Media Today

[Rick Plant]

5 new awe-inspiring images of the universe from James Webb Space Telescope
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/5-new-awe-inspiring-images-of-the-universe-from-james-webb-space-telescope

[Rick Plant]

To search for alien life, astronomers will look for clues in the atmospheres of distant planets – and the James Webb Space Telescope just proved it’s possible to do so
https://theconversation.com/to-search-for-alien-life-astronomers-will-look-for-clues-in-the-atmospheres-of-distant-planets-and-the-james-webb-space-telescope-just-proved-its-possible-to-do-so-184828

[Rick Plant]

Mariners extend their winning streak to 11

There are only so many ways you can describe a baseball team’s style of play, and at their core they all fall into a few classic tropes. You’ve got the classic underdogs, the Chaos Ball-ers, the overwhelmingly dominant, the plays-up/plays-down to their opponents, etc. The 2022 Mariners are strange in that they’ve flirted with so many different identities already this season - and are sure to tangle with more in the coming months.

They’re not a traditionally star-studded team, nor are they a jarring dichotomy of stars and scrubs. This team feels...equal. Balanced, even, when they’re firing on all cylinders. Until they break their drought, the Seattle Mariners will always have something to prove, but what’s most striking this season is that the players aren’t just out to prove the worth of the franchise they represent, they each have something to prove themselves.

Julio Rodríguez is the rookie phenom, working to live up to the hopes and dreams of a franchise, a nation and his own.

Eugenio Suárez, Jesse Winker and Adam Frazier all had stellar standalone seasons, and are trying to show that those seasons weren’t anomalies.

Carlos Santana and Justin Upton are fighting Father Time and the ageism of the league.

J.P. Crawford continues to battle against his top prospect disappointment in Philadelphia - and his All-Star snub last year.

Abraham Tor, Luis Torrens, Sam Haggerty and Dylan Moore are each eschewing years of doubt, striving to show how past organizations were foolish to have jettisoned them.

Cal Raleigh is reminding Mariners fans that Mike Zunino isn’t the only, inevitable ending to a homegrown catcher’s story.

Ty France has been overlooked by the entirety of southern California.

The starting rotation features a bizarre assortment of young, homegrown talent proving they belong; crafty soft-tossers proving that strikeouts are overrated; and an ace proving he’s worth the money.

The bullpen is a series of names only a Mariners fan could love (or really recognize).

And tonight, with the background noise of inexplicable “overrated” chants, this team with something to prove proved it once again.



For most of the game, it seemed like the Mariners were cooked.

Every winning streak has its inevitable end, and after an unexpected doubleheader and late-night arrival in Texas it wasn’t surprising that Seattle was dragging. Marco Gonzales had an uncharacteristically difficult night, but managed to hold the Rangers to five runs despite giving up 11 hits and, most crucially, gutted it out for six full innings.

Up until the top of the seventh, the lone offensive highlight had been upstart Sam Haggerty’s inside-the-park home run - the first Mariner to accomplish the feat since Willie Bloomquist in 2007.

Watch: https://twitter.com/i/status/1547757953750405121

But in the seventh, Haggerty lit the spark again. He and Julio singled back-to-back and drove former Angels nemesis Garrett Richards from the game. An egregious called third strike on France made things look dour, but then Santana walked to load the bases with two outs for the third time this game. And, unlike the previous two times, they managed to drive in some of those waiting runners with a Suárez two-run single.

Watch: https://twitter.com/i/status/1547772221296295938

Down two in the eighth, back-to-back-to-back singles from Frazier, Toro and Haggerty brought the M’s All-Star to the plate. A hit-by-pitch wasn’t the ideal PA, but it still pulled the Mariners within one. Then, jilted All-Star France crushed his signature line drive to score two and suddenly Seattle had the lead. Diego Castillo closed out the bullpen’s third scoreless inning, and it was all done in such a targeted, competent fashion that it felt silly we had ever even doubted them.

Perhaps that’s the lesson to depart from this season thus far: Do not doubt the Seattle Mariners.

https://www.lookoutlanding.com/2022/7/14/23219711/mariners-win-11th-game-in-a-row-inside-the-park-home-run-haggerty

[Rick Plant]

Highlights: First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope (Official NASA Video)

NASA revealed the first five full-color images and spectrographic data from the world's most powerful space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). The world got its first look at the full capabilities of the mission at a live event streamed from the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on July 12, 2022.

The event showcased these targets:

- Carina Nebula: A landscape speckled with glittering stars and cosmic cliffs
- Stephan’s Quintet: An enormous mosaic with a visual grouping of five galaxies
- Southern Ring Nebula: A nebula with rings of gas and dust for thousands of years in all directions
- WASP 96-b: A distinct signature of water in the atmosphere of an exoplanet orbiting a distant Sun-like star
- SMACS 0723: The deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date

The full set of the telescope’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data are available at: https://nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

Full-resolution images can be downloaded at: https://webbtelescope.org

Credit: NASA

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

James Webb telescope can take detailed photos of our own solar system's planets and moons

NASA has released images of Jupiter taken during James Webb's commissioning period



Over the past few days, NASA has released stunning photos of nebulae, groups of galaxies and even the "deepest" view of the universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Now, the agency has released images of something much closer to home that everyone's new favorite telescope — sorry, Hubble! — has captured. When the James Webb team was calibrating the instrument, members took photos of Jupiter to see if it can be used to observe nearby celestial objects like moons and asteroids, as well other elements like planet rings and satellites. The answer, it turns out, is yes.

