I was surprised that Apollo 15 'Falcon' had such an angle on it considering how slowly they took the descent.

Bad news on the James Webb.

Gliese 3470c - the first exoplanet discovered by amateur astronomers.
And using a 12.5 inch telescope in a guy's back yard!

The possible planet (it needs to be confirmed by further observations) is likely 10x the diameter of Earh (Saturn-sized) and with a 'year' of 66 days.  The parent star is half the size of our Sun so a lot less bright, in fact the new planet lies in the 'habitable zone' where liquid water could exist on its surface.

A Neptune-sized planet had already been discovered around the star (Gliese 3470b).
And the observations made include hints of other planets existing in the system.

www.sci-news.com/astronomy/saturn-like-exoplanet-habitable-zone-gliese-3470-08658.html

How long do they take to arrive?

.... which led me on to investigate the Soviet Venera space probe programme to Venus. A lot more in it than I knew about, which was vague memories of fairly poor photos from a lander.

Quite an interesting article - www.fromspacewithlove.com/venera/

Thousands or millions of planets might be orbiting our Milky Way galaxy's central super massive black hole (SMBH).
They will probably be called blanets to distinguish them from the usual type of planets that orbit around stars.  Although they may well be very similar, just a lot more lonely.

Planets around stars seem to form from the disk of debris left after a star forms from its parent cloud of gas and dust.
A similar, but hugely vaster, disk of debris exists around SMBHs, so it seems reasonable that blanets will form there in a similar way.

The "sticking point" (pardon the pun, which will shortly become evident) is ice - that seems to be needed to form planets as ice covered granules are much more likely to stick together than bare pebbles, which would tend to just bounce off each other.  Around a really big SMBH ice is unlikely to form as those black holes kick out a viscious amount of energy making things literally too hot for ice.  But around a smaller SMBH (like the one at the centre of the Milky Way - a mere 4 million solar masses, compared to the more usual type that are in the billions of solar masses) there will be a "snow line" in the disk, beyond which ice would be able to form.

So, it seems quite plausible that the centre of our galaxy is aswarm with blanets, many much like our own Earth, with quite possibly conditions suitable for life.
Imagine the view!



www.space.com/black-hole-planets-blanets.html

Another article on blanets - possible planets around some supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies.

"Astronomers are  speculating that planets by the thousands may be orbiting in a “safe zone” captured by the massive gravitational force of these paradoxical, terrifying, “perfectly constructed” spacetime objects. In 2019, Harvard’s Avi Loeb and NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman, suggested that inhabited planets might exist around the black holes harbored at the center of most galaxies similar to the fictional waterworld planet orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua in the movie Interstellar.

It’s possible, they suggested, that extreme forms of life life may form on some of these planets."

dailygalaxy.com/2020/08/exist-at-an-astonishing-scale-planets-orbiting-black-holes-could-harbor-life-beyond-extreme/

For typical SMBHs of billions of solar masses, that's true, it would be a very hostile environment in the 'habitable zone' as usually defined by temperature.

But for galaxies like the Milky Way which for whatever reason have small or less active SMBHs [our SMBH being a mere 4 million solar masses] it would be a much more benign environment and conditions in the habitable zone could be broadly OK for life as we know it.

Fascinating.

High speed stars in close orbit around the super massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

"We Just Found The Fastest Star in The Milky Way, Travelling at 8% The Speed of Light" ...

On its orbital journey, S4714 reaches a velocity of around 8 percent of the speed of light - an absolutely jaw-dropping 24,000 kilometres per second (15,000 miles per second). But that's not even the most amazing thing.

S4714 ... has given us the first candidate for a type of star originally proposed nearly 20 years ago - those that get so close to a black hole, they are 'squeezed' by its tidal forces. They're also known as 'squeezars'.

www.sciencealert.com/the-fastest-star-in-the-galaxy-zooms-as-high-as-8-percent-of-the-speed-of-light