So last night Mars was at the closest point to Earth at 62.7 million km that it’ll be till 2035 so I decided to try and take a photo.
Haha at least it’s red. 🙂 How I wish I had more range, what would be really nice is to be able to hook my camera up to a telescope. Throw in a picture of Saturn again for fun, at least I can resolve the rings.
A couple of photos from yesterday’s photography session in Niagara with Mario, Eddy & Alan. From the Niagara parks parking lot, Jupiter & Saturn were visible and here’s my attempts with the Canon EOS R5, Canon EF 100-400 MKII lens & Canon’s 2x extender.
With Jupiter, you can see the planet and it’s 4 largest moons, with Saturn you can actually make out the planet and rings!!! These two photos were shot handheld and man now I want even longer lenses!!!
So today the Pentagon confirmed the UFO videos released last year…
The Pentagon has officially released three short videos showing “unidentified aerial phenomena” that had previously been released by a private company.
The videos show what appear to be unidentified flying objects rapidly moving while recorded by infrared cameras. Two of the videos contain service members reacting in awe at how quickly the objects are moving. One voice speculates that it could be a drone.
The Navy previously acknowledged the veracity of the videos in September of last year. They are officially releasing them now, “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos,” according to Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough.
Source: CNN
I’m more inclined to believe these videos because the people speaking in them are fighter pilots who understand how our technology works. Does this mean aliens are or were here, I don’t know but man what a year 2020 has been so far.
We purchased a crystal making kit from Dollarama and tonight put it together as a family.
So it looks like Canadians are getting dumber & like our Southern counterparts more and more people believe that we were created within the last 10k years…
A new poll has found a hefty minority (23 per cent) of Canadians reject the theory of evolution, and instead believe a god created humans within the last 10,000 years.
The survey, conducted by Research Co., found 61 per cent of Canadians believe humans “definitely” or “probably” evolved from less-advanced life forms over millions of years. That’s down five points from a similar Research Co. poll last year.
Seventeen per cent of people said they were unsure.
Source: Global News
Society is going backwards! God is basically Santa for adults, it’s maddening that this is occurring at a time when we need science and reasoning to help us out of some of humanity’s greatest challenges.
Last night my computer was having a problem powering up (it’d turn on for 2-3 seconds then turn off), after playing around with the hardware I decided to replace the power supply and that solved my problem but it got me thinking if it’s time to build a new system. I built this thing I think 7 years ago so granted it’s pretty darn old but to be fair I no longer play video games on it so I don’t really need a power house for what I use it for.
Too bad December is such an expensive month, I’ll reassess in the new year and go from there, assuming that it makes it that long lol.
Scientists have talked about black holes for a long time and inferred its presence based on movement of visible matter but never before have we seen one, till now.
“We’ve now seen the unseeable,” said Avery Broderick, associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s physics and astronomy department, who was part of the international EHT research team. “Black holes are made real — they’re not just the scribblings on theorists’ chalkboards anymore, but they really are out there in the night.”
The image, which shows an orange ring around a round, black silhouette, is of the black hole at the centre of Messier 87 (M87), a galaxy 50 million light-years from Earth. This black hole is one of the most massive known: it’s six billion times more massive than our sun.
Black holes are so dense and have such strong gravity that anything that crosses their threshold — known as the event horizon — gets pulled into them, never to return. That includes both matter and light, making them black and invisible — and therefore very difficult to see and photograph.
Source: CBC
This is an amazing step and man the world of physics is so damn interesting, I love it!
I knew there was a bit of snow coming, I didn’t expect ~10cm more on my driveway so first thing I did this morning was shovel woo… After that was done, Brandon and I went out to hit up a few stores mainly to just get some odds and ends. The two of us went for pho, I did give Maggie a call to see if she wanted to come but seeing as how she was busy with work, she declined.
In the afternoon Brandon and I built a straw contraption for Cubs, the goal was to design something that would allow an egg to survive a 10′ fall and well it worked at home.
STEM projects is always fun, I was telling Brandon that this design always rights itself and that the straws help direct the impact force around the egg. Our first test subject cracked but our second survived multiple drops, though after we were done we had to replace the broken straws. It’s only designed to work once so hopefully this doesn’t have to survive a second drop or else we’ll have a dirty floor…
A bit later I took the boy out for tobogganing and he loved it.
I wanted to take some video too but broke the Rode VideoMic Go at the mount. 🙁 Sigh I ordered a replacement micro version, I’ll see if I can repair this but I don’t have much faith in it and it’s a weak design. The rest of the afternoon we chilled at home, my neck was bothering me late last week and on the weekend but seems better now which is a relief, I don’t have to walk around like Batman anymore lol.
So last night I went up north to take some pictures of the super blood moon and my god was it cold! While I got better image quality than in the city, it was so damn windy I could see the vibrations in my viewfinder so it was actually quite tricky to take good pictures. I also screwed up, I should have turned off my lens’ auto focus once I got good focus my first time around but I kept it on and lost focus once the eclipse occurred because it was too dark. 🙁 Sigh learn for next time I guess, it worked out ok but could have been better.
Since it was so damn cold out I didn’t notice that my lens also zoomed out a bit so the first few pictures were at 400mm, while the eclipse was at ~345mm, that and my Cameron T210PH tripod kind of froze so it was quite difficult to get the moon in frame.
LOL took a pic of my setup with the Canon SL2, I tried using the crop body on the lens setup but I found the image quality was quite poor for some reason. Need to do some further testing to figure it out. Anyway I returned home around 1am and was beat so I decided to work from home today. 🙂
The Kepler space mission has been hugely successful identifying countless planets that but it looks like it’s soon going to be over.
The Kepler mission is coming to an end. The planet-hunting spacecraft that transformed our understanding of exoplanets and other solar systems is almost out of fuel. What little fuel remains is being held in reserve to ensure that the last of its data can be sent home.
The Kepler team has placed the spacecraft in sleep mode for the time being. They’re ensuring that there’s enough fuel for it to download its data via NASA’s Deep Space Network. The next allotted time to do that is October 10th.
It’s difficult to know exactly how much fuel is left onboard the spacecraft. If any fuel remains after its download next week, it will begin a new observing campaign. But there’s a lot of uncertainty.
Source: Universe Today
Sad that it’s coming to an end but all things do, thanks Kepler!
