Red Moon Rising
Image Credit & Copyright: Oshin Zakarian (TWAN) Explanation: This surreal, wintry scene is a composite picture recorded on December 10 as the Moon rose behind the Zagros Mountains of Iran. A total lunar eclipse was already in progress. The image combines nearly 500 successive frames taken over 1.5 hours beginning in twilight as the eclipsed Moon steadily climbed above the rugged landscape. The reddened lunar disk and deep blue twilight make for a striking contrast, yet the contrasting colors have the same root cause. The eclipsed Moon is red because the Earth’s umbral shadow is suffused with a faint red light. The ruddy illumination is from all the reddened sunsets and sunrises, as seen from a lunar perspective. But the sunsets and sunrises are reddened because the Earth’s atmosphere scatters blue light more strongly than red, creating the twilight sky’s dim, blue glow.

The Umbra of Earth
Image Credit & Copyright: Wang, Letian

here

from here

Figure 1. Panoramic view of the entire near-infrared sky reveals the distribution of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The image is derived from the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC)–more than 1.5 million galaxies, and the Point Source Catalog (PSC)–nearly 0.5 billion Milky Way stars. The galaxies are color coded by “redshift” obtained from the UGC, CfA, Tully NBGC, LCRS, 2dF, 6dFGS, and SDSS surveys (and from various observations compiled by the NASA Extragalactic Database), or photo- metrically deduced from the K band (2.2 um). Blue are the nearest sources (z < 0.01); green are at moderate distances (0.01 < z < 0.04) and red are the most distant sources that 2MASS resolves (0.04 < z < 0.1). The map is projected with an equal area Aitoff in the Galactic system (Milky Way at center). A high-resolution version is here. A locator chart is provided here. An animation that shows the cosmic web separated by sliced redshift is given here-animation (beware: this is 19MB in size). Jarrett, T.H. 2004, PASA, 21, 396.

Check the animation!!!

Boom

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2011/38/

White Blood cell chasing a bacteria…

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-F8NENCW0Wkg/Tugio3g8haI/AAAAAAAAx0k/MLT7pUa8Tr0/w320/Our%2BAmazing%2BBodies%2521.gif

Roll slow…

Jupiter Rotation Movie from Pic du Midi
Image Credit & Copyright: S2P / IMCCE / OPM / JL Dauvergne et al. Explanation: Observe the graceful twirl of the Solar System’s largest planet. Many interesting features of Jupiter’s enigmatic atmosphere, including dark bands and light zones, can be followed in detail. A careful inspection will reveal that central clouds rotate slightly faster than clouds toward the poles. The famous Great Red Spot is visible at first but soon rotates out of view, only to return near the movie’s end. Other smaller storm systems ocassionally appear. As large as Jupiter is, it rotates in only 10 hours. Our small Earth, by comparison, takes 24 hours to complete a spin cycle. The above high-resolution time-lapse movie was captured over the past year by the one-meter Telescope at the Pic du Midi Observatory in the French Pyrenees. Since hydrogen and helium gas are colorless, and those elements compose most of Jupiter’s expansive atmosphere, what trace elements create the observed colors of Jupiter’s clouds remains unknown.

Fire…. in space

http://www.space.com/13764-fire-space.html

hammer vs feather

Sun ooze…

Orange Sun Oozing 
Image Credit & Copyright: Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño et al. (IAG & MPS, NRL)Explanation: The Sun’s surface keeps changing. The above movie shows how the Sun‘s surface oozes during a single hour. The Sun’s photosphere has thousands of bumps called granules and usually a few dark depressions called sunspots. The above time-lapse movie centered on Sunspot 875 was taken in 2006 by the Vacuum Tower Telescope in the Canary Islands of Spain using adaptive optics to resolve details below 500 kilometers across. Each of the numerous granules is the size of an Earth continent, but much shorter lived. A granule slowly changes its shape over an hour, and can even completely disappear. Hot hydrogen gas rises in the bright center of a granule, and falls back into the Sun along a dark granule edge. The above movie and similar movies allows students and solar scientists to study how granules and sunspots evolve as well as how magnetic sunspot regions produce powerful solar flares. A few days ago, the largest sunspot group in recent years rotated into view.

Star Forming Region S106 
Image Credit: GRANTECAN and IACExplanation: Massive star IRS 4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born only about 100,000 years ago, material streaming out from this newborn star has formed the nebula dubbed Sharpless 2-106 Nebula (S106), pictured above. A large disk of dust and gas orbiting Infrared Source 4 (IRS 4), visible in dark red near the image center, gives the nebula an hourglass or butterfly shape. S106 gas near IRS 4 acts as an emission nebula as it emits light after being ionized, while dust far from IRS 4 reflects light from the central star and so acts as a reflection nebula. Detailed inspection of images like the above image has revealed hundreds of low-mass brown dwarf stars lurking in the nebula’s gas. S106 spans about 2 light-years and lies about 2000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

We are all connected

http://vimeo.com/27891029

As of 2009, this is what the map looks like on human space programs and our reach into outer space.

