#cloud complex

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Rho Ophiuchi Composite

This is a composite image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope. Pictured is Rho Ophiuchi, at a distance of about 390 light-years from Earth. Rho Ophiuchi is a cloud complex filled with gas and stars of different sizes and ages.

[wigmund]

Photo with annotations

2025 May 27

Zeta and Rho Ophiuchi with Milky Way Image Credit & Copyright: Ireneusz Nowak

Explanation: Behold one of the most photogenic regions of the night sky, captured impressively. Featured, the band of our Milky Way Galaxy runs diagonally along the bottom-left corner, while the colorful Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex is visible just right of center and the large red circular Zeta Ophiuchi Nebula appears near the top. In general, red emanates from nebulas glowing in the light of excited hydrogen gas, while blue marks interstellar dust preferentially reflecting the light of bright young stars. Thick dust usually appears dark brown. Many iconic objects of the night sky appear, including (can you find them?) the bright star Antares, the globular star cluster M4, and the Blue Horsehead nebula. This wide field composite, taken over 17 hours, was captured from South Africa last June.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250527.html

[shitpostingkats]

Cloud actually did a very bad job emulating Zack's persona, because the defining trait of Cloud-as-Zack is "cool", and Zack wasn't actually cool but he was to Cloud. Zack views Cloud getting to live as a relief and Cloud views it as a curse. Zack thinks saving Cloud was his One Good Thing and Cloud thinks of Zack as the ideal hero and himself as the Mistake. Zack would probably been overjoyed when Cloud recovered his memories because up until his death Zack never really came to terms with The Concept Of Zack Fair, but we know he loved The Person That Is Cloud Strife.

[rockettgraphics]

(via Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex Framed Art Print by HeadRubble)

[wildfey]

Actually I do find the contrast between Phoenix Larry and Edgeworth very funny when it comes to the class trial.

Phoenix considers it the defining moment of his childhood, and takes from it the feeling of being alone and needing support and to be defended (it also is massively influential when it comes to his relationship with Edgeworth).

Larry does remember and feels a bit guilty about it (enough to eventually confess) but also... he's done worse. And hey, in his mind at least he made up for it

Edgeworth... barely remembers. He needs reminding. It's not important to him. You could say that with everything else that's happened in his life that this is a footnote. You could also point out that this kid wore a bow tie to school and spent his whole life talking about how much he loves his lawyer dad. This is not the only time he got his money stolen I think.

[cookie-kat777]

4 Minutes and the Great Depression

Now that we have seen Great's experiences in the original timeline and get to see more of Great's "true" character, I feel like people are really misunderstanding him and his behavior. I see a lot in the tags about his actions being that of a spoiled and selfish asshole rich kid--and he probably is--but I think there is more going on here.

Maybe people aren't seeing it because they haven't personally experienced this, or at least not in this particular way, but I have: Great is depressed.

Depression doesn't always present as rotting in bed and being unable to perform basic self-care. Sometimes depression can look like a generally functional person, who underneath the facade is numb, self-destructive, apathetic and overall disregarding of his or her own well-being. Depression can feel like you are anesthetized to reality, like there is a barrier between you and the world around you. You aren't fully present, things don't fully feel real; even your reaction time can be slower (ex. Manee, Dome, Nan).

I believe that Great doesn't appear to care about anything that's happening because he is experiencing all of the above, and is also maybe a little manic (judging from his impulsiveness).

There are clues that he is indeed affected by what is going on: he can't sleep, he needs anti-anxiety meds, he's drinking alone. He doesn't express this more obviously because, as we've seen, no one in his life really gives a shit about him. Not his parents, not his friends. Who is he going to talk about his feelings with? Korn might be the exception, and we do see that they spend time together, but Korn also has a lot going on; he doesn't have a ton of time for Great.

It seems like Great has been emotionally neglected for quite some time. He desires acceptance, love and attention from his parents so badly, but he only ever gets scorned and rejected. A situation like that is the perfect cocktail for depression.

The biggest indicator for me that this is not some cut-and-dry case of rich kid entitlement is that, in the 4 minutes timeline, Great expresses a different personality. He is not just going over his past decisions that led him to this point of near-death and correcting them, he is also adorning these visions with the things his heart yearns for. He gets to be softer, more open, more vulnerable. He reaches out for connection, care and intimacy with another person and finds it returned. He (ironically) starts to come more alive again inside as the clock ticks closer to his death.

I think 4-minutes Great is who Great could be (or thinks he could be) if given the opportunity. Someone who is braver, more upstanding, more gentle, more sensitive. Someone who gets to go on cute dates with cute boys and take home matching cat doll souvenirs. Someone who gets to have tender sex in a glamping tent with soft lighting.

