Recent comments in /f/space

Late-Pool8338 t1_j6vbzq2 wrote

Not sure if this helps but I'm in north Alabama (close to Tennessee) and the area is visible shortly after sunset and for the majority of the night. Wish it wasn't cloudy here!

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limacharley t1_j6vb0y3 wrote

The key is how dark your skies are. This is not a bright comet (Magnitude 5 last time I looked). That means it is just barely visible as a dim smudge with the naked eye in dark skies. It may not be visible if you are in an area with light pollution. The brightness does not change very much from day to day, so, if your skies are dark, then it shouldn't be noticeably harder to see it tomorrow than it would be today.

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TheGreatestOutdoorz t1_j6v37fs wrote

When I went to college, I thought it was so ridiculous that we assumed life had to be carbon based. I majored in biochem and quickly learned why carbon is almost certainly the only base for complex life, and while it kind of made me sad, it was incredibly cool to think about different ways carbon could create complex life forms.

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yongedevil t1_j6v0p8d wrote

And then there are the people who come up with these ideas. Ideas like this, that could be dismissed out of hand as being impractical for any number of reasons. But thanks to people like Von Eshleman who sat down and did the math we know roughly what we need to achieve to make these crazy ideas real.

A solar gravitational lens is still in impractical territory, but pieces like blocking out the sun's light, precise spacecraft positioning, and now high performance engines are developing. Who knows, if one of our other telescopes finds a planet that we really really want a closer look at maybe we'll get an actual image of it showing continents and oceans in our lifetimes.

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