First Orbit – the movie is a feature-length, experimental documentary film about Vostok 1, the first manned space flight around the Earth.
A real time recreation of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first orbit, shot entirely in space from on board the International Space Station. The film combines this new footage with Gagarin’s original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard.
The full length movie is available on YouTube:

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To support WikiSky project we are heavily defendant on internet usage. Our monthly usage sometimes goes way over one terabyte per month (This does not include traffic on our primary servers located in data centers) With new UBB rates such usage will end up with four digit bills. We are looking for solution, but so far the only reasonable option is to upgrade our data center servers ASAP and move all internet bandwidth-hungry processes there. We recently have opened the fund-raising campaign to help with the servers upgrade project.

I don’t know what was thinking our government by letting it happen, but it feels like we are moving back to dial-up Internet era…

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Astronomers have pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what they believe is the most distant object ever seen in the universe. Its light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble. The dim object is a compact galaxy (UDFj-39546284) of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the Big Bang, only four percent of the universe’s current age. It is tiny. Astronomers were surprised to discover that these observations offer evidence that the rate at which the universe was forming stars grew precipitously in about a 200-million-year time span. This huge change in the rate of star birth means that if astronomers can probe a little further back in time they are going to see even more dramatic changes. This will require the power of the James Webb Space Telescope, the planned successor to Hubble, which will be launched later this decade.

You can find more details in the Bad Astronomer’s article.

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Another good article on Bad Astronomer blog by Phil Plat who particularly explains the imaging artifacts on Digitized Sky Survey you can find here.

Here’s one of the recent discoveries by our visitors: (06h34m46.99s, +51°04′49.0″). It’s just another image arifact, but looks pretty cool . Scroll down to the left for more “objects”

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It looks like someone made a joke linking recent news about discontinue SETI program and that video with “space ship”.
Here’s more recent video:

According to our traffic jump, the news caused nation-wide paranoia. Wow, the power of mass media!

More video:

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3 very large object flying to the Earth

The length of the “flying saucers” – tens of kilometers. We(SETI) just have to tell: three very large object flying towards our planet. Landing, according to calculations of scientists, held in mid-December 2012. Date coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar.

Concerned about the management of SETI (the project on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) issued a statement whose meaning is placed in the name of the sci-fi thriller “Alien invasion”.

- A few very large objects rapidly approaching the Earth – says astrophysicist Craig Kasnov. – You can verify this!

He recommends to go to a map Space site sky-map.org and enter the coordinates of the giant UFO:
19 25 12 -89 46 03 – the first large object
16 19 35 -88 43 10 – a cylindrical object
02 26 39 -89 43 13 – the object as a circle
The project participants are assured that the facilities are absolutely real, and the American space agency NASA is trying to conceal important information.

Post scientists immediately divided the earthlings into two opposing camps. Some believe that these ships are flying save humanity from the terrible calamities that can happen on Earth in a short time, others are preparing to star wars.

- In any case, the only thing we can do now – wait for it – says Kasnov. – Soon celestial objects will be visible in a good telescope”

Here’s one of the article

I don’t know about SETI’s claim on space ships, but I can assure you that what you can find on DSS here is mostly telescopes, photographic plates and image processing defects.

DSS all sky survey is a digitized version of two half sky surveys that took place about 30 years ago. The original surveys were taken on photographic plates (there wasn’t digital photography back then, well, at least not in that massive form as we see it today). About 10 years ago the plates had been scanned and digitized. The process probably introduced artifacts like scratches and dust in addition to telescope reflection and photo plates defect artifacts.

What I want to say is anything suspicious you find here on DSS survey must have explanation without involving little green creatures.

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But the amazing thing is that the planet’s distance from the star puts it in the Goldilocks Zone: the region where liquid water could exist on its surface!

See the Bad Astronomy Blog post for details.

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If you want to add this interface to your page, simply add this line of code at the end of your html file, before </body> tag:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://sky-map.org/js/astroOverlay'></script>

Moreover, you can simply add this interface right in your browser to any page you are visiting by simply putting following code in browser’s location (URL) following by <Enter>:

javascript:a=document.createElement('script');a.src='http://sky-map.org/js/astroOverlay';a.onload=function(){astroOverlay()};document.body.appendChild(a);void+0

or put that line in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar, and by clicking on it current page you are visiting will be enriched with the AstroOverlay interface (currently doesn’t work in Internet Explorer). The interface is new and we are still working on fixing bugs and user experience improvements. Feel free to give it a try and let us know what’s your experience with this new feature.

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The spectacular new camera installed on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby spiral galaxy M83.

Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus. The sharp “eye” of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants.

The image, taken in August 2009, provides a close-up view of the myriad stars near the galaxy’s core, the bright whitish region at far right.

WFC3′s broad wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, reveals stars at different stages of evolution, allowing astronomers to dissect the galaxy’s star-formation history.

M83, located in the Southern Hemisphere, is often compared to M51, dubbed the Whirlpool galaxy, in the Northern Hemisphere. Located 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra, M83 is two times closer to Earth than M51.

Source: Hubble Site

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