PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
cherry valley forever
trying on a metaphor
NASA

YOU ARE THE REASON
Peter Solarz

Love Begins

JBB: An Artblog!
h
Show & Tell
AnasAbdin
One Nice Bug Per Day

pixel skylines
Jules of Nature

PR's Tumblrdome
Game of Thrones Daily

â
Sweet Seals For You, Always

Discoholic đŞŠ

seen from Barbados
seen from United States

seen from Germany
seen from Syria

seen from United States
seen from India

seen from Netherlands

seen from France
seen from Brazil
seen from Morocco
seen from United States

seen from T1

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@space-facts

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Star Wars planet names generated by neural network
Neural networks are a kind of machine learning computer program that are very, very good at making their own internal rules about a dataset. If you give them a list of ANYTHING, theyâll figure out how to generate more stuff like it.
This makes neural networks very good at naming things - they can figure out what letter combinations and sounds make a word sound like a name for a kitten, or a paint color, or a Pokemon, or a D&D spell, or a guinea pig, or a metal band, or even a scary guinea pig.
There are almost 3,500 exoplanets confirmed to date and thousands more candidates waiting for confirmation, all with names like âKepler-452bâ and â55 Cnc-câ and â2MASS J01225093-2439505bâ. Clearly, these names are not going to work if we have to one day shout them to the shipâs engineer during a raging ion storm.
Fortunately for the future of space travel, blog reader Chris Jones has sent me a list of almost 700 Star Wars planets. And in short order, the neural network was producing this:
Bartan Cenron Nalarar Bondal Ballor Van-Karal Valtane Vantos Malalas Mateot Tiris Kanan Montaan Tardor Nananon Moridia Tatloor
This is unedited output directly from the neural network, and I had to check to make sure that none of these names were in the original list - theyâre just that plausible.
At a higher creativity (more random) setting, the names are a bit less pronounceable on average, but still could pass for Star Wars planets:
La Vok Slorru G Sakani Vaszalu Varkena Baro IV Toran Hatnlant Uluunna Baroa Tina Duperda Bantak Barkaan Ban Beraou Baxuor Rrarar
Thatâs not to say there werenât strange results.Â
Birdanan Boldura Balmara Barmen Garden Carton Loner Robes Sara Loon Laser Bunlalavor Bal Panda
This stems partly from the fact that the neural network has no idea what English words are - all it knows is Star Wars planet names, and so sometimes it ventures unknowingly into territory where the English language has gone before. There arenât nearly as many of these accidental words as in other datasets, perhaps partly because these planets were designed to NOT sound like English.
I wanted to learn more about some of these planets, so I turned to two procedural programs. Unlike neural networks, in procedural generators human programmers make the rules rather than the neural network inventing its own. The only outputs youâll get are those that the human programmer thought of building in, but this can still produce a huge range of interesting results.
I used the Twitter bot @I_find_planets by Charles Bergquist to generate descriptions of the planets, and the procedural planet generator by wwwtyro to generate the pictures.
Will we ever run out of neural network planet names? Sure, because thereâs only a limited number of ways that characters can be combined into words before weâre back to indistinguishable mishmashes of letters and numbers. But in the meantime, the neural network could help us make our solar neighborhood a more pronounceable place.
Jupiterâs Galilean Moons
Io -Â Jupiter's volcanic moon
Europa - Â Jupiter's icy moon
Ganymede - Jupiter's (and the solar system's) largest moon
Callisto -Â Jupiter's heavily cratered moon
Made using: Celestia, Screen2Gif & GIMP Based on: @spaceplasmaâs solar system gifs Profile sources: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/joviansatfact.html
Makemakeâs Moon
Nicknamed MK 2 and provisionally designated S/2015 (136472) 1, it is estimated to be 160 km in diameter. The moon was spotted about 20,000 km from Makemake in observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope in April 2015.
The diagram above shows the size of MK 2 compared to Makemake, the Moon and Earth.
Photo -Â http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2016/04/26/hubble-discovers-moon-orbiting-the-dwarf-planet-makemake
Diagram -Â http://space-facts.com/makemake/

