CosmoQuest

@cosmoquest.org

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Explore our universe. Map other worlds. Put science in your brain. Home to Escape Velocity Space News, AstronomyCast, 365 Days of Astronomy. Support indie science journalism & community science at patreon.cosmoquest.org

Starship 13 on pad waiting to launch with cloudy skies and a wet landscape.
Please go to https://patreon.cosmoquest.org/posts/pride-flag-but-162620451 for a complete description
The black wedge is the darkness of space pricked with stars and galaxies while the brown shows healthy soil with a single leaf. Credits: Glan Carrie on Unsplash, ESA/NASA/CSA/the JADES Collaboration
A pride flag that has for its green strip a section of an aurora photo by Chris Marquardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/nubui/13092548463
Yellow is the color of the Sun, which supports all life... at least when it comes to the Pride flag. Our real Sun is technically white, but our atmosphere makes it look yellow. Science sometimes lacks poetry. In science, yellow is doubly ionized Oxygen and warm gas in the Rosetta Nebula.
The intersex pride flag with the top band of red replaced is a section of the horsehead nebula, which is a star marked band of red with a cloud of dust and gas blocking light and making a silhouette of a horse.
From NASA: In the centre is an elliptical galaxy, seen as an oval-shaped glow around a small bright core. Around this is wrapped a broad band of light, appearing like a spiral galaxy stretched and warped into a ring, with bright blue lines drawn through it where the spiral arms have been stretched into circles. A few distant objects are visible around the ring on a black background.
Astronauts on the Chinese space station in blue flight suits giving a thumbs up
A screen capture of our watch party
Starship seen from a drone in a bank of fog.
A photo taken just as the Artemis II SLS rocket clears its towers. It looks like a bullet being fired on the other side of a bay during the golden hour. If only this were the only bullet-shaped thing in our world!
The Moon is framed in the window of the Orion Capsule
The contrails of the destroyed Kairos rocket
A 2018 image of the International Space Station against a background of clouds and sea.
In the lower left of a black square there is a large yellow disk with the words "Patreon Creator Ambassador" circling Patreon's logo P. Above and to the right is CosmoQuest's logo, which is a white moon with grey craters and a bright yellow X in the style of the X on a pirate map. It's meant to look like a world orbiting a star.
A scan of an old amber and white photo of Thortveit. He is in a suit and tie with a vest. A balding man, he has a magnificent mustache that tries to hide an unsmiling mouth.
Quoter from USGS page: The rare Sc mineral thortveitite, (Sc,Y)2Si2O7, occurs as ??m- to mm-sized crystals in fluorite-bearing granitic pegmatites and the host melagabbro within the Crystal Mountain fluorite deposit, Ravalli County, Montana. Thortveitite is found as colorless and clear to smoky and translucent, subhedral to euhedral prisms up to 3 mm in length in the massive fluroite, as mm-sized anhedra to subhedra in diopside and edenite, and as ??m-sized droplet-like crystals in actinolite. Micrometric textures suggest that some thortveitite exsolved from actinolite, which contains between 1.2 and 2.9 wt.% Sc2O3. The source of the Sc is believed to be magmatic. The physical, optical and crystallographic properties of thortveitite are described. -from Authors
Image credit: Jessa and Mark Anderson, Flickr, CC-BY-SA-2.0. Atop a black background sit a stunning gold and Tugtupite necklace. The Tugtupire appears as a large mottled pink rectangle with gold seen at the top and bottom. To the right is a slice of a Tugtupite rock with a white vein and brownish outer layer.
A round cut Pollucite crystal. This is a multi-faceted 8.4 Carat gem. Credit gemrockauctions.com/learn/a-z-of-gemstones/pollucite
Image credit Rob Lavinsky. This is a whiteish, lumpy, imperfect, crystal that looks a lot like a badly cast rocket capsule. It has a weird orange inclusion along a facet that runs up the middle of the front. Honestly, this looks like someone tried to cast Orion in resin and had a bad day.