rocks weve seen every other time. Im just not much more impressed by looking at a rock thats from 2 million miles away than I am going for a walk and picking up a rock thats 2 million years old. In fact Im more impressed by something exisiting for that long than I am impressed by something just being very far away.
Now if NASA were to go to a location where there was a high probability of life having existed, and where it might still in microbes or something- thats interesting. This just seems like another 'well theres a one in a million chance we might find signs of life as we're deliberetly looking in the wrong place.' }}

I've never heard they are avoiding likely places due to fear of contamination. But a quick check shows that you are right, with the problem that one begins to wonder if there's any point going into space at all if you can't even send robots to habitable worlds?

https://www.nature.com/news/why-hunting-for-life-in-martian-water-will-be-a-tricky-task-1.18450

But I think the rule should apply only as long as we haven't figured out how to sterilize all our delicate electronics without melting it. Creating heat proof electronics should be a priority for NASA - they've already gone partway down that road of course just to survive atmospheric entry, but it needs to be chased all the way to the end.