1782

Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Parts of it are just watching things happen, and then there are interactive sequences like docking with the LEM and landing. It’s a must-have for space fans, but it’s the “wow, this is what it looked like to do this” aspect, not the game aspects, that make it great.

The one I really enjoyed was the initial demo of Go for Launch: Mercury. The alpha demo is Alan Shepard’s ballistic flight, and you have about as much control as he did (you can spin around when you reach space), but if you turn off the music, it’s amazing to see and hear what he experienced. The real audio from the launch is played as you go through the sequence from launch to reeentry.

It’s alpha now, but I supported it and am anxious for the full game!

1783

It’s one of the few games I have returned on Steam. As a VR experience it just made me ill once it started moving the camera around. Doing a circle pan around the rocket was… not fun.

1784

Not really an issue for me, as I don’t get motion sickness. I have yet to try anything in VR that has felt anything more than eerie, and that includes a rollercoaster simulator.

1785

Any of you lucky enough to see burning re-entry last night that was from a Chinese Long March 7 rocket?

Videos and pics here

1786

It’s Perseid time! Going to be a NASA live stream, apparently, starting at 10 PM Eastern on both Aug 11 and 12.

1787

Going out on a limb here and predicting cloudy conditions here tonight.

1788

Holy freaking crap. That looks incredible.

1789

That’s what we got in Pittsburgh. :(

1790

Here too :( Started raining at 8:00 pm and didn’t stop until 7:00 a.m. Missed the entire peak.

Supposed to be crystal clear tonight though. Hoping we can at least get a minor consolation show.

1791

I went out last night from midnight - 1am PST, and saw about 5 meteors in that hour. They were very bright meteors though - one was so bright it cast shadows. Did anyone else go out?

1792

Clouds. ::sigh::

1793

I tried to get up and go out – even had my alarm set. But when the alarm went off I glared at it and went back to sleep.

More meteors tonight!

1794

Not really space, but no other thread to put it (maybe I’m easily impressed but I couldn’t help but think Wow.)

https://youtu.be/2PbUjTxiyNQ

1795

More data from Tabby’s star: It’s still getting weirder and harder to explain.

1796

If you’re a Seattle-area QT3er, you might like this NASA photo of the Olympic Peninsula, with the entire Seattle metropolitan area visible at the top. Taken from the ISS. Pretty freaking amazing. It’s crazy how you can see the strip-mall awfullness of Aurora Avenue/Highway 99 from that far away.

(click on the photo for full size; it’s about 8,000 pixels wide).

1797

Earth-like planet only 4.25 light-years away

1798

Never realized the Olympics were actually just a big mesa.

1799

Angular sizes are wild like that. Most humans have good enough eyes to make out a 300m skyscraper from the ~700km slant range I’d expect for a picture from low earth orbit, were it not for the ground clutter and the atmosphere. If you stand a penny on its edge and look down on it from standing height, it’s only about twice as large in terms of angular size as the aforementioned building (assuming you’re about 5’10").

1800

Eddorian Galaxy found?

Much of the universe is made of dark matter, the unknowable,
as-yet-undetected stuff that barely interacts with the “normal” matter
around it. In the Milky Way, dark matter outnumbers regular matter by
about 5 to 1, and very tiny dwarf galaxies are known to contain even more of the stuff. But
now scientists have found something entirely new: a galaxy with the
same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy’s star
power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark
matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many. The galaxy Dragonfly 44, described in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters,
is 300 million light years away. If scientists can track down a similar
galaxy closer to home, however, they may be able to use it to make the
first direct detection of dark matter.

1801

These posters are awesome: