Silence in the Library

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Update

Broken image links on my Library Theme have been fixed. Just reinstall the theme to fix it on your blog.

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This is what a question looks like!

And this is an answer!

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Book:

Any option starting with the word "book" relates to what you see on permalink pages in open books.

Color: Book Link - Link colour. Hovering underlines it.

Color: Book Text - The colour of all the text plus blockquotes.

Font: Books - The font used in the books

Books Text Size - Enter a number only. This will be the text size of most of the text on these pages.

Books Title Size - Somewhere between 16 and 20 works well. All titles on open books will be this size.

Notes:

Any option with the word "notes" relates to the notecontainer below each post (displaying tags, likes and reblogs), headings above books, and also the timestamp below popups on the index page.

Color: Notes - The main font colour. It is best to keep this white or close to white, since it displays on top of dark colours.

Font: Notes - Sans-serif fonts work best here.

Notes Size - Another font size option.

Popup:

Options with the word "popup" relate to the popups on the index page when you hover over a book.

Color: Popup background - The background colour of the popups.

Color: Popup Link - Links.

Color: Popup Text - The main text colour.

Font: Georgia - Font style in popups. This doesn't affect the timestamp. That's under "notes".

Popup Text Size - The main font size

Popup Title Size - Don't make this too large. There's only so much that can fit into the little popup windows.

Sidebar:

Options with the word "Sidebar" related to the sidebar.

Color: Sidebar Background - The background colour of the entire sidebar. This won't be visible if you have a background image.

Color: Sidebar Foreground - Currently set to black, it's the background colour behind the title and links. This also applies to your description text.

Color: Sidebar Hover - Link-hover colour for your title, ask, submit, rss, etc. This does not include description links. Those are the same colour as the main text but bold.

Color: Sidebar Links - Same as above.

Font: Sidebar - The font used in the sidebar, excluding the title.

Sidebar Background Tile - When ticked, the background image in your sidebar is tiled.

Image: Sidebar Background - Where you can upload (or clear) the background image on your sidebar.

Sidebar BG position - This should be two words. The first should be one of left/center/right, and the second should be one of top/center/bottom.

Sidebar Link Size - The font size of the links currently set on black.

Sidebar Text Size - The font size in your description

Sidebar Title Size - The font size of the main title

Sidebar Width - How wide your sidebar is. I recommend between 200 to 300.

Sidebar desc rgba - This is the colour behind your description. The first three numbers are the colour. You can visit this site to find the rgb value you want (0, 0, 0 for black & 255, 255, 255 for white). The last number goes between 0 and 1. This is how transparent the colour is. Set it to 0 for complete transparency, and 1 to make it opaque.

Other Options:

Font: Title - The font used in the main title in the sidebar

Add Margin On Right - On the index page, sometimes the popups disappear off the right side of the page. Ticking this will stop the books from sitting too close to the right edge, so none of the popups will be hidden.

Show Archive Link - Displays a link for your archive in the sidebar.

Show RSS Link - Same as above for RSS

Username - This is important if you want your ask and submit functions to work. Enter your username exactly as it shows up on your tumblr, no spelling mistakes. If your ask and submit does not send to your inbox, it's because you typed your name wrong.

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Or return to my main blog.

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Just thought i’d do a short thing on Charles Messier. Charles Messier was a french astronomer who lived from June 26, 1730, to April 12, 1817. Back then, you made your name in astronomy by discovering and studying comets and that’s exactly what Charles Messier did.  While meticulously studying the sky with his telescope, he noticed many diffuse, fuzzy, and oddly shaped objects that he and his assistant would often mistake for comets. So to avoid wasting time on these objects, he compiled a list of them. These objects are some of the brightest deep sky objects in the sky, and include nebula, star clusters and galaxies. He discovered some of the most iconic objects in space. Here is a portrait of Messier, and a few of his 110 discoveries in the famous Messier catalog.

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"Nine times the size of Earth, Saturn is a truly unique planet. Learn all about it right here at Space School."

[tisbematt]

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Adam Block's image of supernova SN 2012aw (arrow) lighting up in spiral galaxy M95 was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. The bar-like structure giving this type of galaxy its name can be seen in the galaxy's center. (Photo: Adam Block/Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter)

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I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

Carl Sagan

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Visit Original Link

Song of the day: 20

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From the TIME article on new Nasa findings released this week:

“The fact that Enceladus becomes as dramatically distorted as it does is a powerful indicator of just how much water it contains. A watery world, after all, is a flexible world, and for Enceladus to be so elastic, it must contain a very large local ocean or perhaps even a globe-girdling one. Portions of that ocean may not just be bathwater warm, but outright hot.”

Our own solar system becomes more and more wonderous.

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Scientists are still discovering hidden objects in the 7 billion mile long region of space we call home.

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Gift of a Dying Star: Skywatcher Snaps Spectacular Nebula Abell 31 Photo

by Nina Sen

Appearing to burst from space in glowing red and blue, this stunning photo captures large planetary nebula Abell 31.