NASA scientists will be tracking asteroid 2005 YU55 with antennas of the agency’s Deep Space Network at Goldstone, Calif., as the space rock safely flies past Earth slightly closer than the moon’s orbit on Nov. 8. Scientists are treating the flyby of the 1,300-foot-wide (400-meter) asteroid as a science target of opportunity – allowing instruments on “spacecraft Earth” to scan it during the close pass.

Tracking of the aircraft carrier-sized asteroid will begin at 9:30 a.m. local time (PDT) on Nov. 4, using the massive 70-meter (230-foot) Deep Space Network antenna, and last for about two hours. The asteroid will continue to be tracked by Goldstone for at least four hours each day from Nov. 6 through Nov. 10. Radar observations from the Arecibo Planetary Radar Facility in Puerto Rico will begin on Nov. 8, the same day the asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth at 3:28 p.m. PST.

The trajectory of asteroid 2005 YU55 is well understood. At the point of closest approach, it will be no closer than 201,700 miles (324,600 kilometers) or 0.85 the distance from the moon to Earth. The gravitational influence of the asteroid will have no detectable effect on anything here on Earth, including our planet’s tides or tectonic plates. Although 2005 YU55 is in an orbit that regularly brings it to the vicinity of Earth (and Venus and Mars), the 2011 encounter with Earth is the closest this space rock has come for at least the last 200 years…..

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/news/yu55-20111025.html

That stunning shot is from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. The big moon is Titan, and by big, I mean bigger than the planet Mercury. Big enough to have a thick nitrogen atmosphere, clearly visible in this picture. The bright moon superposed right on top of Titan is Dione, its icy surface shiny and white.

On the right, just outside the rings, is tiny, flying saucer-shaped Pandora. And the fourth moon? That’s Pan, the tiny white spot in the gap in the rings on the left, barely visible in this shot. But that’s understandable, since Pan is less than 30 km (18 miles) across, and this was taken from a distance of nearly 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) away!

I love pictures like this; they remind me that even after 7 years of Cassini touring around Saturn, there’s still much to see and much beauty to behold there.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

text from: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

Clouds of Perseus
Credit & Copyright: Image Data – Bob Caton, Al Howard, Eric Zbinden, Rogelio Bernal Andreo; Processing – Rogelio Bernal Andreo Explanation: Cosmic clouds of gas and dust drift across this magnificent panorama, spanning some 17 degrees near the southern boundary of the heroic constellation Perseus. The collaborative skyscape begins with bluish stars of Perseus at the left, but the eye is drawn to the striking, red NGC 1499. Also known as the California Nebula, its characteristic glow of atomic hydrogen gas is powered by ultraviolet light from luminous blue star Xi Persei immediately to the nebula’s right. Farther along, intriguing young star cluster IC 348 and neighboring Flying Ghost Nebula are right of center. Connected by dark and dusty tendrils on the outskirts of a giant molecular cloud, another active star forming region, NGC 1333, lies near the upper right edge of the wide field of view. Shining faintly, dust clouds strewn throughout the scene are hovering hundreds of light-years above the galactic plane and reflect starlight from the Milky Way.

Jupiter’s Clouds from New Horizons
Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins U. APL, SWRI Explanation: The New Horizons spacecraft took some stunning images of Jupiter on its way out to Pluto. Famous for its Great Red Spot, Jupiter is also known for its regular, equatorial cloud bands, visible through even modest sized telescopes. The above image, horizontally compressed, was taken in 2007 near Jupiter’s terminator and shows the Jovian giant’s wide diversity of cloud patterns. On the far left are clouds closest to Jupiter’s South Pole. Here turbulent whirlpools and swirls are seen in a dark region, dubbed a belt, that rings the planet. Even light colored regions, called zones, show tremendous structure, complete with complex wave patterns. The energy that drives these waves surely comes from below. New Horizons is the fastest space probe ever launched, has now passed the orbits of Saturn and Uranus and is on track to reach Pluto in 2015.

HH-222: The Waterfall Nebula
Image Credit: Z. Levay (STScI/AURA/NASA), T.A. Rector (U. Alaska Anchorage) & H. Schweiker (NOAO/AURA/NSF), KPNO, NOAO Explanation: What created the Waterfall Nebula? No one knows. The structure seen in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion Molecular Cloud complex is one of the more mysterious structures yet found on the sky. Designated HH-222, the elongated gaseous stream stretches about ten light years and emits an unusual array of colors. One hypothesis is that the gas filament results from the wind from a young star impacting a nearby molecular cloud. That would not explain, however, why the Waterfall and fainter streams all appear to converge on a bright but unusual non thermal radio source located toward the upper left of the curving structure. Another hypothesis is that the unusual radio source originates from a binary system containing a hot white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, and that the Waterfall is just a jet from this energetic system. Such systems, though, are typically strong X-rays emitters, and no X-rays have been detected. For now, this case remains unsolved. Perhaps well-chosen future observations and clever deductive reasoning will unlock the true origin of this enigmatic wisp in the future.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6226