#night sky notes

[kuiperkat]

June's Night Sky Notes: Constant Companions: Circumpolar Constellations, Part III

by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

In our final installment of the stars around the North Star, we look ahead to the summer months, where depending on your latitude, the items in these circumpolar constellations are nice and high. Today, we’ll discuss Cepheus, Draco, and Ursa Major. These objects can all be spotted with a medium to large-sized telescope under dark skies.

From left to right: Ursa Major, Draco, and Cepheus. Credit: Stellarium Web.

Herschel’s Garnet Star: Mu Cephei is a deep-red hypergiant known as The Garnet Star, or Erakis. While the star is not part of the constellation pattern, it sits within the constellation boundary of Cepheus, and is more than 1,000 times the size of our Sun. Like its neighbor Delta Cephei, this star is variable, but is not a reliable Cepheid variable. Rather, its brightness can vary anywhere between 3.4 to 5.1 in visible magnitude, over the course of 2-12 years.

This composite of data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope gives astronomers a new look for NGC 6543, better known as the Cat's Eye nebula. This planetary nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution that our sun may well experience several billion years from now. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI

The Cat’s Eye Nebula: Labeled a planetary nebula, there are no planets to be found at the center of this object. Observations taken with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescopes give astronomers a better understanding of this complex, potential binary star, and how its core ejected enough mass to produce the rings of dust. When searching for this object, look towards the ‘belly’ of Draco with a medium-sized telescope.

Bode's Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, and JPL-Caltech

Bode’s Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy: Using the arrow on the star map, look diagonal from the star Dubhe in Ursa Major. There you will find Bode’s Galaxy (Messier 81) and the Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82). Sometimes referred to as Bode’s Nebula, these two galaxies can be spotted with a small to medium-sized telescope. Bode’s Galaxy is a classic spiral shape, similar to our own Milky Way galaxy and our neighbor, Andromeda. The Cigar Galaxy, however, is known as a starburst galaxy type, known to have a high star formation rate and incredible shapes. This image composite from 2006 combines the power of three great observatories: the Hubble Space Telescope imaged hydrogen in orange, and visible light in yellow green; Chandra X-Ray Observatory portrayed X-ray in blue; Spitzer Space Telescope captured infrared light in red.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

May I ask why you dislike Malleus so much?

[My TWST character tier list is here.]

[For context on why I dislike Malleus: here and here!]

Many of the reasons previously cited above are still applicable presently (though some points may be outdated since those posts were written before book 7). In this post, I will mostly be focusing on why my thoughts on Malleus have not changed despite the new added content of book 7.

I ramble on for a bit, so I put my thoughts below the cut! Ah—but before you read, please be aware that these are my opinions and not meant to be disparaging to any Malleus likers out there.

Me disliking him should not take away any of your joy!! Go out there and love him for me ^^

A lot of the things happening in book 7 were a long time coming, so really I felt as though Malleus finally “losing it” was affirming of all the red flags from before. Since day 1, his loneliness, aloofness, and awkwardness around his peers were key traits of his. What book 7 does is it magnifies the darkest aspects of his character.

We’ve seen several examples when Malleus has fits of rage and his power flares out of control or he at least threatens it. In Glorious Masquerade, he becomes enraged at the realization that the invitation he received was a false one. In A Firelit Sky, he insinuates that he would be upset if people questioned his presence for the trip. He crushes Lilia’s phone in his own Dorm Uniform vignettes, destroying a friend’s belonging because he was upset about not being invited to an occasion. In book 7, we see a flashback of Malleus freezing the whole castle as a child because his grandmother, overtaken by her duties, could no longer dine with him as promised. Malleus’s temper has been a persistent issue since childhood.

