Ad Astra Science Fiction Institute

Posts about speculative fiction, writing tips, cutting-edge science, and other cool stuff. No AI slop. The Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction & the Speculative Imagination brings together creators, educators, and fans to study and create speculative fiction that changes the world. Through a growing set of classes, we offer a comprehensive education and ongoing community. The people we work with create art that opens minds and imaginations, reaching for the stars and striving to "Save the world through science fiction!" Originally founded at the University of Kansas, we've grown into a nonprofit offering workshops, masterclasses, SF courses, and more. Check us out: AdAstra-SF.com or more on Linktree

[iris-of-the-lambs]

Notes from a scholar who found a talking castle, then tried in vain to map a way out of it…

artfight attack for @iguanodont , featuring their dragon character!

[nevver]

[capnsyd]

Idioms of the World, Matt Lindley

[apocryphics]

Annie Dillard

[autismcatboy]

[ Image ID: A text quote

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

End ID. ]

[ltwilliammowett]

Unusual ship names

In the course of time, some quite funny names have emerged, such as HMS Pickle, HMS Beaver, HMS Black Joke or HMS Sandwich. But there are a few others that I don't want to withhold from you.

Falcon in the Fetterlock, English Warship mid 16th century

Three Ostrich Feathers, English Merchant, mid16th century

Bull, Bear and Horse, English Merchant, early 17th century

Mousenest, English Fireship, mid 17th century

Blade of Wheat, English Merchant, late 17th century

Who's afraid, English Privateer, late 18th century

Sturdy Beggar, Salem Privateer, late 18th century

Terrible, English Privateer, late 18th century

Mouse of the Mountain, Hudson River Steamer, early 19th century

Grumbler and Growler, Salem Privateer, early 19th century

Precious Ridicule, New Orleans schooner, early 19th century

Free Love, Mississippi Barque, early 19th century

Catch me who can, Baltimore Privateer, early 19th century

The Twenty - Sixth Day of October 1812, English Schooner, early 19th century

Go ask Her, Neufundland Schooner, early 19th century

Brown Smith Jones, Maryland Police Boat, late 19th century

Essence of Pepermint, Nova Scotia Schooner, late 19th century

[adastra-sf]

Names like these inspired Iain M Banks for his Culture series of novels, which has (space)ship names like:

So Much For Subtlety

Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence

Youthful Indiscretion

Flexible Demeanour

Just Read The Instructions

All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff

Someone Else's Problem

You'll Clean That Up Before You Leave

...and my favorite:

Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath

[spacetelescopescience]

Let’s get to the heart of the matter: starburst galaxy M82.

A team of researchers recently completed an imaging survey of this edge-on spiral galaxy with the James Webb Space Telescope. Because of its infrared sensitivity, the telescope was able to see beyond the thick dust and resolve the central region of M82—revealing the galaxy’s distended disk structure and 16.5 million individual stars for the first time. Webb’s ability to resolve so many stars paves a way for astronomers to reconstruct M82’s star formation history, and more broadly, understand how the galaxy has evolved over time.

This Webb survey is the most recent addition to the overall data on M82. Multiple space observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, have previously studied this intriguing environment. Each telescope offers a different view of M82: Hubble’s visible-light view shows the galaxy’s gas and dust structure, which conceals the features that are prominent in Webb’s infrared-light image.

To understand an intricate environment like M82, including its formation history, astronomers analyze data from various missions to obtain the fuller picture: https://news.stsci.edu/4xKw0MA

[photos-of-space]

New image of the largest volcano in the Solar System

[adastra-sf]

How big is Olympus Mons? Here's a profile diagram comparing its height to a couple of the biggest Earthly mountains:

Hawaii's Mauna Kea stands 4.2 kilometers tall, and Mount Everest (aka Sagarmāthā in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet) reaches twice as high at 8.8 km. Meanwhile, Olympus Mons stretches beyond the Martian atmosphere at 25 kilometers (72,000 feet).

That means if you were to hike to the summit - a feat that would likely take weeks - you'd better wear a pressure suit with an oxygen supply, because you'd be hiking into space!

What's not apparent in this NASA diagram is that Olympus Mons stretches 374 miles across the Martian landscape - about the size of France (the entire country). It's so massive that it crushes the Martian crust in this region.

This image, taken by NASA's Mars Express spacecraft, gives a better perspective on how the Solar System's largest volcano looks from an angle.

Olympus Mons is also relatively young - only a few million years old - so there's a good chance it's still active and could erupt again, growing even bigger as fresh lava flows to the surface.

