As you were. Nothing to see here. rlIt's all just a hoaxrl

Just to hark back to the comparison between the Philae landing and the Apollo moon landings and the question of the hype (or lack of it) attached to both, as a 12 year old at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing I can confirm that it was a huge story and not one single element of the media did not carry wall-to-wall coverage of the whole eight day mission even to the extent where the BBC opened up transmission times at a time where breakfast TV was unknown (other than for major events like Olympic Games).

Other than the mind shattering fact that it was a manned mission to another planet (well ok, a moon) there had been a constant feed of missions building up to it, I only recently realised how quickly they had been firing off manned rockets in 1968 and 69 and the first manned craft to leave earths orbit had only happened seven months before and only three more missions took place before the moon landing.

So the news coverage came thick and fast in that year and with the limitation of just three TV channels you couldn't really miss it and in addition to that, the cherry on the cake, was that NASA were very pro-active in their publicity work and were more than happy to send out A4 colour photos from previous Apollo and Gemini missions, on eof our English Masters (we didn't have plain old teachers at grammar school you know) wrote to Nasa and received pretty quickly a big portfolio of photos and information on their work which was like having the holy grail posted to your school.

So yes, the hype in that one or two year period was intense and I was one of those who got up at some ridiculous hour in the middle of the night to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon even though the images were so bad that you could have been watching anything, it just felt like a huge life event, live on TV.

In many ways the Philae landing is even more remarkable but given the fact that non-star-watchers were completely unaware of it until this week, given that its taken years to get to this point with no other missions or any importance attached to it, and given that its not American then its hardly surprising that there has not been anything like the life important "happening" attached to it, more the pity.

But the numbers, though. Something about this hoax landing simply rldoesn't add uprl

Anyway it is all lies since as most of us now accept, the world is concave. You only need add watch?v=XrcwpwhChUg into a popular video site and there is the proof.

It's ALIVE!

For anybody who’s hardy enough on Saturday night & more alarmingly, with nothing better to do. www.universetoday.com/116641/don ... -the-year/ Weather permitting of course .

For anybody who’s hardy enough on Saturday night & more alarmingly, with nothing better to do. www.universetoday.com/116641/don ... -the-year/ Weather permitting of course .

Anyone know a good stargazing app for an iphone.

I was wanting that one where you turn your camera on point it at the sky and it tells you what star you are looking at.

anyone any ideas

www.icandiapps.com/icandiapps/

www.icandiapps.com/icandiapps/

NASA has just released the highest definition image of the Andromeda galaxy, compliments of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to comprehend just how many stars are cotained in Andromeda, but this image is so detailed if you zoom in, many individual stars packed tightly together (in reality any two are actually light years apart) can actually be resolved. Awesome. www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files ... es_jpg.jpg

NASA has just released the highest definition image of the Andromeda galaxy, compliments of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to comprehend just how many stars are cotained in Andromeda, but this image is so detailed if you zoom in, many individual stars packed tightly together (in reality any two are actually light years apart) can actually be resolved. Awesome. www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files ... es_jpg.jpg

Just a random muse I had.

Our own Sun converts 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium every second. (The remainder escapes as pure energy. Of which only about one-billionth reaches Earth, and a third of that gets reflected).

Andromeda contains at minimum a trillion stars, i.e. 10 [size12[/size

If on average they burn same as our own Sun then when you look at that faint fuzzy patch which is Andromeda you are watching 70,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen being spent every second.

But that's only double the amount in our own Milky Way galaxy. Which to put it in perspective, if Andromeda was twice the size of a RL ball, and the Milky Way was same size as a RL ball, they would be only about 20 ball-lengths apart.

Andromeda is heading our way at something like 80 miles per second but will take 4.5 billion years to collide. The view as it approaches will be stunning.

And the Milky Way's the daddy, as it contains more dark matter than Andromeda, making us more massive, so there!

www.bbc.com/future/story/2013042 ... n-in-space

www.bbc.com/future/story/2013042 ... n-in-space