Anyway, I'm not bringing all of this up to excuse his actions or defend him. I just think Great has a few more layers than people might be giving him credit for.

[quiltofstars]

ρ Ophiuchi and the reflection nebula IC 4604 // Brian Diaz & Dark Matters Astrophotography

[thrivingwhilemultiple]

Who I was changed regularly, faces coming and going without warning; I was so many, too many, thus I wound up being nobody. Nothing stayed static — I never stayed static — there was no starting point. We were a jumbled, erratic galaxy, a constantly-shifting kaleidoscope of constellations, incapable of being neatly filed into a list.

[durgeapologist]

Omg your blog is such a relief. Every day I feel more and more like I want to distance myself from about 80% of the Solavellan community bc I am telling you it is ROUGH being into the egg and wanting to talk about him but being surrounded by people who think that everyone and their mother is out to get them. Meanwhile someone can come up with valid criticisms about how Lavellan's characterization was handled in VG and get swarmed with unsolicited opinions about solrook shippers and accusations of misogyny. I also see them running around in posts that are clearly marked as "Critical" And half the time when I CAN talk to them about Solas it's like they aren't even talking about the same character I am? They want him to be some helpless little abuse victim who isn't responsible for anything he does??? Why are we redeeming him if he did nothing wrong? What would be the point? We love him because he's fucked up and a manipulative bastard but also complex???? Did we play the same game girlies???

i have been staring at this ask since it came in trying to find a normal way to respond to you anon i will be so fr rn so i am so sorry it's taken a few hours

i’ll start with this:

“Why are we redeeming him if he did nothing wrong?”

full stop. this. so much. (i am in love with you anon) why is there a atonement/redemption ending if he did nothing wrong? (you’re literally so real) solas has done horrendous things. like genuinely abhorrent. (i crave to be your friend so bad anon) he is a genocidal, serial killing, manipulative lying cunt. to say the least. AND THAT IS WHY I LOVE HIM. he has such complex characteristics that make him so intriguing. he wants to be a good person. but he doesn’t really know how to be genuine. he is riddled with guilt and regret. he feels BAD about the things he has done. but he doesn’t want to face his mistakes. he knows he has done absolutely terrible things in the name of his people and their liberation, things most of them never asked him to do. some even asked him to NOT DO THOSE THINGS. did he listen? of course not! this is solas we are talking about. arrogant, prideful, calculating solas.

“They want him to be some helpless little abusive victim who isn’t responsible for anything he does.”

yes. yep. THIS SO BAD. (genuinely let me be your friend pls i am on my knees begging) the dynamic between solythal gets convoluted by most solasmancers because of three things: misogyny, jealousy, and ignorance. was there abuse? yeah. not denying that. was there only abuse? no. mythal was a victim of abuse herself. the way she learned to love, she passed down to solas. BOTH were victims of abuse who did terrible, no good, awful things. BOTH were also extremely powerful, omnipotent, and power-hungry individuals. mythal's hunger for power showcased differently than solas' and was amplified (IMO) by elgar'nan whispering in her ear. solas had felassan to keep him in check.

i am of the UPMOST certainty that had solas not taken down the evanuris the way he did and went to sleep after creating the veil, he would have become another tyrant ruling over the elven people. (THE MASKED EMPIRE ANYONE? HELLO? HELLOOOOO?) also anyone who says she was his MOTHER or SISTER?? god please drown me. put me in a tub and hold my head under water. that was his PARTNER AND HIS LOVER. i cannot with the takes that she raised his ass COME ON. i have sooooo much more to say about this dynamic and the themes of abuse AND how solasmancers twist it to make her this most evil, vile, horrible woman; but i would like to keep some of my followers tbh (anon i am frothing at the mouth if you want to discuss this further i beg you to dm me) so we shall move on.

"...valid criticisms about how Lavellan's characterization was handled in VG..."

yeah full stop i will never forgive them for making her one personality type. sorry, i just won't. my lavellan egg-mancer was a strong-willed and angry proud dalish woman who told solas off every chance she could! i am genuinely so happy people who wanted the dynamic we got in VG got that, because that is how their lavellan is/was, but what about the lavs who punched him? who told him to stop being an asshole about elves, and just farmed approval for the romance by asking questions? i chose to hunt his ass down BECAUSE I WANTED TO HUNT HIS ASS DOWN! my lavellan would not be so understanding or forgiving, she just wouldn't, so it feels like my girl's personality was ripped away from her fr. now, i DO NOT agree with some of the takes on how she was presented because those criticisms are in fact riddled with misogyny and most are just downright vile. but i do agree with the criticisms that not all lavellans would have been so kind to that bald man.

