This is such a cool photo. The colours aren’t real, but you can clearly see the path an ancient martian river once took to get to a lake, as well as the delta it generated by dumping sediment into that lake. If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re looking at a satellite photo of Earth.

Canals after all.

Image picked up from Reconciliation Ecology.

I always like Phils descriptive posts about astronomical phenomena; he has a real flair for capturing the sense of awe and grandeur that must accompany a career in watching galaxies collide, mega-volcanoes erupt, and stars explode.

But this write up on the Veil Nebula really caught my eye, Why? Well, look at those dates; that star went bang within the lifespan of our species, and put a glowing nebula six times the size of our moon and nearly as bright in the night sky. Sometime not all that long ago, people basically biologically the same as up looked up at the night sky and saw, with their naked eyes, a star going nova. What must they have thought of that? And how beautiful a sight must it have been?

Of course I have no idea what it would have looked like, maybe it was a damp squib; it’s six times the size of the moon now but presumably it took time to get there, how big was it when those ancient humans saw it in the sky? Did it go up with a bright flash or was the collapse (by our standards) protracted, taking hundreds of years. Man, there are times when I wish I knew more about astronomy, but whatever it looked like, I would have loved to have been around to see it.