[apod]

2026 August 14

Total Solar Eclipse from Greenland Image Credit & Copyright: Aditya Madhavan

Explanation: On August 12, the Moon’s shadow reached out to touch our fair planet. Beginning in the Arctic Ocean, it swept along a narrow track that led the dark lunar umbra across parts of Greenland, Iceland, the Atlantic, Portugal, and northern Spain. And for a moment, denizens of Earth who found themselves with clear skies under the shadow of the Moon could witness a total solar eclipse. After dodging the weather by sea and making a landing along Rype Fjord on the Greenland east coast (at 71.07055N, 27.71252W), this hard-won snapshot was captured at 17:33:26 UTC. That’s near the initial reach of clearing skies along the path of totality, so the image is likely one of the first unobstructed views of the totally eclipsed Sun. Through a break in the clouds, the stunning photo also records one of this eclipse’s transient diamond rings and the magnificent solar corona emerging near the moment totality began.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260814.html

[ieafy]

In the night

[without-ado]

"Shadows on the Balearic Sea" l Andrew McCarthy

[throatoftheworld]

Zdzisław Beksiński, 1975

[sandmandaddy69]

Paul Lehr

[feyosha]

Computers are very simple you see we take the hearts of dead stars and we flatten them into crystal chips and then we etch tiny pathways using concentrated light into the dead star crystal chips and if we etch the pathways just so we can trick the crystals into doing our thinking for us hope this clears things up.

[feyosha]

How does it feel to be the most Galaxy Brained person in this entire thread

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Well that certainly belongs on the post

[feyosha]

why would this distress you friend the dead star crystal chips are just singing to each other with invisible ripples in the fabric of reality itself perfectly normal stuff

[freerangecatmilk-blog]

[adastra-sf]

[stochastic-shieldmaiden]

[sandmandaddy69]

Steve R Dodd

[quasi-normalcy]

We Are the Daughters of the Microbes Who Could Survive in an Oxygen-rich Atmosphere

[deep-space-netwerk]

Alright, so, black holes right?

Most people have probably seen this astOUNDING image of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy - the first real picture of a black hole.

It may look like a blurry orange donut, but you gotta understand, this was and still is a hugely impressive achievement. At a black hole's event horizon, the escape velocity (or the speed at which something has to travel to escape the body's gravitational pull) is faster than the speed of light. By definition a black hole cannot be directly observed. Imaging the shadow of M87* required using eight ground-based radio telescopes all over the world, working together as an interferometer - or as though they were one single telescope the size of the entire planet.

So that's fucking cool in its own right, but how did we know that black holes existed before 2019 when we could actually "see" one? How do we detect something that reflects no light when we DON'T have a simulated telescope the size of Earth? The answer is gravity.

We think that most large galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, left over from their chaotic infancies when hundreds of thousands of early stars collided and then collapsed, and then kept colliding. To give you an idea of what we mean by "supermassive", the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"), is about 4 million times the mass of our sun. And that's SMALL.

So while black holes aren't the horrible all-consuming reality-guzzling unmakers of creation that science fiction likes to paint them as - we aren't in any danger whatsoever from Sagittarius A*, now or ever - they CAN get big enough to really throw things around. So we looked for objects moving under the influence of . . . nothing.

This gif is a years-long timelapse of stars orbiting something in a seemingly-empty region of space the center of the Milky Way, the approximate location marked with a red plus sign.

That something is Sag A*. It's an invisible behemoth, made of the extraordinarily dense remains of the birth of our galaxy, juggling entire solar systems the way Jupiter flings asteroids. And for so long, we couldn't even see it.

This shit makes me go fucking crazy. Imagine what else is out there that we don't understand just because we don't have the tools to even know it exists! Not just in space, in any field of scientific study!

It wasn't until the 1990s that we started realizing trees talk to each other, and now we know there's fungal mycelium networks that connect trees across entire continents. Just THIS YEAR we discovered an entirely new ecosystem underneath the hydrothermal vents in the deepest parts of the ocean floor. For most of human history, the existence of planets around other stars was highly debated, and now we've confirmed over 5 thousand of them. We even know what some of their atmospheres are made of!

There's a saying that "the more you know, the more you know you'll never know", and I feel like there's never been a time in history when that's been more true. And it's almost comforting, y'know? The universe is so vast, it feels correct that we shouldn't be able to understand all of its intricacies.

Reality is stranger than fiction, and the reality is there's stuff out there that we don't even have the words to begin to describe. Until we do! And our reward is even more questions!

[retroscifiart]

The wonderfully trippy 1970-80s art of New Zealand artist Mike Hinge 1931-2003