TL;DR crew : I am creating a repository of space facts, scientific explanation for certain planetary events, what if situations, etc that can be shared in classrooms, used as a reference in research journals hopefully or just to alleviate boredom if you're intrigued by space. I intend to share this on my socials, as well as make it a top search result whenever someone search for a space related article on google(soon to be replaced by a decentralized search engine, someone should create that), so you should expect high quality content from this, like I always deliver

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Ahh space, the final frontier, the one last piece to conquer before humanity's taste for dominance can be satisfied. Ever since man became aware that he was standing on a ball of rock floating through a large emptiness, he has always wondered just what was beyond the big blue sky. Man, A rather curious being as we all know, has always been attracted to obstacles that test his tenacity and limits. Setting out to conquer territories, places that man wasn't ever meant to go or be.

We first took the sea, learnt how to use it to our advantage, learnt to make it work for us, then we took the sky, designed giant metal cages to help us glide through it at neck breaking speed, made the air in the sky work for us.

Soon our planet was under our foot, and we had learnt to control the forces within. We even learnt how to harness the total power fire, however small portion of it we could, in small tubes that went boom. Yet our thirst did not quench, we wanted more, we wanted power, we created weapons that harnessed a form of energy similar to that found in the life giving sun, and turned it into a power of destruction, we named it the nuclear bomb.

Wanting more, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin stepped out of the planet for the first time. A feat that would then be reciprocated more than 20 times by different people within 8 years due to a d*ck measuring contest between countries.

We put a man on the moon, then 11 extra, we sent probes to observe events in other planets, we created satellites which are essentially time capsules detailing human history, and sent them off into deep space.

We wish to go far, and we are going far, humanity and space, the final frontier.

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Hello everyone!

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I have always been fascinated by outer space, planets, and all those sort of things. This came as a result of my dad having way too many sci-fi books in the house back then. I read books such as Eon, startrek, etc. I was always fascinated by the stories, how vast space was and how vividly spread-out a story could turn in space.
This fueled my addiction to get more knowledge on the subject, and by Jss3, I was capable of naming all the closest stars to our solar systems, some of the dwarf planets(ceres, eris at the time, pluto was still a planet) in existence and being able to give theories(how ever silly at the time) why living on mars would be hell(trust me, it is).

Now me being a Nigerian, a lot of people were not particularly interested in this field. Most people then, and even today are not interested in space, or anything too scientific, engineering? sure, medicine? sure, even mathematics, was given more acknowledgment than outer space.

As required by curriculum, geography was a subject that though about planets, and during certain sections, was required to talk about outer space, exploration, and mars. Now I was not a particularly bright student, got mostly Cs in my WAEC and NECO, but in both, I came out with an A in geography, I literally knew more than my teacher, who, if I may add, actually argued with me that the sun was not a star but a sun and that other stars werent like the sun, but simply balls of twinkles in the sky, @illuminatus, can you imagine that?! epic facepalm

Well, as with how I run my things, I am going to be starting this as a series in hopes that Nigerians, Africans and whoever want to, can learn a little about our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, our local cluster, our universe.

I have 2 tools which I hope will provide adequate information, along with sources from online.

The first is universe sandbox2 game/simulator, which uses a complex physics engine to simulate different events, such as the milkyway-andromeda collision that would occur in about 4 billion years.

screenshot from the universe sandbox2 sim

Universe Sandbox ² is a physics-based space simulator.It merges gravity, climate, collision, and material interactions to reveal the beauty of our universe and the fragility of our planet.
Create, destroy, and interact on a scale you've never before imagined.
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It essentially is a piece of software that allows you to run set simulations on your computer. Like for example, have you ever wondered what planet sized basket ball could do to humanity? Or what would happen if you dropped mercury into a geocentric orbit?

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The second is stellarium for linux, which I use to keep myself entertained whenever I am working on some python codes, or learning how to code on ubuntu.

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

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Stellarium is very good when used to determine points and objects in the sky. It is like looking through a telescope, only this one has the power of all the telescopes in the world. You are able to view events and objects that occur in any point in the sky. It also gives you the opportunity to view different object from different planets, asteroid, bodies etc. You could select earth and look at saturn, the distance from earth to there, the distance of saturn in relation to another body, you cold follow the orbit part way of saturn over a period of time.
Or you could select saturn and look at the earth from that point of view (POV)

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They are both quite quite nifty and I hope with these two tools I would be able to explain a few things to everyone and y'all can enjoy/appreciate it.

So in the coming days, this is me hoping that you all will fly to space with me, enjoy the beauty of the universe and revel in its vastness.

From time to time, I would be dropping contests where winners can get some froom cryptocoins, sbd, recharge card and/or steem, so stay tuned!!!

Thanks