We’ve also seen him act callously toward his classmates and misuse magic to force his will upon them. Remember him stopping time during Endless Halloween Night? How he wanted some ghosts to enjoy themselves instead of missing out on being with everyone for the holiday? Now he’s stopping time in book 7 and keeping everyone in their happy dreams forever. Remember how (in his Dorm Uniform vignettes) Malleus thought it would be easier to make the other dorm leaders come to him instead of him coming to them for their meeting? So then he disregards their autonomy and casts magic that’s normally cast on objects on living beings (something which the other dorm leaders take offense to, as it is dehumanizing). He fails to consider their perspective when he returns to Diasomnia (he basically goes, “well, I wouldn’t have been mad if they cast that spell on me!”). Malleus learns nothing from the experience despite Lilia trying to tell him over and over to be more considerate of others and how different they are from him. Now we have Malleus relating his peers to a virtual pet that he never ever wants to leave him.

Malleus can be stubborn and arrogant. He has a very single-minded way of thinking and often does not consider others’ feelings before he makes the decision for them. Malleus can be insecure. He doesn’t even fully realize he is lonely until Yuu suggests it in book 7, but he’s capable of acting on his bouts of intense emotion. He has always had these flaws, and now they are being brought out in full; we’re being forced to confront OB Malleus and all the complicated, twisting feelings of abandonment that come with him.

Let’s make one thing very clear: I don’t take issue with the overblot boys in general; they are meant to be morally grey characters that act in dubious ways. It would be insincere for me to claim “I dislike Malleus because he did bad things!” News flash, many TWST characters have done bad things or at least questionable things that would give you pause. What separates Malleus from the others and makes him egregious enough to earn significant ire from me is the particular actions he takes (which triggers a personal disdain of mine).

Malleus consistently exerts a scary amount of control over others. This is not a new idea; Riddle and Vil are also notorious for being oppressive or controlling, and I’ll be the first to admit that. (You’ll note that those two are low on my tier list too.) The thing is, Riddle and Vil were very overt and open about their demands for obedience. Malleus can be too, but it’s so insidious how he acts within the dreams. He ignores people’s autonomy, gaslights others, and, again, acts like he knows what’s best for them 💀 Other characters have done these things too, but never to the same scale or by exerting this much power. Malleus then resorts to violence when his lies don’t work, even though he’s fully aware of the power disparity between him and his peers. It feels particularly scummy to me because of how Malleus frames his selfish actions and feelings (his wish for Lilia to not leave) as selfless (for the benefit of his peers) and something everyone else would want in order to justify it to himself 💦 I know he is in (or bordering on) overblot so he wasn’t thinking rationally at that point, plus the fact that many examples I listed come from events or vignettes which may not be canon to the main story timeline. Still, there is a concerning pattern of behavior with Malleus misusing his powers or not being considerate of others and failing to grow from those mistakes. You can only go “oopsie” so many times before you harm someone by accident. I expect people to learn their lesson by then and adopt some proper restraint. He keeps claiming his intentions are good as if that’s supposed to dismiss any harm that results from his actions??? No, his actions still harmed people and he has to deal with the consequences of them, not have them hand-waved away or excused. The behavior I’m witnessing is reminiscent of like… having a toxic friend that is constantly told “hey, what you’re doing/saying makes me feel uncomfortable; do you think you could dial it back?” and the friend tells you they’ll try but then never actually changes their behavior or defends their behavior with “I didn’t mean to, so therefore I did not actually harm anyone”.

You can give me a backstory, but a backstory only goes so far as explaining why he is the way he is; it does not excuse him at all. You can say “He’s a fairy! He’s actually a child mentally! He's sheltered!” until the cows come home, but when he relies on magic to quickly fix the problems he caused instead of stopping to genuinely reflect on why people are mad at him, it’s hard for me to sympathize. Because of his immense power and status, the only person that can reasonably hold Malleus accountable is himself, and he has not demonstrated to me that he can do that.

Book 7 is essentially the payoff for allllll the tropes and traits I never liked to begin with coming into fruition. That’s why Malleus has stayed where he is in my TWST character ranking. I did not expect the writing, no matter how good or tear-jerking, to change that. Until Malleus shows that he’s fully apologetic, recognizes the error of his ways, and consciously tries to connect with others and understand their perspectives, he’s staying squarely where he is.

