Latest Posts by nyxs-knight - Page 9
Herbig-Haro 110, a geyser of hot gas flowing from a newborn star
Image credit: NASA/ESA & Hubble
Top 10 Largest Moons In The Solar System: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Moon, Europa, Triton, Titania, Rhea & Oberon.
Image credit: Kevin Gill /Joseph Brimacombe /Stuart Rankin
Sometimes it's fun to play with gender, to subvert and mix words and roles. I like it when my friends call me bro. I like to dress in men's clothes and enjoy the power and respect they represent. I like the cool guy image.
Sometimes it's fun to pass, to accidentally trick and challenge people. They make funny stories, and I feel like a shapeshifter making fun of the social order.
But I always return to myself. Underneath it all is my real, unchangable female self, and I am a woman.
I am a woman with a shaved head. A woman in a suit. A woman called sir and bro and he. A woman who's rough and tough and handsome and bold.
I am a woman in rebellion, and there are no words or clothes or assigned roles or social standards that can take it from me.
Being uncomfortable with feminity doesn’t mean that you are not a woman
It means that feminity is uncomfortable and has nothing to do with being a woman
NGC 602
The small and large Magellanic clouds in the Southern skies are dwarf galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way. They are both also home to a large number of clusters, both open and globular.
NGC 602 is an open cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a group of new blue giants can be seen in the centre. These stars formed from the gas and dust now visible around it, but when the stars ignited, the radiation of the stars pushed back the dust and gas, creating a shock wave. In doing so, it concentrated the elements and gravity has begun to form additional stars in the elephant trunks surrounding it.
In time, those new stars will have a similar effect, having already produced 3 bursts.
Female figurine from the Hohle Fels cave near Stuttgart, about 35,000 years old. Interpreted as a pornographic pin-up.
“The Earliest Pornography” says Science Now, describing the 35,000 year old ivory figurine that’s been dug up in a cave near Stuttgart. The tiny statuette is of a female with exaggerated breasts and vulva. According to Paul Mellars, one of the archaeologist twits who commented on the find for Nature, this makes the figurine “pornographic.” Nature is even titling its article, “Prehistoric Pin Up.” It’s the Venus of Willendorf double standard all over again. Ancient figures of naked pregnant women are interpreted by smirking male archaeologists as pornography, while equally sexualized images of men are assumed to depict gods or shamans. Or even hunters or warriors. Funny, huh?
Consider: phallic images from the Paleolithic are at least 28,000 years old. Neolithic cultures all over the world seemed to have a thing for sculptures with enormous erect phalluses. Ancient civilizations were awash in images of male genitalia, from the Indian lingam to the Egyptian benben to the Greek herm. The Romans even painted phalluses on their doors and wore phallic charms around their necks.
Ithyphallic figure from Lascaux, about 17,000 years old. Interpreted as a shaman.
But nobody ever interprets this ancient phallic imagery as pornography. Instead, it’s understood to indicate reverence for male sexual potency. No one, for example, has ever suggested that the Lascaux cave dude was a pin-up; he’s assumed to be a shaman. The ithyphallic figurines from the Neolithic — and there are many — are interpreted as gods. And everyone knows that the phalluses of ancient India and Egypt and Greece and Rome represented awesome divine powers of fertility and protection. Yet an ancient figurine of a nude woman — a life-giving woman, with her vulva ready to bring forth a new human being, and her milk-filled breasts ready to nourish that being — is interpreted as pornography. Just something for a man to whack off to. It’s not as if there’s no other context in which to interpret the figure. After all, the European Paleolithic is chock full of pregnant-looking female statuettes that are quite similar to this one. By the time we get to the Neolithic, the naked pregnant female is enthroned with lions at her feet, and it’s clear that people are worshipping some kind of female god.
Yet in the Science Now article, the archaeologist who found the figurine is talking about pornographic pin-ups: “I showed it to a male colleague, and his response was, ‘Nothing’s changed in 40,000 years.’” That sentence needs to be bronzed and hung up on a plaque somewhere, because you couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of the classic fallacy of reading the present into the past. The archaeologist assumes the artist who created the figurine was male; why? He assumes the motive was lust; why? Because that’s all he knows. To his mind, the image of a naked woman with big breasts and exposed vulva can only mean one thing: porn! Porn made by men, for men! And so he assumes, without questioning his assumptions, that the image must have meant the same thing 35,000 years ago. No other mental categories for “naked woman” are available to him. His mind is a closed box. This has been the central flaw of anthropology for as long there’s been anthropology. And even before: the English invaders of North America thought the Iroquois chiefs had concubines who accompanied them everywhere, because they had no other mental categories to account for well-dressed, important-looking women sitting in a council house. It’s the same fallacy that bedevils archaeologists who dig up male skeletons with fancy beads and conclude that the society was male dominant (because powerful people wear jewelry!), and at another site dig up female skeletons with fancy beads and conclude that this society, too, was male dominant (because women have to dress up as sex objects and trophy wives!). Male dominance is all they can imagine. And so no matter what they dig up, they interpret it to fit their mental model. It’s the fallacy that also drives evolutionary psychology, the central premise of which is that human beings in the African Pleistocene had exactly the same values, beliefs, prejudices, power struggles, goals, and needs as the middle-class white professors and students in a graduate psychology lab in modern-day Santa Barbara, California. And that these same factors are universal and unchanged and true for all time.
Hohle Fels phallus, about 28,000 years old. Interpreted as a symbolic object and …flint knapper. Yes.
That’s not science; it’s circular, self-serving propaganda. This little figurine from Hohle Fels, for example, is going to be used as “proof” that pornography is ancient and natural. I guarantee it. Having been interpreted by pornsick male archaeologists as pornography because that’s all they know, the statuette will now be trotted out by every every psycho and male supremacist on the planet as “proof” that pornography is eternal, that male dominance is how it’s supposed to be, and that feminists are crazy so shut the fuck up. Look for it in Steven Pinker’s next book. ***
P.S. My own completely speculative guess on the figurine is that it might be connected to childbirth rituals. Notice the engraved marks and slashes; that’s a motif that continues for thousands of years on these little female figurines. No one knows what they mean, but they meant something. They’re not just random cut marks. Someone put a great deal of work into this sculpture. Given that childbirth was incredibly risky for Paleolithic women, they must have prayed their hearts out for help and protection in that time. I can imagine an elder female shaman or artist carving this potent little figure, and propping it up somewhere as a focus for those prayers.
On the other hand, it is possible that it has nothing to do with childbearing or sexual behavior at all. The breasts and vulva may simply indicate who the figure is: the female god. Think of how Christ is always depicted with a beard, which is a male sexual characteristic, even though Christ isn’t about male sexuality. The beard is just a marker. Or, given the figurine’s exaggerated breasts, it may have something to do with sustenance: milk, food, nourishment.
The notion that some dude carved this thing to whack off to — when he was surrounded by women who probably weren’t wearing much in the way of clothes anyway — is laughable.
“Big Clit Energy” in multiple colors
Oh, am I taking a lot of shirtless photos lately? I’m mostly just asserting the normality of the naked female body. It’s gotten real hip and trendy in our community right now to talk about “not being defined by gender.” I understand the sentiment; we’ve all been fed a lot of shit about what it means to be female, to be a woman, for so long that it just seems to be inherently true instead of fabricated by patriarchal society. I can understand wanting to stand strong, be seen, and say “these assumptions do not hold true for me.” The problem is, when that’s framed as the individual being “not defined by gender” or simply not being female, it throws other females under the bus. It says “I am not this way, but this is true about women, so therefore I am not woman and not defined by being a woman.” I’m gonna stand here instead and say that I manifest my own reality, but my reality and manifestation are not in any way limited by the fact that I am female. I refuse to conform to these bullshit expectations the same as I refuse to throw the female sex under the bus by claiming separation from my sisters. I see the strength in all of you, I see your determination and perseverance and willpower. I stand with you, in solidarity, always ✌🏻️
Magnetic monster NGC 1275
This stunning image of NGC 1275 was taken using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in July and August 2006. It provides amazing detail and resolution of the fragile filamentary structures, which show up as a reddish lacy structure surrounding the central bright galaxy NGC 1275. These filaments are cool despite being surrounded by gas that is around 55 million degrees Celsius hot. They are suspended in a magnetic field which maintains their structure and demonstrates how energy from the central black hole is transferred to the surrounding gas.
By observing the filamentary structure, astronomers were, for the first time, able to estimate the magnetic field’s strength. Using this information they demonstrated how the extragalactic magnetic fields have maintained the structure of the filaments against collapse caused by either gravitational forces or the violence of the surrounding cluster during their 100-million-year lifetime.
This is the first time astronomers have been able to differentiate the individual threads making up such filaments to this degree. Astonishingly, they distinguished threads a mere 200 light-years across. By contrast, the filaments seen here can be a gaping 200 000 light-years long. The entire image is approximately 260 000 light-years across.
Also seen in the image are impressive lanes of dust from a separate spiral galaxy. It lies partly in front of the giant elliptical central cluster galaxy and has been completed disrupted by the tidal gravitational forces within the galaxy cluster. Several striking filaments of blue newborn stars are seen crossing the image.
Credit:
NASA, ESA and Andy Fabian (University of Cambridge, UK)
“on the way there”, lesbians heading to the london pride march, photographed by della disgrace, june 1988
try going without makeup for a couple weeks and see how much better you feel about your appearance 💖
try going without shaving for a while and see how much you love your natural body 💖
Life Support Upgrades Arrive at Station, Improve Reliability for Moon, Mars Missions by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
The Hubble telescope has captured an image of an unusual edge-on galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk and showing how colliding galaxies spawn the formation of new generations of stars. The dust and spiral arms of normal spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, appear flat when viewed edge-on. This Hubble Heritage image of ESO 510-G13 shows a galaxy that, by contrast, has an unusual twisted disk structure, first seen in ground-based photographs.
Credit:
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Light continues to echo three years after stellar outburst
The Hubble Space Telescope’s latest image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)
Mayall’s Object (ARP 174)
While Galaxies can come in all shapes and sizes, with a preference to Spiral and Elliptical, few come as interesting as ARP 174.
The designation ARP is the surname of Halton Arp, an American astronomer who in 1966 published The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, of which Mayall’s Object was the 174th in his catalogue.
Originally thought to be a galaxy reacting with a normally visible line of Hydrogen in Intergalactic space, it’s now considered to be two distinct galaxies in the throws of merger. As the elongated object made contact, the ring like structure of the other was formed by a shockwave of the event.
At 450 Million light years from Earth, we are seeing what happened almost half a billion years ago, and not what is there right now.