so anon, TRUST me when i say i feel you so bad. i was in lots of solavellan spaces before i started shipping dreadrook, and even then i was looked at SO funny for my takes on the romance and called plenty of terrible things simply because i didn't hold solas up on this pedestal and make my lav worship the ground he walked on. even as a dreadrooker, the same exact takes that i couldn't get behind in solav spaces are very prevalent in dreadrook spaces. solasmancers have a tendency to simply agree with solas on everything and refuse to acknowledge how bad of a person he really can be.

i am a proud solasmancer AND a proud solas hater. #1 solas hater, in fact. i rarely have positive things to say about his actions and behaviors outside of a joke setting, and even in a joke setting the things people will say to defend him RUB ME SO BADLY THE WRONG WAY. also heavy on the perusing the "critical" tags and getting offended when my takes are, in fact, critical LMFAO. anon i am literally a beggar sitting on the side of the street waving a metal cup at you asking for coins of your affection rn. i have maybe one other friend who feels like this and have hardly anyone to rant about these things with. holding my hands out towards you and begging you to dm me fr. PLEASE. we can be critical together <3

[cerasus--flores]

i have many thoughts of varying purity about webtoon dkos but there's one thing about him on a character design level that really stands out to me

the defining traits of the demon king are his horns and his wings. there's the claws and eyes and the recent pointy ear addition but they're negligible, the two traits he always has are his horns and his wings, and on his og design they're just sorta... there.

on the webtoon? his wings and horns are massive. the horns are the lenght of his face and the wings could fit people inside them. they're really large proportionally, cause dokja's body is still its regular size, and that's because of what they mean.

those traits are the identifying visual markers of the 73rd demon king and the demon king of salvation, which are both roles that are "larger than life". too big for a mere incarnation or a simple human. and right now kdj is just an incarnation! a human still! it's the whole point of it all.

his demonic attributes are too big on him because he's still too human. he's still too small; he's not enough of a threat, not inhumane enough to fit into his wings. so even though he has horns and claws and wings he's still tiny. he's still dressed in purity white. he's still asking to be killed. and he could grow into his wings, he can become that grand demon king, that grand constellation.

he just needs to let his human self die first.

[eremikayearner]

⋆｡°🎧ྀི.⊹₊ ⋆ yes, all my favourite characters are hard to understand. no, i don’t think that says anything about me.

[tohruies]

karasu 🥺

[rimouskis]

not to be a boomer but does it make you sad that we won't get concert crowds like this anymore

[dystopediapod]

Final Fantasy VII: Corporate Greed, Climate Collapse, and the Fight for Survival

A few months ago, we explored the dystopian themes of the revolutionary 1997 game Final Fantasy 7. What seemed on the surface as just another video game, it serves as a dire warning about mankind's negligence and lack of foresight exploiting the planets lifeforce in the pursuit of power and profit. 

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE

[thepastisalreadywritten]

The Year’s Most Spectacular Photos from the James Webb Telescope

By Jeffrey Kluger

December 22, 2023

Close to 1,500 light years from Earth lie a pair of baby stellar twins known as Herbig-Haro 46/47 — which are barely a few thousand years old.

A star the size of our sun, by contrast, takes an average of 50 million years to reach even the stellar equivalent of young adulthood It's Herbig-Haro 46/47's extreme youth that gives the formation more of a blob-like appearance than the stellar duo it is.

Young stars are buried in clouds of dust and gas, which they absorb as they grow. Sometimes, however the infant stars ingest too much material too fast.

When that happens, dust and gas erupts from both sides of the formation, giving the young pair their misshapen look.

But if you have patience — 50 million years worth of patience — what is a blob today will be stars tomorrow.

NASA, ESA, CSA. Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

A pair of brilliant stellar nurseries located 1,600 light years from Earth, the Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster are home to a relative handful of very young but very bright stars.

Four of the stars are easy to see with a simple, amateur, four-inch telescope.

One of the four — the beast of the young litter — is especially visible, a full 20,000 times brighter than our sun.

Apart from their four main stars, the Orion Nebula and Trapezium cluster contain approximately 700 additional young stars at various stages of gestation.

NASA, ESA, CSA/Science leads and image processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

(L): It’s not easy being a Wolf-Rayet star, like this specimen imaged by the Webb telescope at a distance of 15,000 light years.

A rare species of stellar beast — NASA estimates there are only 220 of them in a Milky Way galaxy with at least 100 billion stars — the Wolf-Rayet burns hot and burns fast, with temperatures 20 to 40 times the surface of the sun.