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Triangulum Galaxy -Â The Triangulum and Andromeda Galaxies are linked by streams of hydrogen gas and embedded stars.Â
Large & Small Magallanic Clouds - The Magallanic Clouds are duo of galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.
Messier 87 - Â A jet of energetic plasma originates at the core of M87 and extends outward at least 4,900 light-years.
Whirlpool Galaxy - The Whirlpool galaxy was the first galaxy to be classified as a âspiral galaxyâ.
Antennae Galaxies - The Antennae galaxies are the closest colliding galaxies to the Milky Way.
Pinwheel Galaxy -Â The Pinwheel Galaxy is about twice the diameter of the Milky Way.
Sombrero Galaxy - The Sombrero Galaxy is named due to its resemblance to the distinctive hat.
Milky Way Galaxy -Â The supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*)Â has the mass of about 4.3 million Suns.
Andromeda Galaxy -Â The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at approximately 100 to 140 kilometres per second.
The Largest Moons in the Solar System
Ganymede: Orbits Jupiter, Diameter 5,262 km
Titan: Orbits Saturn, Diameter 5,150 km
Callisto: Orbits Jupiter, Diameter 4,821 km
Io: Orbits Jupiter, Diameter 3,643 km
The Moon: Orbits Earth, Diameter 3,475 km
Europa: Orbits Jupiter, Diameter 3,122 km
Triton: Orbits Neptune, Diameter 2,707 km
Titania: Orbits Uranus, Diameter 1,578 km
Rhea: Orbits Saturn, Diameter 1,529 km
Pluto was discovered on this day in 1930.
The planets, moons and Death Stars seen in the original (theatrical) Star Wars trilogy to scale.
Alderaan, famous for being destroying in A New Hope, is the closest in size to the Earth with a diameter of 12,500 km vs Earthâs 12,742 km average diameter.
Hoth is larger, but still the closest in size to Mars, with a diameter of 7,200 km vs Marsâ 6,779 km.
Endor, the smallest of the bodies to appear in the original trilogy, has a diameter of 4,900 km which makes it very slightly larger than our solar systemâs smallest planet, Mercury which has a diameter of 4,879 km.
Of the gas giants seen in Star Wars, Bespin is very similar in size to Saturn (116,464 km average diameter) but is still quite a bit smaller than Jupiter (139,822 km), which in turn is much smaller than Yavin Prime, the largest planet to appear in the original trilogy.
http://space-facts.com/planets-moons-star-wars/
Pluto has a very eccentric orbit which takes it between 4.4 and 7.3 billion km from the Sun, meaning Pluto is periodically closer to the Sun than Neptune.
Pluto has 5 moons Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. The largest, Charon, is tidally locked with Pluto meaning the same sides are always facing each other.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Discovered in 1930, Pluto is the second closest dwarf planet to the Sun and was at one point classified as the ninth planet. Pluto is now confirmed to be the largest dwarf planet.
Image credit: NASA, based on the planet profiles by Space Plasma
Pluto is smaller than Jupiterâs moons Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa, Saturnâs moon Titan, Neptuneâs moon Triton, and the Earthâs moon.
The instruments carried by New Horizons include Ralph, to provide thermal maps of the dwarf planet, Alice, an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer to analyse the atmosphere around Pluto and LORRI (LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager) a powerful telescopic camera.
For all its scientific objectives to be accomplished the New Horizons spacecraft must pass through a circular region of space just 300 kilometres in diameter.
Images: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-new-horizons-a-heart-from-pluto-as-flyby-begins, http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Press-Conferences/April-14-2015.php, http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Images/Artist-Renderings.php
Total Solar Eclipse: A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon completely blocks the solar disk. In a total solar eclipse, the narrowest part of the path (where the Sun is completely blocked and the Moon casts its darkest shadow) is called the âzone of totalityâ.
Annular Solar Eclipse: When the Moon is farther away in its orbit than usual, it appears too small to completely cover the Sunâs disk. During such an event, a bright ring of sunlight shines around the Moon. This type of eclipse is a called an âannularâ eclipse.
Partial Solar Eclipse: A partial solar eclipse occurs when Earth moves through the lunar penumbra (the lighter part of the Moonâs shadow) as the Moon moves between Earth and the Sun. The Moon does not block the entire solar disk, as seen from Earth.
Image Credit: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap131108.html
Ceres is the closest dwarf planet to the Sun and is located in the asteroid belt, making it the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system. Ceres is also the smallest of the bodies currently classified as dwarf planets.
Updated image: NASA, based on the planet profiles by Space Plasma
For roughly the first 50 years after its discovery Ceres was frequently referred to as a planet: By the end of 1851 14 other similar objects had been discovered and it did not take long before these instead became known as "minor planets". Ceres was eventually reclassified as a Dwarf Planet alongside Pluto in 2006.
Image source:Â http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19171

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
The Asteroid Belt
The majority of asteroids in the solar system are found in the area of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, this is known as the asteroid belt. The belt is 2.2 - 3.2 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and is about 1 AU thick.
The Kuiper Belt
Composed primarily of small solar system bodies made mostly of ices the Kuiper Belt is roughly 30 - 55 AU from the Sun. The ices are frozen volatiles (gases) such as methane, ammonia, nitrogen and water. It also is home to the known dwarf planets Pluto, Haumea and Makemake.
The Oort Cloud
The Oort Cloud is an extended shell of icy objects that exist in the outermost reaches of the solar system. The inner limits of the Oort Cloud begin at about 2,000 AU from the Sun. The cloud itself stretches out almost a quarter of the way to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.Â
Illustrations by Laurine Moreau