Credit as follows: veromilo:

The Known Universe by AMNH (by AMNHorg)

Keck Telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii

~!~ Watch and be amazed by the mechanics behind the telescopes that capture the fabulous photos of the universe that zoom all over the Internet everyday and make LaurasTheory so, so very happy ~!~

South Pole Telescope

~!~

ODE TO THE NIMRUD

How amazing is it that a simple lens can warp the vast magnitude of the universe, bazillions of light years long and wide and deep, stealing its light, like a black hole steals energy and mass, spitting it out on the flip side in a whirlwind of reconstructed particles, delivering it to us in a size that is smaller than ourselves, the plain and accessible size of a monitor or photographic print or telescope eyepiece, and thereby bring it all down to an eye-catching user-friendly scale that we, grounded here on earth, can actually comprehend?

- by Laura

Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe  - Discussion with Dr. Saul Perlmutter (by USdepartmentofenergy)

from LaurasTheory: This video is an hour long but worth the watch for anyone who loves this sort of thing.

I found the introduction interesting, but more importantly: get through the introduction to the presentation. When you get to the part about how the wavelengths of light measured by earthlings from a supernova indicate the degree that the universe has “stretched” since the star exploded…~!~… well, anyway, just keep watching… it actually gets better. Dr. Perlmutter closes the event with a digression into the importance of societal support for the pursuit of scientific discovery…

…As the Great Lord Krishna once proclaimed: “The wise see knowledge and action as one; they see truly.” - from the Bhagavad Gita

…Of the Relationship between Tumbling Bolts and the Planets

About twice a year, to my great aggravation, the bolt falls off the little glass doorknob to my kitchen pantry in this old house, making the knob unusable.

Each time, I have to find the bolt, wherever it tumbled too, and wind it back on to the screw that runs through the knob and a little hole carved in the door.

Each time, I am so annoyed that I just want to run out to Home Depot on the spot and buy a better knob contraption. But I never do.

So, instead, I press my finger on the head of the screw and twirl the bolt back on with my fingernails. About 5 threads of the screw are involved in this operation, but it always seems to require an eternity of twirling.

Anyway, I tighten the bolt as far as my patience allows, then leave it, knowing full well that within six months, the multitude of pulls that the knob receives as I raid the pantry will create enough hundreds of fractions of millimeters of unscrews to cause that bolt to tumble off again one day.

Such seems the revolution of earth, around the sun, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, millennium after millennium… Where will we be tumbling to, in the end? Does anyone really even know which way we are going? I can never seem to get a straight answer to that question.

 (This piece is not meant to be a double entendre of the risque variety, by the way, but if you thought so, well, bully for you… all things are the same thing, configured differently, afterall:)

- Laura