Good morning, Earth! An awesome piece of inspiration this morning from Canadian Colonel Chris Hadfield, Commander of the International Space Station. Col. Hadfield took a photo of Berlin at night from the ISS (he does this all over the Earth, btw, and they're all awesome), showing an obvious color temperature divide between the higher quality [...]
Read More berlin, canada, Colonel Chris Hadfield, good morning, HID, International Space Station, ISS, Mercury Vapor, Sodium Vapor
With a headline like that, one would think this would be bigger news than anything Kim Kardashian might produce, even trumping what color baby bib little cranky monkey Justin Bieber might be wearing today. But, you'd be wrong. Here's the fact of the matter: all over Earth right now – scientific organizations, special lobbying groups, [...]
Read More asteroid impact, asteroids, DE-STAR, Die Hard, House Science Committee, John Holdren, Philip M. Lubin, policy, solar pressure, solar sail, White House, Yarkovsky
I saw this in a post the other day somewhere, and I forgot to bookmark the link. I just spent the last several minutes digging through Vimeo to determine if this was the one, or if I need to lay off the Nabob. Check this out — this is a video of the Earth from [...]
Read More International Space Station, ISS tour, NASA, Suni, Sunita Williams
This is astronaut Don Pettit. Don's got a whole bunch of cameras on board the International Space Station, or at least he did on missions Expeditions 30 and Expedition 31 to the ISS. Don took a whole bunch of awesome photos that were turned into one cool time lapse video, but given a crazy Tron-like [...]
Read More Christoph Malin, Don Pettit, International Space Station, ISS, orbit, photography, space, star trails, Tron, vimeo
So-called Fire Rainbows actually have nothing to do with fire or rainbows, however they are absolutely awesome! The correct nomenclature for this optical phenomenon is circumhorizontal arc (circumhorizon arc and lower symmetric 46° plate arc are also accepted). A multi-colored halo (spanning from the red wavelengths at the top to the indigo like a rainbow) [...]
Read More clouds, meteorology, prism, rainbow, sky, sunlight
Have you seen this thing lately? There are so many things wrong with this that I cannot even start to name them — but Discover Magazine's Blog did, and it sounds like this: …and not to mention, their post is called Planetary Alignment Pyramid Scheme. BAAAHAHAHA! Check out Discover Magazine's retort to this crazy image [...]
Read More Discover Magazine, giza, planetary alignment, pwned, pyramids of giza, silly science
SUPER NERD ALERT! ASTROPHYSICS INCOMING! This is so beautiful — you're looking at what appears to be the "heartbeat" of a protostar, which is a sun-like star that forms out of a giant interstellar cloud full of molecular hydrogen and dust. Most of these clouds are found within the interstellar medium, which is best explained [...]
Read More accretion, Chandra Observatory, heartbeat, hydrogen, interstellar cloud, McNeil's Nebula, protostar, star birth, Suzaku, V1647 Orionis, x-ray
Direct from NASA — meet our Magnetosphere! Ever see that movie with Nick Cage called Knowing? Earth's magnetosphere is the main premise of that movie, and its failure is the cause of the world's destruction. It's not really that good when you realize that the aliens came to save the planet, which really turns the [...]
Read More CME, coronal mass ejection, magnetosphere
My friend Jules posted this I think yesterday — a bunch of images from Don Pettit, flight engineer aboard the International Space Station. Not regular ol' images of life in space or anything, nay. These are long exposure shots of stars, et al, taken from the station itself. This is about the coolest thing I've [...]
Read More ISS< International Space Station, Julie Johnston, long exposure, space, star trails, Stellar
Ok, have a look at this image — if you click on it, it gets really, really big: That's our Milky Way. The image below here represents the material within the white square on the left — a star-forming region called G305 to astronomers and astrophysicists — again, a click makes it bigger: That cutaway [...]
Read More Astrophysics, celestial bodies, G305, Milky Way, stars, UKIRT, University of Edinburgh, VISTA