Daily Affirmation 386.

Daily Affirmation 393.

To the closeted aces. To the aces who are struggling to come up with reasons that they haven’t brought a partner to the family celebration, to the aces who don’t know how to explain why they’re not having kids, why they’re not having the life their families think they should.

To the aces who have come out. To the aces who face invalidation, attempts to “correct” their identity, or attempts to explain it away. To the aces who face flat out denial of who they are, or hatred because of it.

As the holiday season gets underway, please remember that you deserve better than this. You are incredible, and the way you have been treated is not acceptable. You are deserving of love and support.

If Earth had Saturn’s Rings

From an excellent post by Jason Davis

From Washington, D.C., the rings would only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.

From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings would begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light would make the moon much brighter.

From Earth’s equator, Saturn’s rings would be viewed edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.

At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun would be positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.

At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.

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Ten Awe-Inspiring Photos

We’ve taken 10 of our top Instagram posts and put them here for your viewing pleasure. Now, your next 10 cell phone backgrounds can be found in one place.

10. Water on Mars

With 210,000 likes, this image is a favorite on Instagram. New findings from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars. Dark, narrow streaks on Martian slopes such as these at Hale Crater are inferred to be formed by seasonal flow of water on contemporary Mars. The streaks are roughly the length of a football field.

9. Smoke Ring for a Halo

With 210,000 likes, this image shined on Instagram. Two stars shine through the center of a ring of cascading dust in this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The star system is named DI Cha, and while only two stars are apparent, it is actually a quadruple system containing two sets of binary stars. As this is a relatively young star system it is surrounded by dust.

8. Pluto’s Largest Moon, Charon

With 216,000 likes, a lot of people thought this image was interesting on Instagram. Our New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon - and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history. This high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon was captured just before closest approach on July 14. The image combines blue, red and infrared images; the colors are processed to best highlight the variation of surface properties across Charon.

7. Veil Nebula

With 220,000 likes, many people favorited this image  on Instagram. This is the expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. This view is a mosaic of six pictures from our Hubble Space Telescope of a small area roughly two light-years across, covering only a tiny fraction of the nebula’s vast structure. This close-up look unveils wisps of gas, which are all that remain of what was once a star 20 times more massive than our sun.

6. Messier 94 Galaxy

With 234,000 likes, this image is a favorite on Instagram. This image shows the galaxy Messier 94, which lies in the small northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs, about 16 million light-years away. Within the bright ring or starburst ring around Messier 94, new stars are forming at a high rate and many young, bright stars are present within it.

5. Solar ‘Pumpkin’

With 247,000 likes, many followers enjoyed this image on Instagram. This photo was posted on Halloween and shows active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face. The image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in October 2014, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space.

4. Italy from the International Space Station

With 251,000 likes, this image captivated many of you on Instagram. Before drifting off to sleep, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (@stationcdrkelly) captured this images from the International Space Station and wrote, “ Day 180. Moonlight over Italy. #BuonaNotte Good night from @ISS! #YearInSpace.”

3. Cosmic Archaeological Dig

With 286,000 likes, this image dazzled many of you on Instagram. Peering deep into the Milky Way’s crowded central hub of stars, researchers using our Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered for the first time a population of ancient white dwarfs – smoldering remnants of once-vibrant stars that inhabited the core. Finding these relics at last can yield clues to how our galaxy was built, long before Earth and our sun formed. This image is a small section of Hubble’s view of the dense collection of stars crammed together in the galactic bulge.

2. Super Blood Moon

With 310,000 likes, this image was very popular on Instagram. It shows the Super Blood Moon behind the Washington Monument on Sunday, Sept. 27, in Washington, DC. The combination of a supermoon and total lunar eclipse last occurred in 1982 and will not happen again until 2033.

1. Pluto

With 363,000 likes, this image is one of our most popular pictures on Instagram. The dwarf planet sent a love note back to Earth via our New Horizons spacecraft, which traveled more than 9 years and 3+ billion miles. This was the last and most detailed image of Pluto sent to Earth before the moment of closest approach, which was at 7:49 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 14 - about 7,750 miles above the surface – roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India - making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.

For more pictures like these, follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nasa/ 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

What’s a Space Headache?

Headaches can be a common complaint during spaceflight. The Space Headaches experiment improves our understanding of such conditions, which helps in the development of methods to alleviate associated symptoms, and improve the well-being and performance of crew members in orbit. This can also improve our knowledge of similar conditions on Earth.

Earth and Moon by Expedition 24 crew member

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The differences under the ace umbrella

NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a significant solar flare as seen in the bright flash on the right on Dec. 19, 2014. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares

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asexuality is real pass it on

Solar System: 5 Things To Know This Week

Our solar system is huge, so let us break it down for you. Here are 5 things to know this week:

1. Dancing with a Star

Our local star, better known as the sun, teems with activity. This month NASA has been tracking regions that burst with magnetic loops. The Solar Dynamics Observatory is one of several space-based assets that keep tabs on the sun daily, watching as charged particles trace the magnetic field, forming bright lines as they emit light in ultraviolet wavelengths.

2. An Idyll for Ida

On Nov. 24, the asteroid Ida makes its closest approach to Earth (at a very safe distance). Ida is the first asteroid found to have its own moon, and the second ever visited by a spacecraft. Its close encounter happened in 1993 as Galileo flew by en route to Jupiter.

3. Moonshine

On Nov. 23, the Cassini spacecraft will fly near Saturn’s icy moon Tethys. Several instruments aboard Cassini will collect data, including an eight-frame color image mosaic. Between Nov. 27 and Dec. 2, Cassini will have very limited communications with Earth, because Cassini will enter solar conjunction, when Cassini and Saturn are on the other side of the Sun from Earth.

4. The Moon Will Occult Aldebaran

That may sound ominous, but all it means is that Earth’s moon will pass in front of the giant red star Aldebaran on Nov. 26. Aldebaran is the bright “eye” of the constellation Taurus. The event will only be visible in some parts of North America. Details can be found HERE. 

5. One Wild Ride, One Year Later

What a year it’s been for the Rosetta mission since the Philae lander came to rest on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014. A steady flow of data from the orbiter, together with several days of information sent from the lander, is providing a detailed picture of this remnant from the creation of the solar system.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

The moon at 365,700KM taken with an 8" newtonian telescope

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