Am I saying a character with flaws is a bad thing? No, absolutely not! Flaws are what make a character interesting, I’m not faulting Malleus or any other characters for having them. Am I saying that he is poorly written? No, I think Malleus is actually quite a complex character and he’s been really fascinating to follow. I love the emotional complexity of book 7–and it was so clever how the devs related his virtual pet to wishing for happily ever afters for people in his real life. This magnitude of danger is also just about what I expect of book 7 and the themes of togetherness that TWST was angling for from the start. But the fact remains unchanged that I perceive his attitude as irritating at best and reprehensible at worst.

My distaste for Malleus is based entirely on my own views and life experiences. The specific flaws Malleus has and how he acts because of them don’t sit well with me and the kinds of things I enjoy in fiction. It’s not anything deeper than that!

[deltawebsistem]

Starry night over the Stonehenge Mads Peter Iversen Photography

[nightvale-thoughts]

i got to watch the total solar eclipse yesterday and all i could think of was the dark planet of awesome size, lit by no sun, an invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans…

[drawfee-quot3s]

yeah sorry i can't make it to the thing tonight, it's just that, um, airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars?

i'm sorry i can't make it to dinner tonight, i could really use a wish right now (wish right now)

- jacob + karina

[axololtls]

shot with Canon 1000D together with Tamron AF 55-200 f/4-5.6 Di II LD Macro lens. photo is also posted on my IG.

[teathattast]

call it so serendipitous

you and i in the same life

sounding so simultaneous

in the air tonight

[drxgonflyart]

Wonderstruck (by drxgonfly) Instagram | Etsy

Based on this Photo of mine

[deadpanwalking]

Good evening, why do you think americans are obsessed with Doctor Zhivago and what do you think of the novel?

I'm being charitable when I say that there are maybe five Russian books that John Liquor American can readily name, and all of them have been made into movies and/or musicals. With Zhivago, part of the reason it became a cultural touchstone so quickly has to do with the circumstances of its publication in the United States during the Cold War, closely followed by the epic David Lean film, in which Omar Sharif is so hot that it hardly matters that the movie itself is mid.

In regards to Zhivago's specific appeal to American sensibilities, I think a lot of it has to do with that adage about how an English language romance begins with a kiss and ends in a wedding, while a Russian language romance will begin with a kiss and end in Siberia. The weddings are fun but after all that stale cake, you want to want, and you want to be left wanting.

My relationship with Doctor Zhivago is that it's fundamental to my understanding of human dignity and human frailty. It is also a very nice love story.

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

alright. know what? with Secrets of the Obscure right around the corner and plenty of new Mists-related sky island settings coming with it, I'll just bite the bullet and interest-check a little something I've been turning in my head for a long, long while.

would YOU be interested in a Mists-based GW2 roleplay guild that uses a lore compliant multiverse system to allow canon, canon-adjacent, lore-breaking, and otherwise 'contradictory' muses to coexist in the same setting?

simply put: every writer's cast would be set in their own self-contained universe. as such, everyone could bring whatever muses they want with their own personal headcanons, and no one could dictate what is or isn't canon for anyone else. so long as your muses are GW2-based, you're good to go! bring your Commanders, bring your canon-divergent OCs, bring your canon muses-- and yes, even the ones that are 'supposed' to be dead. who can say what might have happened in a strange world far across the Mists, after all?

neutral hubs and in-character safety guardrails would be in place to keep all muses on a relatively even playing field regardless of their power, history, and prestige, too. play hardball if you like, but it might not end quite the way you'd hope. the main rule would be to maintain good OOC etiquette at all times: no godmodding, no metagaming, no theft, don't blend IC and OOC, and so-on.

if that sounds like something you might have interest in, please interact with this post! and if you've got questions or concerns, I'd love to hear them; feel free to send an ask or a DM, or just reply to this post!

