When I run shows that have Orion in view, I usually talk about Betelgeuse (correcting people’s pronunciation) and say how much I want it to go supernova so that I can see it. 
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I didnt know you guys knew so much about space. I find it so fascinating. I have a telescope, but its too bright around here.
I have to take it out to the country.
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It’s all part of, “But his bosses didn’t like him so they shot him into space!”
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I’m actually the director of a planetarium. 
And before that I was historian of astronomy who was pretending to be a physics professor.
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It’s about to hatch!
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@TeriG you are by far have the coolest job ever! Maybe we can be friends 
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NASA released some computer generated images of Jupiter’s moon IO, taken via a flyby of the Juno probe. They show a magma lake as well as an incredibly thin mountain:
Io is sometimes called the “tortured moon”, owing to the tremendous gravitational back-and-forth being inflicted on it not only by Jupiter itself but also it’s larger moons Europa and Ganymede. Looking at the image they provided of the moon’s surface, I can see it:
Source: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-juno-gives-aerial-views-of-mountain-lava-lake-on-io
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I’ve always thought Io looked like a big bruise. Always easy to identify as a result.
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It’s a shame that Io sits smack dab in the depths of Jupiter’s radiation belt. An orbiter of it would get some fabulous images! Even the Europa Clipper can’t directly orbit its namesake because its electronics would be fried after just a month for the same reason.
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The moon never gets boring, depending on where the shadow is there are always cool things to see.
Not too far from you the observatory at Widener University does public nights several times a month. LED street and parking lot lights have really made the light pollution worse the last few years but the 16 inch scope can still see the brighter nebulae, some of the fainter stuff we can no longer see except on spectacularly clear nights.
We are all booked up for the rest of this semester so the next chance to go will be in the fall. The fall schedule will probably be up on the university web site in August. We don’t do public nights in the summer because it gets dark way too late.
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I always thought a full moon was underwhelming, unless an eclipse was going on. But any other phase, you’re right.
Also, Jupiter is an easy spot, and even the cheapest binoculars will probably show the 4 main moons.
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Thats awesome @MartyS i will def check that out!
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People always want to see the moon when it’s full, we always have to tell them that’s the most boring view of the moon, without shadows it looks flat. Go out and look every night as the shadows change during the various phases, there are dunes and walls in the maria that you can only tell are there when they cast a shadow, without the shadows it’s just all one color and they do look like seas.
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My favorite phase to observe is the gibbous phase. You can see most of the surface, but you still get the interesting shadows.
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Voyager 1 is now sending readable information again.
Just engineering data for now, they hope another patch will get science data flowing.
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The coolest thing to me is how they were able to fix Voyager 1.
Through their investigation, Voyager’s ground team discovered a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware. This affected some of the computer’s software code.
“That took out a section of memory,” Spilker said. “What they have to do is relocate that code into a different portion of the memory, and then make sure that anything that uses those codes, those subroutines, know to go to the new location of memory, for access and to run it.”
Only about 3 percent of the FDS memory was corrupted by the bad chip, so engineers needed to transplant that code into another part of the memory bank. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety, NASA said.
So the Voyager team divided the code into sections for storage in different places in the FDS. This wasn’t just a copy-and-paste job. Engineers needed to modify some of the code to make sure it will all work together. “Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well,” NASA said in a statement.
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The craft reports that it did suffer some minor damage to its nameplate.
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How do you pronounce that? And how do you know? More to the point … how does it know?
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Some bald chick told it.
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