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Helicopters Arrive at National Archives for Exhibit Opening

Last night, the North Carolina Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association installed three Vietnam War-era aircraft on the lawn of the US National Archives. The Vietnam veterans will be giving tours of the helicopters starting today and the “Remembering Vietnam” exhibit opens to the public this Friday, November 10.

Read more about the exhibit opening here. See a timelapse of the helicopter installation on the National Archives Foundation Facebook page. 

Navigating Space by the Stars

A sextant is a tool for measuring the angular altitude of a star above the horizon and has helped guide sailors across oceans for centuries. It is now being tested aboard the International Space Station as a potential emergency navigation tool for guiding future spacecraft across the cosmos. The Sextant Navigation investigation will test the use of a hand-held sextant that utilizes star sighting in microgravity. 

Read more about how we’re testing this tool in space!  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Edify yourself 👽

Weird Animal Facts (see 15 more)

Note to self: in order to write, you have to actually do more than stare at a Word document rereading what you’ve already written. For example, maybe typing new words would be a good strategy.

the x files’ nonexistent writers room: one of the biggest holes we’ve dug ourselves into with the william storyline is the existence of his adoptive parents, the van de kamps. mulder and scully can’t just whisk their son away from the only family he’s ever known, right? that wouldn’t be moral or ethical, how do we fix this

james wong:

Delicate Temporary Tattoos That Look Like Real Watercolor Illustrations

London-based brand and temporary tattoo designers PAPERSELF prides itself in the creation of artistic temporary tattoos. Adorned with soft pastels and inspired by nature, the watercolor-like temporary tattoos are unique. They follow the new trend of artistic temporary tattoos, which mimic the delicacy of watercolor paintings. Find their entire collection in their Etsy shop.

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Topic: Etsy, Illustration, Temporary Tattoos, Tattoos || by STAFF

I want to live with SOFIA in the sky

What's Inside SOFIA? High Flying Instruments

Our flying observatory, called SOFIA, carries a 100-inch telescope inside a Boeing 747SP aircraft. Having an airborne observatory provides many benefits.

It flies at 38,000-45,000 feet – above 99% of the water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere that blocks infrared light from reaching the ground! 

It is also mobile! We can fly to the best vantage point for viewing the cosmos. We go to Christchurch, New Zealand, nearly every year to study objects best observed from the Southern Hemisphere. And last year we went to Daytona Beach, FL, to study the atmosphere of Neptune’s moon Triton while flying over the Atlantic Ocean.

SOFIA’s telescope has a large primary mirror – about the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Large telescopes let us gather a lot of light to make high-resolution images!

But unlike a space-based observatory, SOFIA returns to our base every morning.

Which means that we can change the instruments we use to analyze the light from the telescope to make many different types of scientific observations. We currently have seven instruments, and new ones are now being developed to incorporate new technologies.

So what is inside SOFIA? The existing instruments include:

Infrared cameras that can peer inside celestial clouds of dust and gas to see stars forming inside. They can also study molecules in a nebula that may offer clues to the building blocks of life…

…A polarimeter, a device that measures the alignment of incoming light waves, that we use to study magnetic fields. The left image reveals that hot dust in the starburst galaxy M82 is magnetically aligned with the gas flowing out of it, shown in blue on the right image from our Chandra X-ray Observatory. This can help us understand how magnetic fields affect how stars form.

…A tracking camera that we used to study New Horizon’s post-Pluto flyby target and found that it may have its own moon…

…A spectrograph that spreads light into its component colors. We’re using one to search for signs of water plumes on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and to search for signs of water on Venus to learn about how it lost its oceans…

…An instrument that studies high energy terahertz radiation with 14 detectors. It’s so efficient that we made this map of Orion’s Horsehead Nebula in only four hours! The map is made of 100 separate views of the nebula, each mapping carbon atoms at different velocities.

…And we have an instrument under construction that will soon let us study how water vapor, ice and oxygen combine at different times during planet formation, to better understand how these elements combine with dust to form a mass that can become a planet.

Our airborne telescope has already revealed so much about the universe around us! Now we’re looking for the next idea to help us use SOFIA in even more new ways. 

Discover more about our SOFIA flying observatory HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Nutmeg and Kerosene - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Candle + Book Giveaway

Hey everyone! The Literary Snob is teaming up with The Happy Bard Candle Co. to do a double giveaway this September. We’re all on the same trivia team in the real world (Sean Bean Lives!) and I absolutely love Happy Bard’s literary inspired candles. They’re about to release their next line of literary candles and one of the new scents will be a fan submission! So we’re holding a contest and double giveaway to find the fairest combo in the land. 

Reblog this post with your submission for a literary candle scent. You can send in as many submissions as your heart desires and tag anyone who dreams of being a candle virtuoso. The Happy Bard Candle Co. will pick their favorite submission at the end of the contest, create the candle, and send it to you! Plus I will send the winner one of the newly released Vintage Minis of your choice.

GIVEAWAY RULES

Reblog this post with a book & fragrance combo suggestion

Follow The Happy Bard Candle Co. on either Instagram or Facebook

Follow The Literary Snob on Tumblr

Have fun and be creative!

RULES

There is no limit on submissions, so reblog away! Currently, The Happy Bard Candle Co. cannot ship internationally, so anybody can participate but only those in the U.S. can win. Contest ends Saturday, Sept. 30 at midnight.

We look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with! Plus I might throw in an extra prize for whoever makes me laugh the hardest. Good luck!

This is why you should always speak your mind

I made the top comment on the Star Wars Facebook, criticizing the Benioff and Weiss hire.

I present: comments from three hundred upset men (and women!) and why none of them have shaken my belief in how bad a hire this is.

I knew my remark would be unpopular and met with nasty comments, misguided statements about Game of Thrones and the film industry, insinuations that there aren’t any good women or nonwhite directions, couple of lewd comments about my sex life. There is truth to the adage: Facebook is a cesspool.

What I didn’t know is that I would get enough attention to make the top comment.

At the time of writing, sixty hours after initial posting, it’s running a little less than 80% laugh reactions—so, people thinking I’m a moron—and it’s running about 1,100 reactions and 324 replies.

Unfortunately for my would-be adversaries, I don’t debate on Facebook and it is a favorite pastime to read the vitriol and mediocre hash slung in my direction as if it’ll have any effect on my self-esteem. Fortunately, you don’t have to do the same. I present: the major response patterns and why they don’t hold any water.