aokp:
Things that make you go Hmm.
That said - I’m kind of glad they’re not coming here, destroying our habitat and stacking us in cages for experimental research (scattered humans supposedly being anally probed aside…). -__-
(via popularconscience)
UFO Sighting - Budapest, Hungary - 04/23/2012 (by xxxdonutzxxx)
UFO’s Over Russia: Massive sightings light up St. Petersburg’s skies
Naves nodriza sobre San Petersburgo en Abril 2012: Parte 1 (by tercermilenio)
An unidentified glowing object is said to have crashed down from the skies in Russia’s Siberia, causing a powerful explosion. A search for the mysterious item is underway amid speculations of what on Earth it could be.
Witnesses describe seeing a bright glow covering the sky, followed by a shining object falling with a strange clanging sound and disappearing in the distance with a blast.
The unidentified object supposedly fell in the taiga forest of the Irkutsk region, 15 kilometers from the nearest village of Vitim, on Friday night. The head of the regional administration said a group of researchers has been sent to inspect the area and question witnesses.
“We will be able to say what it is, only when we see the thing itself and the place where it fell,” explained head of the region Aleksandr Sergey. “The investigators, together with hunters are going there on snowmobiles”.
There are two possible causes of the incident being examined. The object could either be a part of a large meteorite, or satellite wreckage. Speculations that it could be a piece of the failed, recently launched North Korean carrier rocket have been dismissed. Neither could it be a piece of any other aircraft as there have been no flights in the area.
The director of the astronomical observatory at Irkutsk University however explained that the searches won’t find any traces if it was a meteorite.
“Usually such objects completely disintegrate – they burn down in the atmosphere and split into very small fragments upon falling,”he said.
Map of Russia, showing the Irkutsk region where the unidentified flying object fell
This is not the first incident of this kind in the area.
The best-known case, the Vitim bolide, fell in this very area in 2002 causing a powerful explosion. Detected by a US military missile-defense satellite, the event recalled the massive Tunguska blast of 1908, caused by a large falling meteorite.
This March, a mysterious cylinder fell in another part of Siberia, causing widespread speculation as to what it was. While media supposed it was part of a satellite or a fragment of a ballistic missile, the Russian Federal Space Agency denied ownership of the object.
A new paper claims this is not a Rorschach test for the extraterrestrially challenged, but an anatomically correct, three-dimensional rendering of a parrot on Mars that is too accurate for chance.
So concludes an independent team of two geologists, three veterinarians and a sculptor — who spent six years hashing out the details of three images from NASA’s now-defunct Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft taken between April 2000 and December 2005.
What is generically described by NASA as “repeat layered material and rectilinear ridges” in its description of Mars Global Surveyor photo No. S13/01480, actually includes an “avian-shaped formation that exhibits a unique set of proportional features,” says independent researchers Michael Dale, George Haas, James Miller, William Saunders and veterinarians A.J. Cole, Joseph Friedlander and Susan Orosz, in a paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
(via npr)
Good photography is not just about timing. It also depends on good positioning. Case in point? This view of a spiral galaxy, which is fortuitously positioned edge-on relative to the view from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
The galaxy, officially known as NGC 2683, was nicknamed the “UFO Galaxy” by astronomers at the Astronaut Memorial Planetarium and Observatory in Cocoa, Fla.
(via npr)
A photo of 200,000 galaxies, a mere 0.004% of our sky.
These images were taken with VISTA, the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), a 4.1 meter telescope in Chile. This huge image is actually composed of 6000 separate images, and is the single deepest infrared picture of the sky ever taken with this field of view. Hubble can get deeper, for example, but sees a much, much smaller part of the sky.
You can find the full, high rez version here. It’s worth a look, a very long one. (17,121 x 10,824 pixels & 250MBs)
