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Nigel

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9 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Was it easy to see, or very faint.

If it was a clear strong light that was easy to follow, that was ISS.

If you were struggling to decide if you could really see it or not, that was Dragon

Yeah ISS was clear last night about 1015pm, thought it was a plane but was too quick.

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They both lagged a couple of minutes behind the forecast time, it was supposed to be 10:11 for ISS and 10:16 for Dragon.

I got them roughly 10:14 and 10:20 ish

I’m not sure at any point they were truly ‘over’ the UK hence them being relatively low in the south west sky.

Yeah, 24 hours in and I’m a **** expert.

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10 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

Seemed a nice smooth journey, fully automated, coulda watched a film on the way on them screens.............................when we going?😄

 

And that’s the crux of the matter really. Sitting a couple of people in there helps with the promotion of the thing but they aren’t really required. They’ve added a bunch of problems in to the equation. The extra weight, the food, the oxygen the safety systems.

If we were happy with just the science side of it then it would be cheaper and marginally easier. But Mr Musk wants to live on Mars and most people want to see astronauts.

The actual technically difficult or more risky parts of the flight, the crew had the controls taken off them.

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5 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Was it easy to see, or very faint.

If it was a clear strong light that was easy to follow, that was ISS.

If you were struggling to decide if you could really see it or not, that was Dragon

Was quite low on the horizon but sorta easy to see .. ISS has always been a lot higher in the sky whenever I’ve seen it .. 

I saw one of them though that bit is def :) 

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22 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

Was quite low on the horizon but sorta easy to see .. ISS has always been a lot higher in the sky whenever I’ve seen it .. 

I saw one of them though that bit is def :) 

Yeah ISS was far lower than normal. I had to switch to a spot with a lower horizon I wouldn’t have seen it from my usual spot.

Of the people I do the chatting with, I was the only one to see it this time around, had to search around to find people that had seen same thing at the same time in the same place. 

ISS going over in about 5 minutes or so I think (haven’t checked), see that in this light and you really are doing well.

 

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Saw the ISS in daylight.

As always, 2 minutes later than advertised, I think I’ve worked out it’s because the tweets I’m watching must be from further north. That’s my theory!

Pointed it out to witnesses too as people were beginning to question my spotting skills. Somebody suggested I had a bionic eye and that quickly turned in to an accusation of bionic bollocks. So it was nice to spot the ISS in daylight and get others to see it too.

 

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timelapse that shows the Earth rotating over the course of 24 hours by using the heavens as the point of reference rather than the landscape.

 

 

 

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

2020 eh, what a year

Dark Matter

 

I can't pretend to say I can fathom much of that, I was truant for over half my classes from age 14 and science probably suffered the hardest. 

I found that read fascinating nonetheless, as I do have quite a good grasp of the English language, so it wasn't entirely lost on me. I want to develop my understanding.

Thanks for that!

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51 minutes ago, A'Villan said:

I can't pretend to say I can fathom much of that, I was truant for over half my classes from age 14 and science probably suffered the hardest. 

I found that read fascinating nonetheless, as I do have quite a good grasp of the English language, so it wasn't entirely lost on me. I want to develop my understanding.

Thanks for that!

I'd recommend starting with A Brief History of Time (or Briefer) if you've not read it. It's pretty easy to digest and helped me understand a lot of concepts I couldn't get my head around. 

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My mate bought a second hand seismometer and it picked up yesterday’s 7.6 in Mexico.

I’d be mad excited about that, he’s just all about logging it and seeing if he can improve the software.

Nerd.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Quote

 

This Scientist Says He’s Built a Jet Engine That Turns Electricity Directly Into Thrust

If this plasma propulsion tech is real, it could change everything.

This past autumn, a professor at Wuhan University named Jau Tang was hard at work piecing together a thruster prototype that, at first, sounds too good to be true.

The basic idea, he said in an interview, is that his device turns electricity directly into thrust — no fossil fuels required — by using microwaves to energize compressed air into a plasma state and shooting it out like a jet. Tang suggested, without a hint of self-aggrandizement, that it could likely be scaled up enough to fly large commercial passenger planes. Eventually, he says, it might even power spaceships.

 

Futurism

Let's hope there's something in this, and it's not just China trying not to look like the globe's fountain of pox.

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On 24/06/2020 at 21:11, chrisp65 said:

My mate bought a second hand seismometer and it picked up yesterday’s 7.6 in Mexico.

My understanding of how those things work is a bit shakey, but it sounds like a cracking bit of kit.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Further analysis appears to show that the Phosphine detection in Venus is bunk or at a minimum is much less significant than the claimed detection (somewhere close to 2 sigma vs the claimed >10 sigma). Science!

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