Abell 31 is a planetary nebula caused by a dying star as it releases dust and gas. As the star dies, it starts to expel wind quickly; the process then slows and speeds up again. The faster wind runs into the slower winds and forms colorful shapes in the sky. In this image, red gas signifies hydrogen and blue means oxygen… [Continue Reading]

Image courtesy of Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona.

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1st Student Selected MoonKAM Pictures Look Inspiringly Home to Earth

The first student selected photos of the Moon’s surface snapped by NASA’s new pair of student named Lunar Mapping orbiters – Ebb & Flow - have just been beamed back and show an eerie view looking back to the Home Planet – and all of Humanity – barely rising above the pockmarked terrain of the mysterious far side of our nearest neighbor in space.

Congratulations to Americas’ Youth on an outstanding and inspiring choice !!

The student photo is reminiscent of one of the iconic images of Space Exploration – the first full view of the Earth from the Moon taken by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 back in August 1966 (see below).

The images were taken in the past few days by the MoonKAM camera system aboard NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft currently circling overhead in polar lunar orbit, and previously known as GRAIL A and B. The formation-flying probes are soaring over the Moon’s north and south poles.

The nearly identical ships were rechristened as Ebb and Flow after Fourth grade students from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Mont., won the honor to rename both spacecraft by submitting the winning entries in a nationwide essay competition sponsored by NASA.

“The Bozeman 4th graders had the opportunity to target the first images soon after our science operations began,” said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., to Universe Today.

“It is impossible to overstate how thrilled and excited we are !”

The initial packet of some 66 student-requested digital images from the Bozeman kids were taken by the Ebb spacecraft from March 15-17 and downlinked to Earth March 20. They sure have lots of exciting classwork ahead analyzing all those lunar features !

“GRAIL’s science mapping phase officially began on March 6 and we are collecting science data,” Zuber stated.

GRAIL’s science goal is to map our Moon’s gravity field to the highest precision ever. This will help deduce the deep interior composition, formation and evolution of the Moon and other rocky bodies such as Earth and also determine the nature of the Moon’s hidden core.

Engaging students and the public in science and space exploration plays a premier role in the GRAIL project. GRAIL is NASA’s first planetary mission to carry instruments – in the form of cameras – fully dedicated to education and public outreach.

Over 2,700 schools in 52 countries have signed up to participate in MoonKAM.

5th to 8th grade students can send suggestions for lunar surface targets to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission Operations Center at UC San Diego, Calif. Students will use the images to study lunar features such as craters, highlands, and maria while also learning about future landing sites.

NASA calls MoonKAM – “The Universe’s First Student-Run Planetary Camera”. MoonKAM means Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students.

The MoonKAM project is managed by Dr Sally Ride, America’s first female astronaut.

“What might seem like just a cool activity for these kids may very well have a profound impact on their futures,” Ride said in a NASA statement. “The students really are excited about MoonKAM, and that translates into an excitement about science and engineering.”

“MoonKAM is based on the premise that if your average picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture from lunar orbit may be worth a classroom full of engineering and science degrees,” says Zuber. “Through MoonKAM, we have an opportunity to reach out to the next generation of scientists and engineers. It is great to see things off to such a positive start.”

Altogether there are eight MoonKAM cameras aboard Ebb and Flow – one 50 mm lens and three 6 mm lenses. Each probe is the size of a washing machine and measures just over 3 feet in diameter and height.

Snapping the first images was delayed a few days by the recent series of powerful solar storms.

“Due to the extraordinary intensity of the storms we took the precaution of turning off the MoonKAMs until the solar flux dissipates a bit,” Zuber told me.

“GRAIL weathered the storm well. The spacecraft and instrument are healthy and we are continuing to collect science data.”

The washing-machine sized probes have been flying in tandem around the Moon since entering lunar orbit in back to back maneuvers over the New Year’s weekend. Engineers spent the past two months navigating the spaceship duo into lower, near-polar and near-circular orbits with an average altitude of 34 miles (55 kilometers) that are optimized for science data collection and simultaneously checking out the spacecraft systems.

Ebb and Flow were launched to the Moon on September 10, 2011 aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida and took a circuitous 3.5 month low energy path to the moon to minimize the overall costs.

The Apollo astronauts reached the Moon in just 3 days. NASA’s next generation Orion space capsule currently under development will send American astronauts back to lunar orbit by 2021 or sooner.

NASA has just granted an extension to the GRAIL mission. Watch for my follow-up report detailing the expanded science goals of GRAIL’s extended lunar journey.

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NASA Image of the Day: Hubble Sees Glittering Jewels of Messier 9

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over 250,000 individual stars shining in it. Messier 9, pictured here, is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical swarm of stars that lies around 25,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of the Milky Way, so close that the gravitational forces from the galactic center pull it slightly out of shape.

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If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan