(top) A MAJOR OUTBREAK OF NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS: Last night, July 5-6, a major outbreak of noctilucent clouds (NLCs) blanketed Europe. Electric-blue tendrils of frosted meteor smoke rippled over almost every European capital from Scandinavia to the Adriatic. “It was the most phenomenal display of NLCs I’ve seen in my life,” says Viktor Veres, who photographed the outbreak from Budapest, Hungary.
“I was just getting ready for dinner when one of my friends, Alex, cried ‘NLC party time!’,” says Veres. “The electric-blue clouds were almost directly overhead. I sprinted to the car (partially dressing in the street) and drove up Gellért Hill for a view of the clouds over the most famous sights of Budapest–the Danube River, Chain Bridge, Buda Castle, and Parliament. And, yes, my dinner got cold.”
(center) Paris was also “overcast” by noctilucent clouds. “They were very bright,” reports Bertrand Kulik, who shot them floating above the Eiffel Tower.
“The shapes of the noctilucent waves were out of this world!” he says.
NLCs are Earth’s highest clouds. Seeded by meteoroids, they float at the edge of space 83 km above the ground. The clouds form during summer when wisps of water vapor rise up to the mesosphere, allowing water to crystallize around specks of meteor smoke. This summer, record cold temperatures in the mesosphere are boosting their production.
Last night’s mega-display in Europe comes on the heels of a 4th of July sighting in southern California at the same latitude as Los Angeles. It seems that everyone should be alert for noctilucent clouds. Dusk and dawn are the best times to look; here’s why.
(bottom) COMET NEOWISE MEETS NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS: When European astronomers woke up this morning to photograph Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3), they saw something they didn’t expect. The sunrise comet was surrounded by noctilucent clouds. Petr Horálek caught the once-in-a-lifetime shot from Seč, Czech Republic.
“Noctilucent clouds crossed the skies like spider webs,” says Horálek. “They are caused by ice crystals on particles of meteoric dust. This dust often comes from comets’ tails. And here we are – both phenomena can be seen in one image as bright Comet NEOWISE is on the left, rising in the glory of morning dawn.”
“Today is a historic day for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many people who have supported us in the fight against the pipeline,” said Chairman Mike Faith of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “This pipeline should have never been built here. We told them that from the beginning.”
when the capitalists die out either thru global warming or revolution will we be able to start homegrown internet
been reading about dual power and how to grow my own tomatoes and i’m wondering how and if we’ll be able to start commie internet lol
like obviously the internet is this huge electric capitalist controlled hardware infrastructure thing so after all that shuts down is there a way to do it ourselves lol
i want to come home from a hard day on the communal allotment, kiss my Wife, crank up my generator, and start sharing meams!
GOOD NEWS: the homegrown commie internet is in the works! Across the world, people fighting against censorship and for a more democratic internet are building mesh networks (meshnets) of long-range wifi (LoRa)
Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!
As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc
What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing
You can read more about this kind of stuff here (or here if it’s cloudy in Barcelona)!
there’s also the work being done by the DCPT, left-behind Detroiters meshing together their neighborhoods to share overpriced high-speed connections among the community and producing these good good educational documents, especially this rad resource page. building meshnets to share a global uplink is very similar to building meshnets for the purpose of intracommunication and these resources are useful in both cases
I’ve had a couple people ask about how to join/organize something like this, which is great! The best list of active projects I know of is here, though you should also do a search online if you don’t see one in your area in case they missed it. For those without a nearby group, put a pin here and try contacting nearby pins as well - you can use the instructions on buildyourowninter.net as well as the DCPT’s resources as linked above to get set up!
Please reblog this version so others can get involved!
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
