Are We Here Yet ?

Solar system to scale...

Do you know that feeling of insignificance ?

Yeah, that one.
Good for keeping the ego in check...

In other trivia...

There is a Starbucks in the CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia , where no-one asks the names of customers.
Apparently this causes slow service.
Did no-one think to, oh, I don't know - make a fake name?
Isn't deception part of the stock- in - trade ?
And why so many questions ?

 Facebook admit to manipulating news, and Google write their own history.
Once written by the victors, history is now generated by algorithms.
With a left-wing bias.
The danger here is similar to any social media site - people tend to surround themselves with like minds, so alternative opinions tend to be quashed, which equates to surpression of free speech.
Hmmm
Discuss...

Meanwhile, up in the Mesosphere... 
 

Like a stellar jellyfish...

Above the atmosphere, way up high, (about 60 miles / 100 km) is the Mesosphere, which is where we find  trolls , elves and sprites lurking.
Recently discovered, red sprites are immense bolts of red lightning that seem to power storms down below - their origins are unknown, and until one was caught on film , they were considered as mythical as unicorns.
All the phenomena illustrated above are known as TLEs - Transient Luminous Events.


NASA have been making serious waves with a huge web presence, detailing almost every mission and all images from explorer craft and landers throughout our solar system (and beyond, if you count the distant Voyager craft) .
Looking for a balance, I discovered that there is a site called Russian Spaceweb.com, on which I watched this launch footage.

In other news, there is a dwarf planet without a name - 2007 OR10 is the largest unnamed planet in our solar system .
It should perhaps be the subject of an international quiz to name it.

New Horizons continues , having furnished us with the first closeup flyby of Pluto, adding immeasurably to our knowledge of that distant denizen of the solar system.
New Horizons is now sending updates and images as it heads even further out (currently some few hundred million miles beyond Pluto) to a projected rendezvous with a KBO- (Kuiper Belt Object) in 2019.
Latest images show another little KBO ( 1994 JR1) with a five hour rotation period, so pretty fast.

It's tiny because it's far away...1994 JR1

The excitement with the KBOs is that they are almost certainly unchanged since the birth of our solar system.
Let's keep our fingers crossed that funding is approved for this next stage of NASAs exploration of the outer reaches of our solar system.


Meanwhile, 30 million light years away... 

A distant ' blue galaxy' known as ' Little Lion' may provide scientists with an insight into the Big Bang. At a distance of 30 million light years, it's far away, yet close enough to gauge from its spectrum that it contains very few precious metals - apparently an indicator of no stellar activity , which makes it extremely primitive.