Engage psudo-science/fiction : So, when you decelerate out of FTL, aren’t you going to give off a lot of Cherenkov Radiation, and doesn’t the transition from hyperspace to realspace carry over a lot of tachyon/dark-matter particles that have to get shed from the ship in a ‘discharging’ action in the relative proximity to a gravity well? And the photons from our gravity well are simply trailing them behind the ship ship and triggering a refraction effect to make it look like a comet tail?

Ok, enough of that, but a boy can dream…

… What ever it is, its gorgeous, and I hope we can get better pictures of it, if not establish communications

Click here to see a larger version [nasa]

This blog post at : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/12/11/incredible-vista-of-the-cosmos/ has done that to me today.

Here’s another phenomenal picture. It’s an amazing 2 x 1.5 degree field toward the center of the Milky Way, revealing about a million stars! It’s taken completely in the near infrared, just outside of what the human eye can see, and shows dust and stars mostly invisible in optical light.

Click here to see that amazing image, and fathom that most of it is invisible to our naked eye, but is there, sitting there, in our galaxy…

Yeah, tears in my eyes, at how amazing our existence is.

A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft’s landing site. Data show the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground.

“Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars,” said Jim Whiteway, of York University, Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian-supplied Meteorological Station on Phoenix. “We’ll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground.”