Clear sky at lunchtime enabled me to get a photo of the giant, splotchy sunspot on our Sun. That thing is several times the size of Earth, which boggles my tiny mind.
Another eclipse photo, showing the solar prominences around the edge. I am told that these prominences are probably several times the diameter of the earth! Yikes. #Eclipse
I wasn't exposing for the full corona, but this is what I was able to extract from the shadows. I know it extends far beyond what is shown here, but I was zoomed in too tightly to include it all. 🙃 #Eclipse
Unprocessed photo, taken in southern Quebec. We were extremely fortunate that (a) my house was smack in the middle of the line of totality, and (b) the sky was perfectly clear throughout the event.
Now, with 9x bracketing, I have a mere 639 photos to evaluate, process and merge. But what an experience! Awesome, really.
@gwozniak
After weeks of dismal weather, not to mention 25cm of snow last week, I was sure we would have cloudy skies today. Cleared out completely Sunday afternoon, and stayed that way until sunset today. Lucky!
Have you read "A City on Mars"? I am reading it currently - just getting to the Mars part - it really puts a damper on any enthusiasm to colonize Mars any time soon!
@65dBnoise@stim3on
These are all good points that the book @stim3on referred to, "A City on Mars" also makes, with data and examples to back them up. It is, IMO, a realistic look at the very daunting obstacles to any sort of colonization on other planets or the Moon.
@tom30519@stim3on
For the time being the only solid thing that has happened is the successful flight of Artemis 1. This time next year, Artemis 2 is supposed to be the first mission, 52 years after Apollo 17, which will bring humans around the moon and back. That's something I'm waiting to see happen.
By then, hopefully, StarShip explosions will be less frequent, or else NASA will have to find another moon lander for Artemis 3 which, by the way, appears to be coinciding with the MSR mission.
After days of constant rain, the late afternoon sun broke through the clouds, putting a spotlight on this maple tree. Still some brilliant fall colour to be had here in Quebec!
@tom30519
Not AI in the sense of LLMs matching inputs and pretending knowing stuff, but symbolic logic that uses agents to gather data and use it to reply to questions, with some added randomness to avoid giving boring replies. Parts of it, like speech recognition, text-to-speech, soil moisture measurements and some more, do use LLMs and NNs, but the "brain" is mostly symbolic, and thus I never doubt that what I get is not made up BS.
As you say no CacheCam images of sealing it. In addition the sample does not appear on the sample page. I assume it will only appear on the sample page once it has been successfully sealed.
SuperCam zapped both sand and rock with a series of 10 laser strikes. I assume that the spectrometer is able to examine the plasma emanating from each hole separately.
SuperCam
Sol 868, LMST: 16:21:38
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP
@tom30519
This is a the latest view from Mars. The camera was looking at: 289.984, 24.619, -6.499 (az, el, roll),
Is your image oriented with north up?
A new core hole has magically appeared, according to this Mastcam-Z photo taken on Sol 831. The photo from Sol 821 of the same location shows that it was drilled sometime during the 10-sol interval between the two images.
No images showing the drill in operation have been downloaded as of this posting.
SuperCam has chosen (directed by AEGIS or an Earth-based geologist?) to have a closer look at this group of smaller rocks, nestled among larger equally interesting-looking (to a Non-Geologist™) rocks.
@65dBnoise
Unless Ginny can overcome the 45m no-fly zone restriction, there won't be much interaction with her co-residents beyond telepathy.
And anyway, she currently operates under the strict orders emanating from the rover, so no coup required at all!
Her ability to fly and see things from above is a useful skill that the others would want to benefit from, so friendly relations will no doubt continue.