What's Up? The Space Place

 Hey, Space Placers! HIGH CONTRAST FULL MOON GREG REDFERN Elon Musk finally gets it - Moon first, then Mars. In this article Musk says: “SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years,” SpaceX founder, CEO and Chief Engineer Elon Musk wrote on his X social media site Feb. 8. “Mars will start in 5 or 6 years, so will be done in parallel with the Moon, but the Moon will be the initial focus,” Musk added. “It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six-month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2-day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city,” Musk wrote. NASA and almost all of the spacefaring countries are focusing on going to the moon and stay this time. I have always said that the moon is the "Eighth Continent" and the spacefaring future of humanity...

 Hey, Space Placers! Could Earth, and everything on it and beyond — even our entire universe — be a simulation running on a giant computer? Image via Pixabay/ Geralt via EarthSky.org In a theme straight out of science fiction, read this article. Sky Guy in VA

Hey, Space Placers! Six previously undiscovered, weird, and fascinating astrophysical objects are displayed in this new image from NASA’s Hubble  Space Telescope. They include three lenses with arcs distorted by gravity, one galactic merger, one ring galaxy,  and one galaxy that defied classification. NASA, ESA, David O'Ryan (ESA), Pablo Gómez (ESA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble) FROM NASA: " A team of astronomers has employed a cutting-edge, artificial intelligence-assisted technique to uncover rare astronomical phenomena within archived data from NASA’s   Hubble Space Telescope . The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a side. They identified more than 1,300 objects with an odd appearance in just two and a half days — more than 800 of which had never been documented in scientific literature. Most of the anomalies were galaxies undergoing mergers or interactions, which ex...

 Hey, Space Placers! AI image of our  Milky Way  galaxy. The innermost stars in the galaxy are depicted as moving at near  relativistic  speeds (at a significant fraction of the speed of light) around a dense core of  dark matter , with no  black hole  at the center. The idea of dark matter in place of our galaxy's central supermassive black hole also explains the surprisingly fast speeds of stars at the outskirts of our galaxy.  Image via Valentina Crespi et al./ Royal Astronomical Society vis EarthSKy.org. New research about our Milky Way Galaxy, specifically what resides at the very center of our galaxy, has come up with a interesting theory. Instead of a 4.4 million solar mass black hole called SgrA* causing what astronomers have been observing for decades at the galaxy's center , perhaps a " a supermassive compact object composed of self-gravitating fermionic dark matter (DM) "  could be the cause. Read the story I emailed...

 Hey, Space Placers! For Release: February 4, 2026 CELEBRATE THE ‘ASTROLYMPICS’ DURING THE WINTER GAMES IN ITALY The ‘AstrOlympics’ project connects the amazing physical feats of the athletes competing in the Olympic Games to the spectacular physical phenomena discovered by NASA and other telescopes in space. By comparing examples of speed, acceleration, time, mass, rotation, density, and more of athletes on the ground to objects in space, viewers of AstrOlympics may find new appreciation and inspiration from both. The AstrOlympics project, which runs for both the Summer and Winter Games, has been celebrating cosmic and athletic triumphs since 2016. It was conceived of and developed by the science center for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory on behalf of NASA. “We started the AstrOlympics project to highlight the shared physics behind extraordinary feats—whether they happen on the Olympic stage or across the universe,” ...

 Hey, Space Placers! Artemis II Crew Now Out Of Quarantine NASA Get the full story here. Sky Guy in VA