The Moon was probably just scared of dinosaurs.

What's kind of crazy about the perceived distance thing is that timing of being in this planet now also plays a factor. 100 million years ago a 1ish% relative size larger might have made for far fewer annular eclipses. Or more, I can't find any info on that, but I expect fewer annular and more total eclipses. Of the 224 eclipses this century, 72 are annular and 68 total.

But it's all part of this scifi bonkers planet. Our star makes us have crazy light rivers in the sky at the poles because molten iron inside the planet is spinning faster than the outside of the planet to make giant magnetic currents. The crust isn't even solid, it's a slow moving chunky ice flow of silicates, like some busted-ass pie pulled straight from the oven. Huge deposits of dead trees and other early life got buried and remained intact as seams or seas of hydrocarbons, just hanging out. In some places the life that evolved here can die and get buried and some of the remains turned into stone versions of itself. We can bounce radio waves of the inside of the atmosphere and the magnetic currents for our convenience.

Sorry, but it always sends me down a rabbit hole of how weird this place is and we just get used to it.

The Abominable Moonman

Moti

Before the Soviet space race started, NASA had plans to do a couple flybys then build a base that would become a shipyard for deeper space exploration so it’s kind of a “best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago” situation but still amazing to see every stage complete successfully. That’s great news for Artemis III

Like this

Or this

I felt bad for them that as soon as they got back in comm range they had to set up a video call and that fuckin blob was on the phone. The Canadian did slide in a nice comment about diversity before handing off the mic though, appreciated that energy

Must be peaceful up there.

Side note: Dizzy is fucking great. I should play it again!

imagine watching the globe for explosions visible from space. that's gotta be worse than waiting for a headline.

Not arguing that PNG is the right choice, but you want something lossless for science purposes, and this is a science image.

You can tell roughly what order the impact craters were formed by seeing what overlaps what; looks like the small impacts mostly followed the big impacts. Maybe the earth's orbit cleared out the bigger stuff first? If you had a really good image, you might be able to work out the average impact angle, and therefore the average speed of impact, since we know the speed of the moon, and how they would intersect. Nothing's filled with lava like it has on the near side of the moon, which makes me think these have mostly happened later in the moon's life, when it's cooled down a bit.

I just love space, I've no education in it. I bet someone with a fancy moon science degree would be able to tell you a lot more, and they'd be poring over every pixel. Don't want any JPEGs getting in the way of that.

Why's that?

The diffusion models at least were basically designed to "remove noise from a random image until a real image emerged" so that actually makes a lot of sense, interesting

Oh guess the AI folks haven't yet realized that you can increase perceived accuracy by adding a small amount of random noise.

Which of course they didn't, because then they'd need to understand some things about images instead of just throwing whatever data they can find at it and hoping it figures it all out from that.

Though I'm not sure how much it applies to images, as the examples I've seen were audio. But it's cool to hear a low bitrate audio sample of someone talking unintelligibly and then play that same clip with random noise also playing and suddenly you can understand what is being said.

Lemmy probably returns images in different formats depending on what client supports (and ones with better compression take precedence).

Jpegxl gang

You don't?

Lemmy hug of death?

I think we need to spend some more time looking down at what we can fix here before we can look to the stars with anything other than a colonizer mindset. Space is just going to be commodified for the ultra rich and any benefit the exploration of it might give will, as with all things, never actually “trickle down” to the poor of the earth.