2020.

What a shite year.

But I *did* make a lot of new friends here, so to celebrate here's a rundown of some of my favourite posts I shared in 2020!

First up: a post from January where I showed how big Earth is compared to our closest *ever* view of the Sun's surface:

(1/12)

February's entry is one of my very favourite space images ever: a silhouette of #Pluto, sunlight shining through its hazy atmosphere, as seen by @NewHorizons2015 during its July 2015 flyby...

(I mean, how scifi is this?!)

(2/12)

For March, this image of highly squashed and folded rocks in the Alps—these folds were originally vertical, so what you're seeing are rocks that were originally squashed in one orientation and then flipped onto their side.

Do *not* fuck with geology.

(3/12)

For April, here's an incredible photo of a fulgurite—a natural shape formed when (usually) lightning hits sand and fuses the silica to glass.

They can form REALLY weird structures!

(4/12)

May's post has to be the 40th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption in May 1980—when the stratovolcano *literally* fell apart in a huge lateral blast.

I photoshopped in the Empire State Building to the ash plume to give some sense of scale:

(5/12)

For June, what really grabbed my attention was this image of something so innocuous as a grain of interstellar dust.

Just that this particular grain of dust, for example, is about 7 billion years old... a few billion years *older* than the Solar System...

(6/12)

July's post really stopped me in my tracks.

It's a photograph (or, at least, a direct image) of two giant exoplanets orbiting their star. They're the two dots in the middle and lower right. (The star itself, TYC 8998-760-1, is at upper left.) Wow.

(7/12)

For August, it's a video.

This is Saturn, appearing to "rise" behind the Moon (which really is moving out of the way). This incredible video was taken by Jan Koet in 2007.

Now *this* is science-fictiony-!

(8/12)

September's image was not nearly as happy.

The wildfires that were turning the sky red and orange in the western U.S. gave us some stunning but deeply unsettling views.

Here, I put images from the surfaces of Venus, Titan, and Earth side by side...

(9/12)

For October... an image of Mars falling apart a little, just for fun.

This is a landslide near one of the polar ice caps on the Red Planet, caught *in the act*! Just one of the incredible views of the planet afforded us by @HiRISE:

(10/12)

The penultimate image in this thread is also from Mars... but shows us—Earth, as a lonely speck in the twilight Martian sky.

(Can you see it? It's a little white speck that *isn't* dust on your screen, about a third of the way in from the left!)

(11/12)

The last image is, in fact, *again* from Mars, but what's fascinating isn't the surface of the planet but what's *on* it:

An iron meteorite, from who knows where?, found just sitting there by @MarsCuriosity. (The rover even sampled the meteorite with its laser!)

(12/12)

Thank you for following me here, and for engaging with the posts I make.

I'll keep going in 2021 and beyond. And here's to a healthier, and happier, next year!

#HAPPYNEWYEAR2021