wow, a 4-day old blog and 4 posts, which statistically means i've posted one post each day. incredible! however, don't expect i'll keep this pace up once the initial fascination with
i'm bored again. bored and sleepless. this has one good side however: it's night, and because of the awesome temperatures (yes, i consider 7° quite awesome (44°Fahrenheit, for the americunts)), i could, for the first time this year, take a proper look at the night sky. what a wonderful view! looking at the stars always calms me down (which is maybe an explanation for the lack of foul language of this post so far...)
i though you might be interested in some fun facts:
- the sun is aprox. 150,000,000km (93mil miles) away. this is one "astronomical unit (AU)" it takes the light aprox. 8.3 minutes to get from the sun to the earth (a little reminder: speed of light in vacuum = 299,792,458 meters/second).
the sun is the brightest object on the sky (my grasp of the obvious is truly astonishing) with an apparent magnitude of -26,74mag (the lower the number the brighter the object. Vega has an apparent magnitude of + 0.03 and was originally chosen as the definition for the zero point of this scale. so much for precision, yay!)
the farthest man-made object from earth is the probe Voyager-1, launched in late 1977. it's currently 17.4 billion km (=10.8 bil miles) away in the so-called heliopause. it's still responding to commands from earth (and even executing them, cool!), and is considered one of NASA's greatest accomplishments
Polaris (or pole star, north star) is NOT the brightest star in the northern hemisphere. this award goes to sirius (also the brightest visible star overall) with an apparent magnitude of -1.47
even with near-perfect circumstances (minimum of light pollution, new moon, absolutely no clouds), nowadays only aprox. 6,000 objects are visible on the night-sky with bare eyes (all these objects haven an apparent magnitude of 6 or lower, which is apparently the visual limit for the bare eye)
modern (earthbound) astro-photography has a capacity of capturing objects up to +25mag (which equals a lit candle on the moon). the hubble ultra deep field managed to capture images of galaxies with an apparent magnitude of +29. said galaxies are estimated to be aprox. 13 billion light years away (which means they are also 13 billion years old, and thus the oldest objects ever viewed by man)
the closest star to our solar system is Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away (that makes for 39 trillion km (=24.2 trillion miles), or 1.3 parsecs (=26,800 AU)
the biggest known measurable star, VY Canis Majoris, is aprox. 1,800-2,100 solar radii. if it was placed instead of our sun, it's surface would stretch to the orbit of saturn. an airplane with the speed of 800 km/h (=497 mph) would take 356 years to cross Canis Majoris' diameter (aside from the fact that said airplane couldn't accomplish that feat for countless reasons, one being the INCREDIBLE HEAT, or the COMPLETE ABSENCE of oxygen to power its machines. but most of you are just too stupid bound by conventional ways of thinking to understand that, was it not for such comparisons)
astronomy, awesome! i also highly recommend this video, i daresay that this is one of the most important videos on the whole interwebs.
with that in mind, please try not to forget that shit (which will happen eventually considering thecapacity of your brainsimmense data overflow that could prove difficult to handle at once). it's kinda useful to annoy your average physics teacher
greetings from the waterpistol
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