Jurassic Park is not a documentary.

That and the servicemember terms.

"Guardians?" Come on.

Not without being enormous, unfortunately. The only solution to the diffraction limit is larger apertures.

Hubble has produced a lot of data for researchers to parse. If it vanished tomorrow this year's stuff alone would probably be able to keep astronomers going for years.

No, it's a replacement term for "lunar eclipse" which journalists started pushing some years back because it sounded scarier and less science-y, and thus gets more clicks. Purely dumbing things down for advertising purposes.

Seriously. It's gotten people thinking that eclipses and "blood moons" are separate things.

At least they didn't slap another three random adjectives onto this one like they've started doing for every full moon for some reason..

It's a Fox News article. Of course they're that insular.

Amateurs have (barely) imaged spacewalking astronauts from the surface, so sooner or later someone's going to get at least enough of an image of this thing to get a shape or the like.

It was probably a typical someone-opened-the-wrong-email ransomware attack rather than something targetted.

And it will be the most consistently-buried part of every single article about this for the next week or two, I'll bet.

There probably isn't. MIRI's a much lower-resolution instrument than NIRCam both in general and because of the wavelengths it's looking at, so it's always going to produce smaller images.

That specific site's been uselessly bad for awhile. At this point they're basically mirroring/rephrasing other, better sites' articles, so there's nothing really lost by not going there.

To the naked eye the Pillars - and the whole Eagle Nebula - would be invisibly small. Think less "1mm square at arm's length" and more "1mm square at the other end of the street."

> Have we not learned from pretty much ALL alien movies?

I learned some time ago that most movies are fictional.

You already said the scenario is a "we stop existing or they stop existing" war between superpowers. If you think that wouldn't go nuclear I don't know what to tell you.

Handwringy what-ifs over applying the conduct of genocidal superpower wars to other situations is silly.

If things got to that point, nothing they could do would confer any advantages because the nukes would be flying anyway. If things didn't get to that point, scenarios like "how about we destroy global telecommunications and meteorology, because that totally won't completely screw us too" aren't going to come up.

I know that We^TM are always intrinsically sane and They^TM are always intrinsically not, but no, Russia would not destroy most of its capability to communicate internally in the event of a war with the west because that would simply hasten their already-assured defeat.

China definitely isn't going to do it out of the blue like people panicking over this story seem to assume.

Nobody - not even the Inscrutable Unfettered Evil Yellow Peril - is going to wipe out the entire planet's telecommunications, including their own, in an attempt to "level the playing field" against the United States. The scenario is entirely ridiculous.

> The idea is that a nation that did not depend on geosynchronous orbit could "level the playing field" against a nation that did make use of that.

The Venn diagram of "countries that don't need geosynchronous orbit" and "countries capable of launching spacecraft" contains no overlap whatsoever, even before getting into the fact that a country which took out the planet's geosynch satellite network wouldn't level the playing field as much as get leveled by everyone else on it.

> This was taken when Space Station was flying XPOP attitude, a solar inertial attitude that allowed the solar panels to point towards the sun without tracking. Essentially, the station itself was the tracking mechanism.

... Well, this is me, never again complaining about how much a tracking equatorial mount costs.