Christmas in January
Posted by Danielle in Children's Items, Picspam on January 26, 2012
Yeah, yeah, it’s a little late for Christmas, but these images are too terrific to wait eleven months to post, I’m sorry! (Hat tip to Rachel Hobson for the find!)
Heh heh, Santa goes out on a LM… (limb! Get it? GET IT?? HAHAHA… okay I’ll shut up now.)
Green Fairy
Image Credit & Copyright: Bjørn Jørgensen
Green fairy? Eagle? Angel? Whatever you might see in this aurora’s vast shape, I think “fantastic” is a safe description, don’t you?
What’s that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal mass ejection occurred on our Sun five days ago, throwing a cloud of fast moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Although most of this cloud passed above the Earth, some of it impacted our Earth’s magnetosphere and resulted in spectacular auroras being seen at high northern latitudes. Pictured above is a particularly photogenic auroral corona captured last night above Grotfjord, Norway. To some, this shimmering green glow of recombining atmospheric oxygen might appear as a large eagle, but feel free to share what it looks like to you. This round of solar activity is not yet over — a new and even more powerful solar flare occurred yesterday [January 23] that might provide more amazing aurora as soon as tonight [January 24].
Agoraphobia
Posted by Danielle in Art & Architecture, Books & Literature on January 24, 2012
Agoraphobia © Austin Kleon
I’ve only just been introduced to the newspaper-blackout poetry of Austin Kleon — I love this one, ever so much. Buy the print here.
The Milky Way, Over Storms, Over Africa
Posting on a stormy Friday night? Why not? This is BEAUTIFUL. (I suppose technically it’s “Vidspam”, not Picspam.)
A Supernova in Two Wavelengths
This is an unusual image, a mix of visible light (red) and X-rays (green). It reminds me of a water opal:
Where’s the other star? At the center of this supernova remnant should be the companion star to the star that blew up. Identifying this star is important for understanding just how Type Ia supernova detonate, which in turn could lead to a better understanding of why the brightness of such explosions are so predictable, which in turn is key to calibrating the entire nature of our universe. The trouble is that even a careful inspection of the center of SNR 0509-67.5 has not found any star at all. This indicates that the companion is intrinsically very faint — much more faint that many types of bright giant stars that had been previous candidates. In fact, the implication is that the companion star might have to be a faint white dwarf, similar to — but less massive than — the star that detonated. SNR 0509-67.5 is shown above in both visible light, shining in red as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, and X-ray light, shown in false-color green as imaged by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Putting your cursor over the picture will highlight the central required location for the missing companion star.
Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Hughes et al., Optical: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI /AURA)
21st Century Rockwell
An interesting, Norman Rockwell-esque encounter with alien life from 1955. Image courtesy of x-ray delta one.
Beautiful Spiral
A lovely spiral galaxy for your Wednesday.
From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. The big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 10 million light-years away, behind a veil of foreground dust and stars in the high and far-off constellation of Cepheus. From the core outward, the galaxy’s colors change from the yellowish light of old stars in the center to young blue star clusters and reddish star forming regions along the loose, fragmented spiral arms. NGC 6946 is also bright in infrared light and rich in gas and dust, exhibiting a high star birth and death rate. In fact, since the early 20th century at least nine supernovae, the death explosions of massive stars, were discovered in NGC 6946. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, NGC 6946 is also known as the Fireworks Galaxy. This remarkable portrait of NGC 6946 is a composite that includes image data from the 8.2 meter Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea.
Composite Image Data – Subaru Telescope (NAOJ) and Robert Gendler; Processing – Robert Gendler
Lunar Transit
A very cool photo I received by email (see the other two here and here.) See that little white thing in the upper left? Yeah, that’s the ISS.
JSC2012-E-017827 (4 Jan. 2012) — The International Space Station can be seen as a small object in upper left of this image of the moon in the early evening Jan. 4 in the skies over the Houston area flying at an altitude of 390.8 kilometers (242.8 miles). Photo credit: NASA
Here’s the whole sequence (click for MONDO-VIEW):
JSC2012-E-017837 (4 Jan. 2012) — Multiple images of the International Space Station flying over the Houston area have been combined into one composite image to show the progress of the station as it crossed the face of the moon in the early evening of Jan. 4. The station, with six astronauts and cosmonauts currently aboard, was flying in an orbit at 390.8 kilometers (242.8 miles). The space station can be seen in the night sky with the naked eye and a pair of field binoculars may reveal some detail of the structural shape of the spacecraft. Station sightings in the area will be possible again (weather permitting) Friday, Jan. 6, beginning at 6:11 p.m. CST. Viewing should be possible for approximately six minutes as the station moves from 10 degrees above west-northwest to 10 degrees above south-southeast. The maximum elevation will be 44 degrees. To find sighting details by city, visit: http://go.usa.gov/81R. Equipment used by the NASA photographer, operating from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was as follows: Nikon D3S, 600mm lens and 2x converter, Heavy Duty Bogen Tripod with sandbag and a trigger cable to minimize camera shake. The camera settings were as follows: 1/1600 @ f/8, ISO 2500 on High Continuous Burst. Photo credit: NASA
Titan and Dione
Today’s APOD is not to be missed! (But I’m a sucker for images of Saturn and the moons thereof.)
Orbiting in the plane of Saturn’s rings, Saturnian moons have a perpetual ringside view of the gorgeous gas giant planet. Of course, while passing near the ring plane the Cassini spacecraft also shares their stunning perspective. The rings themselves can be seen slicing across the middle of this Cassini snapshot from May of last year. The scene features Titan, largest, and Dione, third largest moon of Saturn. Remarkably thin, the bright rings still cast arcing shadows across the planet’s cloud tops at the bottom of the frame. Pale Dione is about 1,100 kilometers across and orbits over 300,000 kilometers from the visible outer edge of the A ring. Dione is seen through Titan’s atmospheric haze. At 5,150 kilometers across, Titan is about 2.3 million kilometers from Cassini, while Dione is 3.2 million kilometers away.
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
Cosmic Flights
Posted by Danielle in Books & Literature on January 4, 2012
I just love these Soviet space illustrations from Flight into Cosmic Space, circa 1949 (and hey, they were posted on my birthday, so happy belated to me!) Above is a space station (or a cosmic-sized ring, your choice), and below is said station with a rocket launching away from it. Check out the post at Dreams of Space for more images!
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About Silver Rockets
This blog celebrates space exploration, human spaceflight and the heavens, through lots and lots ofimages.
My name is Danielle Signor, and I am a space cadet. STS-133 NASA Tweetup Attendee!
This is a blog, NOT A SHOP. Click the images for their source or purchase link, if available.
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