Fantastic astronomy website Bad Astronomy (get it? Bad Ass…tronomy?) has word of a couple new pictures that are pretty incredible.  Both are pictures of galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, the nearest large cluster of galaxies to us – “only” about 60 million light years away. First up is NGC 4402:

Then we have NGC 4522:

The Virgo Cluster is made up of more than a thousand galaxies, packed fairly tightly together (for galaxies, anyway). The gravity they exhibit on each other causes them all to swarm around each other in crazy orbits at incredible speeds. Like, 10 million kilometers per hour. To put that in perspective, a high-powered rifle bullet may leave the muzzle at about 1,500 meters per second. That’s 5,400 km per hour.  So, some of these galaxies are whipping around over 1,800 times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet.

Now, there’s a very, very thin cloud of gas all around these galaxies, called the interstellar medium. It’s thinner than the atmosphere on Earth by a long shot. We’re talking about, like one to ten atoms per cubic centimeter. But over the massive size of a galaxy, it adds up. And when the galaxy is whipping through it at 1,800 times faster than a rifle bullet, this so-thin-you-can’t-see-it gas actually rips out the gasses within the galaxy.  What makes these pictures so cool is you can clearly see this happening.

You can grab bigger versions of the photos, including desktop wallpaper images and really big TIF files here: NGC 4022 and NGC 4522

It has been 19 years since Hubble launched in 1990. It’s initial construction, all the launches to put it in space and repair and upgrade it several times, have cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $8 billion. So, a little more than $400 million a year. Sound crazy high? Again, some numerical perspective: There are 156.3 million taxpayers in the U.S. (as of 2008) Hubble’s cost averages out to about $2.70 per year for each taxpayer. I can’t get a cup of goddamn Starbucks for that. Your tax dollars at work!

This isn’t exactly a crazy amount of radiation, and it’s probably not worth getting worked up about. I know this intellectually, and I’m sure my body can and does easily absorb that much radiation without complications. All kinds of radiation hits us all the time, and whether it’s harmful or not depends on the strength and length of exposure. EM radiation bombards us from radio towers (FM, AM, TV, etc.), power lines and outlets and stuff, cell phone towers, Wi-Fi, and a whole bunch from the freakin’ Sun itself. Of course, we do constantly talk about protecting yourself from all that solar radiation with sunscreen and such.

Even knowing that it’s almost certainly not harmful, it’s still a little troubling that my iPhone 3G, which I always keep in front pocket when I’m out of the house, is 0.24 - 1.39 W/kg. I mean, how often is it way down at the .24 range? When is it way up at 1.39? I suspect this range has to do with things like whether or not Wi-Fi is enabled. Annie’s G1 comes in at 1.11 W/kg, which is somewhere in the middle of the list. 3G smartphones, unsurprisingly, fare worse than…uh…dumbphones I guess you’d call them.

(By the way – I was going to name this post “I’m nuking by nuts!” but I chickened out.)

I recently attended a press event aboard the ship, and snapped a few photos along the way. The best way to view them is on my flickr page, so you can grab the full-sized images if you want. There’s some neat stuff in there. The painted footprints are Neil Armstrong’s first steps after getting back aboard the ship – his first steps “on earth” after walking around on the moon. The command module you see is similar to, but not the same one used on Apollo 11 (the Apollo 11 module, CSM-107, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum).

Go check out the set, let me know what you think. There are only 8 photos (I won’t bore you with shots of 24 monitors running from a single PC and so on).

Some of this footage has been lost for almost 40 years, so this is probably going to be the best look at the moonwalk any of us have ever had. Even back when it was “live on TV”, the quality of the broadcast and people’s TV sets in 1969 was a lot worse than even today’s middle-of-the-road web video, let alone HDTV.

Hard to believe that the 16th will be the 40 year anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, and the 20th will be 40 years since we actually walked on the moon for the first time. It’s even harder to believe we haven’t sent anyone back since 1972. Imagine where we’d be today if we had continued regular manned missions to the moon over the last 37 years?