[kuiperkat]

December’s Night Sky Notes: A Flame in the Sky – the Orion Nebula

by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

It’s that time of year again: Winter! Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the clear, crisp sky offers spectacular views of various objects, the most famous of all being Orion the Hunter.

As we’ve previously mentioned, Orion is a great way to test your sky darkness. With the naked eye, you can easily spot this hourglass-shaped constellation. Known as an epic hunter in Greco-Roman antiqity, Orion and all its parts have many names and meanings across many cultures. In Egyptian mythology, this constellation represented the god Sah. The Babylonians referred to it as The Heavenly Shepard. In most cultures, it is Orion’s Belt that has many stories: Shen in Chinese folklore, or Tayamnicankhu in Lakota storytelling. But the Maya of Mesoamerica believed that part of Orion contained The Cosmic Hearth – the fire of creation.

1,500 light years away from Earth sits the star-forming region, and crown jewel of Orion – Messier 42 (M42), the Orion Nebula. Part of the “sword” of Orion, this 24 light year wide cloud of dust and gas sits below the first star in Orion’s Belt, Alnitak, and can easily be spotted with the naked eye under moderate dark skies. You can also use binoculars or a telescope to resolve more details, such as the Trapezium: four stars in the shape of a keystone (or baseball diamond). These young stars make up the core of this magnificent object.

These Webb images show a part of the Orion Nebula known as the Orion Bar. It is a region where energetic ultraviolet light from the Trapezium Cluster — located off the upper-left corner — interacts with dense molecular clouds. The energy of the stellar radiation is slowly eroding the Orion Bar, and this has a profound effect on the molecules and chemistry in the protoplanetary disks that have formed around newborn stars here. The largest image, on the left, is from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument. At upper right, the telescope is focused on a smaller area using Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). A total of eighteen filters across both the MIRI and NIRCam instruments were used in these images, covering a range of wavelengths from 1.4 microns in the near-infrared to 25.5 microns in the mid-infrared. At the very center of the MIRI area is a young star system with a planet-forming disk named d203-506. The pullout at the bottom right displays a combined NIRCam and MIRI image of this young system. Its extended shape is due to pressure from the harsh ultraviolet radiation striking it. An international team of astronomers detected a new carbon molecule known as methyl cation for the first time in d203-506.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), PDRs4ALL ERS Team

But stars aren’t the only items visible here. In June 2023, JWST’s NIRCam and MIRI (mid-infrared instrument) imaged a developing star system with a protoplanetary disk forming around it. That’s right – a solar system happening in real time – located within the edges of a section called the Orion Bar. Scientists have named this planet-forming disk d203-506, and you can learn more about the chemistry found here. By capturing these objects in multiple wavelengths of light, astronomers now have even greater insight into what other objects might be hiding within these hazy hydrogen regions of our night sky. This technique is called Multi-spectral Imaging, made possible by numerous new space based telescopes.

In addition to the Night Sky Network Dark Sky Wheel, a fun activity you can share with your astronomy club would be Universe Discovery Guide: Orion Nebula, Nursery of Newborn Stars. This will allow you to explain to audiences how infrared astronomy, like JWST, helps to reveal the secrets of nebulae. Or you can use public projects like the NASA-funded MicroObservatory to capture M42 and other objects.

Stay tuned to learn more about what to spy in the Winter sky with our upcoming mid-month article!

[raplele]

holy fuck this is gas

[skydigiblogs]

ykw i just realized i haven't actually posted about the shit i liked about ghost game and i was thinking about like.

gammamon and gulusgammamon's relationship today???

the resolution of that whole thing really made me and my system happy, because one of us was literally in the middle of writing an essay about how no one ever does the "superpowered evil side" trope right, yeah?

ghost game is literally the only time i think they've ever done it alright from a system's perspective

mostly because while yeah, that whole conflict comes to a head at the climax of the series, it also doesn't end in some annoying shit where either gammamon Learns To Control His Evil Side (functionally destroying gulus) or Finds A Better Higher Power (technically he does as siriusmon but), he just goes DUDE YOU NEED TO CHILL and gulus grumpily obliges after getting the shit kicked out of him.

i'm pretty sure i've seen a few systems right more in-depth posts about this here on tumblr but like... yeah...

gammamon system my beloved

[justsalpals]

Here's a funny thing about me and shipping. I crave the slow burn.