A photo taken by the telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument’s short-wavelength filter (above) clearly shows the gas giant's distinct bands and its moon Europa. The Great Red Spot is also perfectly visible, even though it looks white due to the way the image was processed. When the NIRCam instrument's 2.12 micron filter was used, the resulting image showed the Jovian moons Europa, Thebe, Metis and even Europa's shadow near the Great Red Spot. And when the team used NIRCam's 3.23 micron filter, the resulting image captured some of Jupiter's rings, as you can see below:



Bryan Holler, one of the scientists who helped plan these observations, said:

"Combined with the deep field images released the other day, these images of Jupiter demonstrate the full grasp of what Webb can observe, from the faintest, most distant observable galaxies to planets in our own cosmic backyard that you can see with the naked eye from your actual backyard."

It's worth noting that James Webb captured these images moving across its field of view in three separate observations, proving that it's capable of finding and tracking stars in the vicinity of a celestial body as bright as Jupiter. That means it can be used to study moons in our solar system and could give us the first images of the plumes of material known to spew out of natural satellites like Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus.

The team also tracked asteroids in the asteroid belt to figure out the fastest objects it can observe. They found that it can still get gather data from objects moving up to 67 milliarcseconds per second across its field of view. NASA says that's equivalent to tracking a turtle moving from a mile away. As Stefanie Milam, James Webb's deputy project scientist, said, these images show that "everything worked brilliantly." We can expect not just more impressively detailed images of space in the future, but also information that could shed more light on how the first galaxies had formed.

https://www.engadget.com/james-webb-telescope-jupiter-images-072407786.html

[Rick Plant]

Mariners Continue To Claw Their Way Out Of Obscurity, Win 12th Straight



The Seattle Mariners have never been set up for success in the eyes of an American sports fan. They have to fight the prevalent East Coast bias, they’re too far out of the way to be a team one could catch a home game to while passing through to another city, and they certainly never had a media proprietor as an owner that put them on national television (here’s looking at you, Atlanta Braves and TBS).

To add to that, the Mariners play their home games on the West Coast. If you’ve never experienced 10:10pm game starts on the regular, consider yourself fortunate. The day begins on the East Coast, meaning the news cycle begins on the East Coast. Chances are whoever is influencing those news cycles probably didn’t stay up to watch a lot of West Coast teams.

That’s all to say that the Mariners were born, trident first, into an uphill battle out of obscurity. Any media attention they get is earned, not given.

One way to get the media’s attention? Keep winning.

And so they keep winning.

Mariners anew

There were plenty moments in this game that would’ve made Mariners fans of yester-month melt faster than a snow cone in a Texas summer. The team only recorded one hit through the first three innings while striking out four times over that span, Robbie Ray gave up two homes runs (one of which put Texas within a run) before being pulled for Erik Swanson, and Julio was down to his last strike with the bases loaded and two outs.

Yester-month Mariners fans might’ve felt misplaced anger boil up during these moments, perhaps even shutting the television or radio off because we already know what’s going to happen.

I can’t speak for everyone in the Mariners fandom, but for me these moments felt different. The challenges the team faced in these moments no longer seemed insurmountable, they now felt doable. Not just doable, but presumed achievable.

After the Mariners failed to get more than one hit for three innings they went on to score three runs in the 4th inning.

After Robbie Ray gave up two home runs that put Texas within a run the bullpen came in to record seven straight outs to end the game.

After Julio found himself in a 2-out make-or-break situation with the bases and count full he delivered and hit his first ever Grand Slam (break out the rye bread).

And yes, after another 12-strikeout performance by our reigning Cy Young winner, our offense continued the trend of providing run support.

Now that the Baltimore Orioles had their win streak snapped by the Tampa Bay Rays, all eyes are rightfully affixed to the team in the Upper Left USA. It helps that Julio has lived up to — and perhaps exceeded — his hype, but I can’t remember the last time I saw the MLB social media accounts or the ESPN social media accounts talk about the Mariners as much as they are now.

It used to be that we’d have to wait for Mina Kimes to appear on a show to hear the word “Mariners” uttered through our television’s sound system. That’s no longer the case.

The only drawback to this is every analysis of the team is met with the question, “but are they the real deal?” I guess there’s only one way to find out.

Keep winning.

https://www.lookoutlanding.com/2022/7/15/23221000/mariners-continue-to-claw-their-way-out-of-obscurity-win-12th-straight

[Rick Plant]

WATCH LIVE: Stunning new images from James Webb Space Telescope offer fuller picture of our universe

[Rick Plant]

The clearest image of Jupiter ever photographed.