The Sagan Project
Poster designs illustrating some of Carl Sagan’s quotes.
(Source: lesimaginationsimaginaires)
20
May
This photo was reblogged from lesimaginationsimaginaires and originally by lesimaginationsimaginaires.
#Everything is Illuminated #Elijah Wood
Some perspective
Light travels at a speed of 299,792,458 metres per second exactly. No matter how fast you, or the light source is traveling, go try measuring it and you’ll find that this is exactly the case.
At this speed, it takes light:
- 18 milliseconds to travel between London and New York
- 0.13 seconds to circumnavigate the equator of the Earth
- 1.4 seconds to travel to us from the Moon
- 8.4 minutes to travel from the Sun
- 4.15 hours to travel from the Sun to Neptune, the most remote planet in the Solar System
- 17 hours to travel to the current location of Voyager 1, the farthest man made object from Earth
- ~0.8 years to travel from us to the Oort Cloud, a hypothesised spherical cloud of icy comets centered around the Sun, which marks the boundary of the solar system
- 4.2 years to travel to us from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Sun.
- 1,100 years to travel to us from the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way
- 100,000 years to travel across the whole disc of the galaxy itself
- 2.5 million years to travel to us from the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest neighbour
- 110 million years to travel across the Virgo Supercluster, our small, local little corner of the universe
After this it stops making sense to say “a distance x”, as the expansion of the universe warps our perception of distance on these immense timescales. Therefore, when you hear radio static, 1% of that is said not to originate from a place, but rather a time, roughly 13.5 billion years ago - the cosmic microwave background from the time of recombination at the dawn of the universe.
TL;DR: The universe is big.
(Photo: pretendy)
I love perspective.
There’s nothing I’d like more right now than to go swimming, but my father won’t open my pool for another month.
19
May
This photo was reblogged from scientificillustration and originally by seagard-deactivated20120413.
Steps of Scientific Method - Meme version
“I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the past 20 years. And I’m just now waking up” American Beauty
Just watched this movie for the first time, and now I understand everyone’s affection for it.
Debris Belt around Fomalhaut
Copyright: ESA/Herschel/PACS/Bram Acke, KU Leuven, Belgium
Fomalhaut (α PsA, α Piscis Austrini, Alpha Piscis Austrini) is the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus and one of the brightest stars in the sky.
If there’s one thing I hate more than sequels, it’s “threequels.”
Astronomical, Brah.
We all know the sun is licking his lips, waiting. The galaxy is the longest of socially awkward party settings. I think I could have improved on Venus, but after about 10 faces I gave up.
It’s true. If you’re into studying the impending doom of our solar system and universe (sickos), might I remind you to check out Wikipedia’s most interesting entry: The Timeline of the Far Future.
Life Under the Sea
David Doubilet’s aquatic nature photography captures perspectives that we never see from our terrestrial perch.
Marvelous.
(Source: College Humor)
