[via petapixel.com]
This amazing video by Spacecraft Films shows the July 16, 1969 launch of the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the moon. The camera was rolling at a whopping 500 frames per second, allowing the first 30 seconds of the launch to be slowed down into this 8-minute narrated video of pure awesomeness.
[via APOD]
Reddened light from the setting Sun illuminates the cloud banks hugging this snowy, rugged terrain.
Inspiring a moment of quiet contemplation, the sunset scene included a remarkable pillar of light that seemed to connect the clouds in the sky with the mountains below. Known as a Sun pillar, the luminous column was produced by sunlight reflecting from flat, six-sided ice crystals formed high in the cold atmosphere and fluttering toward the ground.
Last Monday, astronomers watched this Sun pillar slowly fade, as the twilight deepened and clearing, dark skies came to Mt. Jelm and the Wyoming Infrared Observatory.
[via wired.com]
The collision in early February of the 60-mile-long B-9B iceberg with the protruding tongue of the Mertz Glacier in East Antarctica is captured here in a series of satellite radar images.
The crash created a second massive iceberg nearly 50 miles long and 25 miles wide, named C-28. The name means that it’s the 28th glacier since 1976 that has broken off from the quadrant of Antarctica that faces Australia.
[via APOD]
Click image for full-size picture (1800x1394)
Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices.
This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy’s bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565′s thin galactic plane. An assortment of other galaxies is included in the pretty field of view. Neighboring galaxy NGC 4562 is at the upper right. NGC 4565 itself lies about 40 million light-years distant, spanning some 100,000 light-years.
[via bit-tech.net]
Google has launched its first user-generated version of Street View, which maps geolocated images in a 3D space and allows for virtual walk-throughs with impressive imagery.
As reported over on GigaOM,the new layer allows users to upload two-dimensional photographs and place them within a three-dimensional space – creating a 3D panorama of the area with far higher resolution and quality than that available from the standard Street View service.
The idea isn’t new: back in 2006 Microsoft unveiled its Silverlight-based 2D-to-3D photo manipulation system Photosynth, which works in much the same way: taking images uploaded by individuals and placing them within a collaborative space to create a fully immersive – if slightly herky-jerky – 3D panorama.
[via APOD]
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A jewel of the southern sky, the Great Carina Nebula, aka NGC 3372, spans over 300 light-years.
Near the upper right of this expansive skyscape, it is much larger than the more northerly Orion Nebula. In fact, the Carina Nebula is one of our galaxy’s largest star-forming regions and home to young, extremely massive stars, including the still enigmatic variable Eta Carinae, a star with well over 100 times the mass of the Sun.
Put a satellite in a circular orbit about 42,000 kilometres from the center of the Earth (36,000 kilometres or so above the surface) and it will orbit once in 24 hours. Because that matches Earth’s rotation period, it is known as a geosynchronous orbit. If that orbit is also in the plane of the equator, the satellite will hang in the sky over a fixed location in a geostationary orbit.
As predicted in the 1940s by futurist Arthur C. Clarke, geostationary orbits are in common use for communication and weather satellites, a scenario now well-known to astroimagers.
[via APOD]
The snow capped Teide volcano is reflected in a pool of water in this nearly symmetric night sky view from the Canary Island Tenerife.
Bright north star Polaris stands above the peak in an exposure that also captures the brilliant trail of a polar orbiting Iridium satellite.
Of course, with the camera fixed to a tripod, the stars themselves produce concentric trails in long exposures, a reflection of the Earth’s rotation around its axis.
Large astronomical observatories also take advantage of the calm Canary Island sky.
[via APOD]
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Sometimes, the space shuttle launches at night. Pictured above, the space shuttle Endeavour lifted off in yesterday’s early morning hours from Launch Pad 39A in Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA, bound for the International Space Station (ISS). A night launch, useful for reaching the space station easily during some times of the year, frequently creates vivid launch imagery.
The shuttle, as pictured above, is framed by an enormous but typical exhaust plume ejected as the shuttle’s powerful rockets began lifting the two million kilogram space bus into Earth orbit. Endeavour’s mission, labelled STS-130, includes the delivery of the Tranquility module to the space station.
[via mit.edu]
Workers examine a new Quench Protection System at CERN in January. Image courtesy of CERN
In December, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, shattered the world record for highest energy particle collisions.
This week, team led by researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of those collisions. Its findings show that the collisions produced an unexpectedly high number of particles called mesons — a factor that will have to be taken into account when physicists start looking for more rarer particles and for the theorized Higgs boson.