All of that rapidly expended energy causes the star to lose its hydrogen envelope quickly and expose its helium core.

The result: a very early and very violent death.

A star like our sun burns for about 10 billion years. As for a Wolf-Rayet? Just a few hundred thousand before it dissolves into cosmic dust.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

(R): If the Wolf-Rayet star dies an ugly and violent death, the celebrated Ring Nebula, photographed by the Webb at a distance of 2,000 light years from Earth, has been expiring beautifully.

The glowing remains of a sun-like star, the nebula was discovered in 1779 by the French astronomer Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix.

As the nebula throws off its outer layers of ionized gas, it reveals its characteristic blue interior, composed of hydrogen and oxygen that have not yet been expelled off by the nebula’s stellar wind.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow (University College London), N. Cox (ACRI-ST), R. Wesson (Cardiff University)

Dwarf galaxy NGC 6822 lives up to to its name — home to just 10 million stars, compared to the minimum of 100 billion in the Milky Way.

But what NGC 6822 lacks in numbers, it makes up in spectacle — which the keen eye of the Webb telescope has revealed.

Discovered in 1884 by American astronomer E.E Barnard, NGC 6822, is now known to have a prodigious dust tail measuring 200 light years across..

What's more, it's home to a dense flock of stars that glow 100,000 times brighter than our sun.

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Meixnev

Spiral galaxies are often defined by uneven — and even ragged — arms.

But not galaxy M51, which lies 27 million light years from Earth and is defined by the tautness of its arms and the compactness of its structure.

M51 isn't alone in space. Nearby lies the companion galaxy NGC 5195.

The two galaxies are engaged in something of a gravitational tug of war — one that the NGC 5195 is winning.

NGC's constant gravitational pull is thought to account for both the tightly woven structure of M51's arms and for tidal forces that are thought lead to the creation of new stars in the arms.

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team

Just below Orion’s belt lies one of the most celebrated objects in the night sky: the Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery that is home to about 700 young stars.

This Webb image focuses not on the entirety of the nebula but on a structure in the lower left-hand quadrant known as the Orion Bar.

So named because of its diagonal, ridge-like appearance, the bar is shaped by the powerful radiation of the hot, young stars surrounding it.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), and the PDRs4All ERS Team

A baby by stellar standards, the IC 348 Star cluster is just five million years old and located about 1,000 light years from Earth.

Composed of an estimated 700 stars, IC 348 has a structure similar to wispy curtains, created by dust that reflects the light of the stars.

The conspicuous loop in the right hand side of the image is likely created by the gusting of solar winds blowing in the direction that, from Earth, would be west to east.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA)

When it comes to galaxies, there's big and then there's huge and by any measure, Pandora's Cluster — more formally, known as Abell 2744 — qualifies as the latter.

Not just a galaxy, and not even a cluster of galaxies, Abell 2744 is a cluster of four clusters, which long ago collided with one another.

Located 3.5 billion light years from Earth, Pandora's Cluster measures a staggering 350 million years across.

The cluster's massive collective gravity allows astronomers to use it as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying the light of foreground objects, making them easier to study.

NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology) and R. Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh). Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Webb was built principally to look at the oldest and most distant objects in the universe, some of 13.4 billion light years away.

But doesn't prevent the telescope from peering into its own back yard.

This image of Saturn and some of its 146 moons, rivals the images obtained by the Pioneer and Voyager probes.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Matt Tiscareno (SETI Institute), Matt Hedman (University of Idaho), Maryame El Moutamid (Cornell University), Mark Showalter (SETI Institute), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Heidi Hammel (AURA). Image processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)

Infant stars are born all over the universe, but the closest stellar birthing suite to Earth is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, located just 460 light years distant.

A turbulent — even violent — place, Rho Ophiuchi is defined by jets of gas roaring from young stars.

Most of the stars in this comparatively modest nursery are more or less the size of the sun.

But one, known as S1, is far bigger — so much so that it is self-immolating, carving a great cavity around itself with its stellar wind, the storm of charged particle's all stars emit, though few with the gale-force power of S1.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

[khattikeri]

i think the whole "jin guangyao cares more for his male best friend's life than for those of his own wife and son" thing, beyond being fun xiyao fuel, has a lot of interesting implications in the way jin guangyao latches onto lan xichen as an ideal to aspire to.

ultimately jin guangyao liked lan xichen's status and power more than he cared for qin su, a woman who sincerely loved him and fought her parents to be with him even when he had no real status or backing, and jin rusong*, who couldn't have been more than four when he was murdered for politics' sake.