🚀 astromecanik 🪐🇵🇷 @astromecanik@qoto.org

@astromecanik Librations are super cool! The Lunar libration is caused by the Moon's slightly inclined orbit, Earth's tilted rotation axis, the Moon's fairly eccentric orbit, a parallax effect due to an observer on the earth moving towards and away from the Moon over the course of a day (and month), and, finally, physical librations which are caused by tides and interactions with other planets and the Sun. All of these cause an observer on the Earth to see the Moon at a slightly different angle

I briefly mentioned that tides can change the orbits and rotation rates of planets and moons, and that this has happened to Earth and our Moon.

Specifically, tides have caused Earth's rotation rate to slow down, meaning our day has gotten longer. We think, billions of years ago, that a "day" used to only be ~6--10 hours long!

Those same forces have caused our Moon to recede away from us, which it is still doing today at a rate of around 1.5 inches per year.

(📷 : Our Moon by Gregory Revera)

If you weren't aware, astronomers don't have a great relationship with Musk. A big issue for us is the Starlink satellites, which due to their low altitude and high number, already regularly interfere with ground-based observations. #starlinked on Twitter has endless examples.

We get told it's the "price of progress" and that SpaceX will make space telescopes cheap anyway. But that's BS: development of advanced space tech is much more expensive than the launch.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22396388/space-x-elon-musk-starlink-too-bright-astronomy-stars-pollution

Get ready for some #science (I will leave the #math for another day 😉)!

The force of #gravity is stronger the closer you are to a more massive object, like a #planet or #star, and weaker the further away you are.

In this image there is large circle which represents a planet. The arrows represent the pull of gravity. Their length represents the strength of that pull being exerted by a massive object (shown as a black dot). The further away you are from the dot, the weaker the pull of gravity.

For new people wondering why Mastodon is on thousands of servers instead of one:

-It helps protect us all against Elon Musk scenarios. It's very difficult for anyone to buy a network made of thousands of independently owned servers. (It's the same reason why no one owns the world's email network, because there are so many independent providers out there.)

-If your server misbehaves (or sells out to a malevolent billionaire), you can move your account to a different server, or even to a brand new server. Decentralisation means you're never trapped on a site you hate.

-Mastodon is an open platform where anyone can start their own server, and they don't need tech knowledge if they use a service like https://masto.host or https://federation.spacebear.ee

...and there are lots more good reasons too, to do with servers using alternative Fediverse software etc, but I'll save that for a future post 😁

#MastoTips #Mastodon #FediTips #Fediverse

fediverse is an alien as fuck concept to normal social media users. root your explanation in something familiar, and over-simplify it. it'll work much better than saying technical jargon that for all intents and purposes is a magical fucking spell for the average user

RT @RyderHeadspace@twitter.com

Lets finish the dlc and work towards Journey 2 in Dark Souls 2 over at http://twitch.tv/ryderheadspace

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/RyderHeadspace/status/1519122030704173057