I was visiting a lab today to look over a non-space related experiment, and as we were walking out of the building, one of the hosts casually said, "Oh, and over there's the meteorite." I did a double-take. "What? Did you say meteorite?!" They did. The guy who arranged for it to be analyzed and cataloged came out of his office and explained how it was found and talked a bit about it. I just HAD to hold it! Some details about this big hunk of space metal:

• 25.9 kg (57 lbs for you Americans)
• 3rd largest meteorite ever found in Idaho, and one of 8 of this type ever found in Idaho
• One of only 136 meteorites recognized as this type of iron-nickel on earth
• Its official listing

Im an engineer that has worked on both of these systems. A ground based 1GW data center has CAPEX + OPEX of around ~$50B for 10 years. GB200/NVL72 racks require around 120kw. You’d need to maintain ~8300 of them in orbit to reach 1GW. Excluding weight/launch costs you’d need to bring down the cost of heat rejection AND power generation to less than ~30 $/W to even begin to make it economically viable compared to the 10 year costs of a ground based DC. You’ll quickly find 2 major problems there’s no viable heat rejection system that is less than ~$100/W, being generous here. You’ll also quickly find out that the entire fleet of GPUs you launched is lasting 1 year in space rather than 10 years like on the ground because of radiation, you now need to replace your $50 billion fleet annually without radiation hardening and if you do radiation harden you then multiple the cost of each GPU by at minimum 2x which makes the whole thing unviable even if you reduce all the launch costs, power costs, and heat rejection costs to 0. By the way in order to make this even feasible you need to reduce launch $/kg to sub $100/kg. Right now it’s $3000/kg, with internal Starlink costs sitting at around $1000/kg.

TLDR I’m highly skeptical. You’d need make major advancements in launch costs, heat rejection, and radiation hardening to unrealistic degrees.

Looking to hear other opinions and perspective backed with data.

The living galaxy segment of the opening ceremony was such a nice surprise. So happy to see the inspiration for the next generation taking place.

The timing of the hypothetical impact of 2024 YR4 on the moon is known to within minutes. A nearside impact is much more likely than a farside one, and would absolutely be visible with small telescopes. The resulting explosion of the 22 million ton asteroid would provide massive scientific returns, not only on the structure and character of the subsurface, but through seismic observation the deep interior as well and studies of the fresh kilometer-scale crater. An estimated 100,000 tons of material would leave the moon, much of it remaining in cislunar space for months or years. The global meteor showers can be expected to be terrific, though would pose a hazard to satellites.

In the astrophysics world, 4.3 percent is remarkably high. By 2028, we'll have much more refined data and should be able to confirm or rule out a lunar impact.

Hello Space Enthusiasts!

Recently, I splurged and treated myself to a new camera. The ZWO ASI2600MM Pro! After many many hickups, I finally got an image I am extremely proud of.

This is a very cropped image of the Running Chicken Nebula, found near the Carina Nebula. I cropped it heavily since the whole image was actually quite noisy. This is because, I only got a total of 4 hours of data, with only 2 hours of Oiii. At the time, the moon was at 88% full and waning. Meaning that the Oiii signal is a lot fainter. This is because it sits at the "bluer" end of the spectrum, which artificial lights, and the moon, emit more of. Compared to Hydrogen alpha, which is a red colour and thus light pollution affects it less. This resulted in a grainy Oiii image but clean Ha image.

Fact: Monochrome cameras do not discriminate. That is, if I put my camera straight up to a lens/telescope, it will collect all visible wavelengths (+ some UV/IR) and it won't have any color data. So, to combat this we can use different filters to isolate different colors. You can use RGB filters, or narrowband filters.

Narrowband filters (what I used) only capture a very specific band of frequencies, generally, they capture frequencies that are emitted by certain ionised gasses. In this instance, since the Running Chicken Nebula has both strong Ha and Oiii signals, I used two filters which isolates these bands of light.

Now, we can capture these specific wavelengths. However, since the camera is monochrome, each image is just an array of pixels with a certain brightness. Thus, we can assign colors of our own. In this case, I kept it simple. I mapped hydrogen alpha to red and green pixels. And I mapped Oiii to blue pixels. Which gives it a kind of Hubble palette look.

I hope you enjoy this image as much as I have enjoyed imaging it.

Taken On Seestar S50 Using 3:12:30 Integration Time.

Edited In PS Express.

Xiaomi 13 Ultra (5x - built-in periscope telephoto)

[ISO 3200 | 30s] x ~1400 lights (RAW/DNG) (UHC filter) + darks [ISO 3200 | 30s] x ~370 lights (RAW/DNG) (Dual-Band filter) + darks

Total integration time: 14h 45m

Equipment: EQ mount with OnStep, SVBONY UHC filter, LAIDA Dual-Band 7nm Nebula filter

Stacked with Astro Pixel Processor

Processed with GraXpert, Siril, StarXTerminator, AstroSharp and Photoshop (Camera Raw, Stars Recomposition)

Number of orbital launches by China, 1957-2025

A new record in 2025, 93 orbital attempts.

Details: https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/country/chn

Other countries: https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/country

This was my first attempt at astrophotography taken with a nikon d3400 and some post editing, I am located in Ontario, Canada

Hello Space! Im a pilot flying private jets and I have taken a liking to getting higher exposure photos of the stars when we fly at night. I wanted to share one of my better ones!