Spiral galaxy NGC 2336.Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, V. Antoniou; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt
NGC 2336 was discovered over a century ago, but the big, blue spiral galaxy has never looked better, thanks to an eye-catching image obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.
German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel discovered NGC 2336 in 1876, which he did with a humble 11-inch (0.28 meter) telescope. He could’ve scarcely imagined a photo like this, taken by Hubble’s 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) main mirror, according to a NASA press release.
NGC 2336 is approximately 100 million light-years away and located in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis (which depicts a giraffe). With its eight prominent spiral arms, NGC 2336 measures some 200 light-years across. By contrast, the Milky Way—another spiral galaxy—is around half that size, measuring 105,000 light-years in diameter.
The gigantic galaxy is filled with young stars, which appear in blue, while older stars, many located toward the center, shine in red.
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Interestingly, NGC 2336 produced a visible supernova, which astronomers detected on August 16, 1987. It was later determined to be a type 1a supernova, in which the exploding member of a binary pair is a white dwarf.
In a year in which the quarterback carousel is spinning at an accelerated rate, the Cleveland Browns, who usually go through QBs like remotes eat up batteries, are glad they’ve found one to hang on to for the long term finally.
Browns general manager Andrew Berry expressed his belief that Baker Mayfield has proven he can take his game to the next level and stabilize a franchise that has been in constant turnover.
“The quarterback position is in my mind the most important position in professional sports,” Berry said Wednesday, via the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “And until you have a baseline of winning-level quarterback play, it’s really difficult to win and make progress in the NFL, and oftentimes if that position isn’t productive or isn’t solidified, it can feel a lot like operating in neutral.
“That’s something that’s certainly not lost on us and it’s definitely not lost on us as an organization.”
There were some rough patches, particularly in 2019, but the Browns believe that getting their first playoff win in seemingly eons shows Mayfield is the man for the long-haul.
Entering his fourth season, Mayfield and the Browns sit at what has become a crossroads for clubs. Many extend massive extensions, while others roll with the fifth-year option and then have the franchise tag at their disposal. The Browns have until May 3 to exercise the fifth-year option, which is guaranteed for injury only.
The Philadelphia Eagles and Los Angeles Rams came to regret the big-money deals they handed to Carson Wentz and Jared Goff, respectively, which led to the largest dead-money salary cap hits when both were traded this offseason.
Berry noted that he wouldn’t use the Wentz situation and the subsequent $33.8 million dead money to inform his decision on Mayfield.
“I don’t know that anything that has happened to any of the other 31 teams has a major bearing, in terms of how we are going to address the quarterback situation here,” Berry said. “To me, we’ll evaluate that internally and make a decision we think is best for our team and our organization. I think it would maybe be a stretch to say that’s going to serve as a cautionary tale or any type of blueprint for us. We’ll make the best decision for us with the information we have.”
Whether or not the Browns hand Baker a massive new extension, Berry expects the QB to make another leap in 2021.
“Like all of our players, we want to see him take strides and show growth as we go into year two within our offensive and defensive systems,” Berry said. “Baker is the first quarterback in — you guys probably know the years more than I do — that’s led this team to the playoffs and a playoff victory.
“He’s endured an enormous amount of adversity in his young career just quite honestly with the changes that he’s gone through with the coaching staffs, front offices, offensive systems, and he’s risen above it all. And so I think we all saw him grow from week to week to week last year and we expect him to continue that progress and have a fantastic 2021 season for us.”
As for Mayfield, he’s having an interesting offseason already:
Microsoft is making its first significant change to the Outlook calendar view in years. A new Outlook calendar board view is coming soon to Outlook for the web, and it works a lot like Trello. It’s a new dynamic view that will let you organize meetings alongside tasks, notes, goals, links, files, and more.
It works much like Trello, where you can add new cards of information to help you organize your calendar and meetings. Files can sit alongside this view or even simple notes and goals to help with organization. It’s essentially an ever-expanding board that tries to centralize everything that goes into keeping your calendar clean and up to date.
The new Outlook calendar board looks a lot like Trello.Image: Microsoft
“On average, people use 6 tools to track all the things they need to get done,” says Gabriel Valdez, a product marketing manager for Microsoft’s Outlook team. “That is a lot of context switching, back and forth, and maybe even double tracking.” This new calendar board view is designed to help people cut down on having to switch between tools and apps to manage their time.
Microsoft is making this new board calendar view available in Outlook for the web first, and it will be available to commercial and education users soon, too. It’s not clear how this new view will appear in Outlook for Windows or the mobile versions of Outlook in the future, though.
Microsoft is also improving Outlook for iOS and Android for meeting scheduling. Later this month, suggested times for meetings will appear for all commercial and education users, making it easier to avoid conflicts when scheduling meetings with multiple participants.
The first high resolution panorama showing the Perseverance Mars rover‘s landing site provides a remarkably detailed view of Jezero Crater, including the jagged rim of the crater in the distance and low cliffs marking the edge of an ancient river delta.
The panorama is made up of 142 images captured by the Mastcam-Z camera instrument over the weekend, three days after the rover’s dramatic landing.
Click on the image below to zoom in and explore the landscape.
The zoomable, dual camera system is mounted on a remote sensing mast and is capable of rotating a full 360 degrees to provide panoramic color and 3D images. It is capable of detecting something as small as a house fly across the length of a football field.
“I’m taking it all in,” the rover’s Twitter account reported Wednesday. “This is the first 360-degree view of my home using Mastcam-Z.”
I’m taking it all in. This is the first 360º view of my home using Mastcam-Z. This dual, high-definition camera system sits atop my mast and has zoom capability. Inspect tiny details of Jezero Crater with the special interactive viewer at https://t.co/roDhWK56gj #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/TAy28PpG73
— NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 24, 2021
Perseverance landed last Thursday in a crater that once held a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. Billions of years ago, water entered the crater through a channel cutting through the crater’s rim, depositing sediments in a broad delta formation as it filled the crater to a depth of hundreds of feet.
The water vanished some three billion years ago, but the sediments might hold preserved remnants of ancient microbial life. Perseverance was designed to collect promising rock and soil samples that will be deposited on the surface for retrieval by another rover later this decade. The samples then will be launched into orbit for capture by a European spacecraft that will bring them back to Earth for detailed analysis.
The wind-sculpted rock in the inset shows the level of detail the Mastcam-Z instrument can provide.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
The Mastcam-Z panorama looks out across the floor of the crater, showing Jezero’s craggy rim in the distance and eroded cliffs marking the edge of the delta formation. Nearby scouring marks where rocket exhaust plumes hit the surface as Perseverance was being lowered to touchdown by its “sky crane” jet pack.
“We’re nestled right in a sweet spot, where you can see different features similar in many ways to features found by (the earlier rovers) Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity at their landing sites,” said principal investigator Jim Bell of Arizona State University. ASU operates Mastcam-Z in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.
Perseverance looks toward the rim of Jezero Crater.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
One goal of the initial imaging campaign is to identify relatively flat, boulder-free areas where a small helicopter, still attached to the belly of the rover, can be dropped off for tests to determine if flight in the thin martian atmosphere is feasible.
Initial test flights are expected in about two months.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted an interactive 360-degree view of the Perseverance landing site on Mars in 4K resolution. It’s the latest jaw-dropping imagery to return from the mission, including that incredible video of the rover plunging through the Martian atmosphere before being “skycraned” down to the surface of the red planet.
The 60-second video was captured by Perseverance’s color Navcams perched atop a sensing mast above the rover. The 360-degree scene can be navigated in a browser or in the YouTube app on your phone or 4K smart television. The images were captured on February 20th, two days after the Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater.
Perseverance has a total of 23 cameras, the most of any Mars rover to date: 16 for engineering and science and another seven that recorded those dramatic images of entry, decent, and landing. Audio captured at the landing site by Perseverance’s microphones has also been posted to NASA’s Soundcloud account.
NASA image showing location of the two color Navcams.Image: NASA
NASA’s Perseverance mission has already made public a total of 4,796 raw images to date. Perseverance is capable of transmitting data at rates up to 2Mbps to the orbiters overhead. The Mars orbiters then relay the data back to Earth using their much larger antennas and more powerful transmitters. The video of the vehicle descending down to the surface amounted to about 30GB of images stitched together.
The Perseverance rover is designed to seek signs of life and better understand the ancient geology of Mars. It will spend at least one Mars year (two Earth years) exploring the area around the landing site.
Street View launched over a decade ago and this vast image database is currently powering the Live View AR feature. An update to Google Maps for Android improves the Street View experience by adding a split screen mode.
The new split view UI launches automatically when you open Street View after dropping a map pin. Meanwhile, if you’re accessing Street View directly from a location’s listing, it will be the regular fullscreen interface. In those cases, you’ll notice a ‘minimize’ button in the bottom-right corner.
The map below has paths that feature street-level imagery highlighted in blue, and Photo Spheres taken by users are surfaced as dots. You can tap anywhere to quickly jump, while the circular marker for where you are features an arrow that shows the direction being pointed at. This navigation method is immensely more convenient than getting around in Street View with arrows and dragging.
