Door to the Otherworld

Ornamental Gas While this may look like a delicate bubble floating in space, it is actually the very energetic remains of a violent supernova explosion. The pinkish outer layer is an expanding shock wave, and the soft green and blue tint within is from material heated to millions of degrees and emitting X-rays. This is the supernova remnant known as SNR 0509-67.5, located some 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. From our perspective on Earth, the stellar explosion responsible for this orb happened 400 years ago. The glowing bubble is 23 light-years across and is expanding at a rate of 5,000 kilometers per second (11.2 million miles per hour). This image is a composite based on observations from two of NASA’a Great Observatories. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the rich star filed backdrop as well as the expanding shockwave. The Chandra X-ray Observatory details the searing material inside the expanding bubble. -JF Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.Hughes et al, Optical: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Source

Book of the day: Me Beofre You by Jojo Moyes

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The Witch’s House in Beverly Hills, built in 1921. 

Oh my god????

Ring of Fire NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was used to capture this image of galaxy NGC 1291 in infrared light. The face-on galaxy is located about 33 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus. It is a mature galaxy, at roughly 12 billion years old. The central region of the galaxy features a long bar of stars, appearing here as an S-shaped feature within the blue circle. Barred spiral galaxies are quite common, and those bars seem to have an influence on how galaxies evolve. The Spitzer image shows shorter wavelength infrared light in blue, and longer wavelengths in red. The inner reaches of the galaxy are populated by older stars that formed long ago. With most of the raw materials used up by earlier generations of stars, there is very little star formation taking place at the galaxy’s center. Further out in the galaxy, things are very different. There is a ring of material that is teeming with new stars. All this activity heats up the surrounding dust, setting a aglow in the longer infrared wavelengths, painting a ring of red around the blue circle. The central bar had a hand in fashioning both the old and the new stars in NGC 1291. In the early years of the galaxy, it stirred the pot, forcing stars and gas out of their orbits, herding material inward and creating resonances, or high-density areas, that collapsed to form new stars. Later in the evolution of the barred spiral, new star formation shifted outwards. Density increased along the spiral arms and the resonances created by the bar once again triggered a wave of stellar births. The Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G) is a program to analyze the structures of more than 3,000 nearby galaxies, to better understand the role that central bars play in galactic evolution. -JF Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Source

julian pls

Star Trek 2015 Advent Calendar - Day Five: Favorite Villain

Martha Hackett as Seska in Star Trek: Voyager

That autism feel when your partner lets you infodump and actively talks to you about your SI

tng + tumblr (1/3)

DS9 was a show in which:

Five star treks out of five, would rewatch

(shamelessly copied from plaidshirtjimkirk)

For @tomparisalbum. Inspired by @hesitantbabelien using this

OH. MY. GOD. I have no words. there is NOTHING about this that isn’t perfect and amazing haha but no how did you hack into my phone tho? :/ 

The transmitter briefly burst to life, sparked, hissed and then fell silent for good.

Gabourey Sidibe - Portrait by Sam Spratt

A while back, I asked Gabby to come to my studio. Work immediately began and the beginnings of several sketches and pieces started to come together, but I didn’t want to rush the main painting so I shelved it while the usual pattern of clients interrupting personal work took over. Many paintings never get finished or see the light of day, both personal and professional, but Gabby was special. I wrote these notes back during her visit:

Her time in my studio was mostly light, filled with her bubbly energy as we cracked open some beers, exchanged embarrassing drinking stories, taking group photos as if we’d known each other for more than the actual hour we had, and her trying to convince me that she has an actual medical condition where she finds everything adorable. You’d be fooled too if you were lied to by an Oscar-nominated actress with her talent. But when I asked her, stripped of any pretension, that if I were to paint her, how she’d like to be portrayed, she said “I don’t really care about how I’m portrayed” and then she paused and continued “I guess … did you ever watch the show Community? Ya know how the school’s mascot is the human being? I mean, I don’t want to be a grey faceless spandex blob like that, but I’d like to just be a human being. Not someone’s message or idea of what I stand for because of what I look like, just a human, how you’d paint me if I were anyone else".