It's hard for me to get invested in a relationship when the writers clearly intend for the characters to get together from the beginning. Even in the slowest of slow burns when it comes to "canon" relationships, it doesn't hit right for me. Because there's always at least a little bit of a romantic gaze between the characters from the start, tinting their storyline from the beginning. They exist in that relationship explicitly as part of their stories.

Which is fine! I find plenty of ships like this to be cute and fun, and fully support people who are into them.

But those aren't the ones I go feral for. Those relationships don't have me reading 100k fanfic late into the night, or hunting down whatever meta analysis I can sink my teeth into.

I crave a full picture of characters, who they are outside of each other, their own personal goals and arcs, all laid atop a foundation of a deep and complex relationship before romance even comes into it.

And THEN I hit em with the non-platonic feelings.

It's the sort of relationship that comes far more naturally to fanfiction, where the original foundation is already laid out, and very very rarely to canon ships.

Which is why it's so special to me that I think I'm getting the most fully realized version of this, in canon, slow burn, beautiful and complex and with a full foundation, in Suvi and Ame.

Who knows, maybe they won't get together. And since I know Aabria lurks around corners here, I'd like to stress that it not being canon would be absolutely fine and still a fantastic story at the whims of the players/writers. (After all, as mentioned above, I'm well versed in the worlds of fanfic and getting my ship fix there where it does not fit in canon.)

And if they do get together? Oh baby, I hope it's not for a long time. I hope they don't acknowledge or voice it aloud for so many arcs to come. I hope I finally have the canon slowest of burns epic lesbian love story of my dreams.

[rooolt]

The concept of lark finding out “what the doodler wants” and then shattering it before anyone else can know is sooooo fascinating to me because the way I’ve always read it the doodler doesn’t want anything. To me, the doodler was horrifying because it was not an all powerful malicious entity with goals or wants, but a faceless brainless force of nature that was so strong it’s mere presence in the world spelled destruction. Like never once in the podcast has the doodler shown any agency or intent, every action in service of it even in amod seemed entirely motivated and verbalized by its acolytes. We know from amod that the doodler thrives of the concept of randomness and to me that’s all it ever was. It was so heavily entrenched in the random and chaos that it physically could not have wants or desires for power because it would so be against its very nature. That’s why the doodler was scary to me, because it could not be manipulated or tricked like a person could, it was simple raw destructive horrifying power, and I don’t think the lark stuff disproves that. What if that is the truth, what if the doodler doesn’t want anything? If you’re lark, a person who feels crushing responsibility for this disaster and you find out that it is no different in intent than a hurricane, does that not terrify you? Does that not instill in you a fear that if anyone else found out they would feel so powerless against it that they would just give up? They’d give up and the world would end and it would be your fault. This was not the all powerful creature 11 year old you thought it was, the one he wanted to fight to prove his strength, this is pure entropy and chaos and randomness and destruction and no one else can know lest they stop fighting? Is the fighting fruitless, who even knows, but at least it fools you into thinking you’re making a difference.

[dragonskyheart]

Mew and Note Meet!

I thought I would draw Mew and Note meeting. I kind of consider Note to be the Mew of the Rhythm Heaven series! Mostly in the sense that notes are elusive species that doesn't really interact with humanity, has a small population, is playful, has possibly existed for a long time, and is either possibly divine or has divine connections. (Most of these are headcanons but shut up...) So, I decided to draw them together!

Date Started: 2/4/2024 (Was finished on the same date)

Without the Night Overlay thing cause why not