This Street View split screen is widely rolled out (via Reddit) through a server-side update on recent versions of Google Maps. It’s showing up on the Android client, but not iOS. Meanwhile, it’s long been available on the web with the ability to adjust the height of each half.
More about Google Maps:
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ESA and NASA’s Solar Orbiter took the images of Venus, Earth, and Mars used in this GIF on Nov. 18, 2020.
ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI
Here on Earth, we’re using to looking up and spotting other planets in our solar system, but it’s eye-opening when our mechanical emissaries peer back and see us among the stars.
Solar Orbiter launched in early 2020 on a mission to study the sun, but it’s been doing some sightseeing in its spare time. The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft captured a lovely scene late last year when it saw Venus, Earth and Mars against a backdrop of stars.
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The Venus, Earth and Mars trifecta came in November when the orbiter’s Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) camera spotted the planets while the spacecraft was heading for a Venus flyby.
ESA just released the scene as a short video. Venus is the brightest planet off to the left of the image. Earth is in the middle and Mars is fainter and down in the lower right corner.
“Stars are visible in the background, appearing to move in Solar Orbiter’s recording while the spacecraft travels around the sun,” ESA said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Solar Orbiter portrait of Earth and friends fits in nicely with a history of views from elsewhere in the solar system. For comparison, you can see what Earth looks like from Mars and what it looked like to NASA’s Voyager 1 back in 1990. It helps put our place in the universe into perspective.
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Video created from a series of still images taken by Solar Orbiter. The brightest objects, from left to right, are Venus, Earth, and Mars.Gif: ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI/Gizmodo
Well, here’s something you don’t see every day.
On November 18, 2020, the Solar Orbiter managed to capture three of our solar system’s eight planets in a single frame, according to a European Space Agency statement. The resulting four-second movie was stitched together from a series of still images taken across 22 hours.
Venus is the largest and brightest of the objects, followed by Earth and then Mars to the lower right of the frame. What’s particularly cool about this vantage point is that the probe is peering back into the solar system as it heads away from the Sun and towards Venus.
Venus, Earth, and Mars, as spotted by the Solar Orbiter.Image: ESA/NASA/NRL/Solar Orbiter/SolOHI
When the photos were taken, Solar Orbiter was 30 million miles (48 million km) from Venus, 156 million miles (251 million km) from Earth, and 206 million miles (332 million km ) from Mars. The Sun is out of frame to the lower right, but its glow is clearly visible.
The spacecraft, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, was en route to Venus for a gravitational assist when the images were taken using its Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) camera. Solar Orbiter eventually flew past Venus on December 27. A steady diet of flybys with Earth and Venus will bring the probe closer to the Sun and also tilt its axis of orbit such that it can observe the Sun from different angles.
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Launched in February 2020 and equipped with 10 different instruments, Solar Orbiter is a mission to study the Sun from up-close. The closest images ever taken of the Sun, made last July, showed previously unknown “campfires” on the surface of our star, uncovering stellar processes only dreamed about in theory.
The probe is also studying conditions in its immediate vicinity, namely the solar wind, or charged particles, pouring out from the Sun into space. The resulting data will help scientists to predict inclement space weather that can harm communications and technology on Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this sharp view of NGC 4535, nicknamed the “Lost Galaxy.”
ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
There are a lot of gorgeous galaxies out there in the universe, but it’s hard to top a truly sublime spiral, the kind of galaxy that swirls sparkling curved arms across the dark of space. That’s what’s on show in a new Hubble Space Telescope portrait of galaxy NGC 4535.
NGC 4535 has an engaging nickname: the Lost Galaxy. It’s not actually lost in space, but the moniker comes from how it looks with gear that’s not as fancy as Hubble.
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“Despite the incredible quality of this image, taken from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 4535 has a hazy, somewhat ghostly, appearance when viewed from a smaller telescope,” the European Space Agency said in a statement Friday.
According to ESA, amateur astronomer Leland S. Copeland viewed the galaxy in the 1950s and gave it the whimsical Lost Galaxy nickname in honor of its ethereal appearance.
NASA unveils 30 dazzling new Hubble space images for an epic anniversary
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NASA also shared the image this week. NASA and ESA jointly operate Hubble. The space telescope’s image shows a stunning amount of detail. The bright blue spots are where young, hot stars hang out. The lighter colors closer to the middle highlight older and cooler stars.
The Lost Galaxy view is part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS, or PHANGS, survey, which includes a collection of data on star formation. The galaxy resides in the constellation Virgo at a distance of 50 million light-years from Earth, but Hubble makes it feel like it’s close to home.
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