Y'all just think about that.

After the gravity wave detectors found neutron star mergers spitting out rare earth metals, lightning on Jupiter seems like a static shock on a door knob.

Yeah OK, but ain't no neutron stars in our local star system, like Jupiter is.

It's not a competition, but if it was, I think first place for awesomeness would go to the volcanoes of Io, but I could be wrong. I've never heard of this gravity wave detector thing. Lightning on Jupiter is pretty fucking cool, though.

I was into astronomy when I was a kid, the way some kids are into dinosaurs. We're talking about the Apollo era, so there were probably a lot of kids like me. I wanted to be an astronaut. I'm scared to get on a plane, so I think things worked out for the best. I took a course at the local planetarium, every Saturday for several weeks.

The expansion of knowledge over the past 50 years is just staggering. I just looked up the number of moons that have been discovered for Jupiter, and it's actually more than the last time I looked it up a few years ago. I think it was 68 last time, and now it's 79. When I was a kid, it was 12 moons. Just 12. Of course, Galileo only discovered 4.

No exoplanets (outside the solar system) were known back then; now there are 4000 confirmed exoplanets, and many more awaiting confirmation.

And yet people talk about how there's no space program any more.

For the curious: my heart started pounding and for a couple of seconds I felt like I was in a dropping elevator. Nothing major, but more than a video of space pictures should have done.