Zabriskie Point - More Photos

👋 Good Morfternight!

This week’s morfternight is short due to a packed meetup schedule and late due to the time difference. I am in Nevada, nine hours behind my usual.

🌍 And I thought Vienna was hot in the summer…

After flying to Los Angeles last Thursday, I drove to Las Vegas with a slight detour through the Death Valley. Historical temperature records show that I have been lucky, as the maximum I have experienced so far is 44C or 113F.

I have been to Las Vegas before, and I know that it sits in the middle of a desert, but until this trip, I had not appreciated what it meant.

The road trip from LA to Vegas and the visit to Death Valley were magical experiences. Here’s my friend Luca taking a photo in the Mojave desert.

🪩 The Camera at Lagrange point L2

I previously mentioned my fascination for the JWST, the telescope that NASA sent about 1 million miles, or 1.6 million km away from Earth, to take photos of the Universe, looking far and back in time, more than we ever did.

XKCD puts it better than I would have:

🪐 13 billion years ago

The first images coming from JWST are incredible. If you take a grain of sand, and hold it at arm’s length, here’s what the tiny sliver of space it covers contains.

Here’s a comparison of several images taken by Hubble, our former best telescope ever, and JWST.

I am tempted to say we live in the future, considering we can now look back 13 billion years in the past.