Featured Posts
Universe Today
14 May 2013, 21:07 UTC
The World at Night’s (TWAN) annual Earth & Sky photography contest showcases the stunning beauty of the night sky while highlighting the challenges of keeping our skies free from light pollution. TWAN has now announced the winners of this year’s contest, and the winning photos are simply breathtaking. This year’s theme of “Dark Skies Importance,” [...] The Milky Way and Aurora over Godafoss, waterfall of the gods, Iceland, by Stephane Vetter from France, the first place winner in Beauty of the Night Sky category, TWAN 2013 Earth & Sky Photo Contest. The World at Night’s (TWAN) annual Earth & Sky photography contest showcases the stunning beauty of the night sky while highlighting the challenges of keeping our skies free from light pollution. TWAN has now announced the winners of this year’s contest, and the winning photos are simply breathtaking. This year’s theme of “Dark Skies Importance,” were judged in two categories: “Beauty Of The Night Sky” and “Against The Lights,” said Babak Tafreshi, the founder and director of TWAN,” and the winners were selected from submissions by photographers in about 45 countries.” The selected images were judged to be are those most effective in impressing the public on both how ...
Stunning Astrophotos Reveal the Importance of Dark Skies
14 May 2013, 21:07 UTC
The World at Night’s (TWAN) annual Earth & Sky photography contest showcases the stunning beauty of the night sky while highlighting the challenges of keeping our skies free from light pollution. TWAN has now announced the winners of this year’s contest, and the winning photos are simply breathtaking. This year’s theme of “Dark Skies Importance,” [...] The Milky Way and Aurora over Godafoss, waterfall of the gods, Iceland, by Stephane Vetter from France, the first place winner in Beauty of the Night Sky category, TWAN 2013 Earth & Sky Photo Contest. The World at Night’s (TWAN) annual Earth & Sky photography contest showcases the stunning beauty of the night sky while highlighting the challenges of keeping our skies free from light pollution. TWAN has now announced the winners of this year’s contest, and the winning photos are simply breathtaking. This year’s theme of “Dark Skies Importance,” were judged in two categories: “Beauty Of The Night Sky” and “Against The Lights,” said Babak Tafreshi, the founder and director of TWAN,” and the winners were selected from submissions by photographers in about 45 countries.” The selected images were judged to be are those most effective in impressing the public on both how ...
SPACE.com
14 May 2013, 20:26 UTC
AR1748 should be lined up with our planet by the weekend.
Sunspot Blasting Out Major Solar Flares Will Face Earth Soon
14 May 2013, 20:26 UTC
AR1748 should be lined up with our planet by the weekend.
Lunar Networks
14 May 2013, 19:44 UTC
Western portion of Crüger crater floor. LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) mosaic (M1108725909R and M1108725909L), LRO orbit 15669, November 28, 2012, centered near 16.759°S, 292.627°E, field of view 1670 meters, sunlight from the west, angle of incidence 72.32° at 1.67 meters per pixel resolution, from 79.83 km [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University]. Hiroyuki Sato LROC News Center Crüger is a 45 km diameter crater located between Oceanus Procellarum and Orientale basin. The floor is completely covered in basaltic lava deposits, and is very flat. The western portion of the floor shows slightly high reflectance spots with clustered craters and disturbed surfaces, likely a field of secondary craters. A unique feature of this grouping is the sharp topographic relief delimiting its southern boundary. The upper half of the opening image, the relatively disturbed and hummocky part, corresponds to the cluster area. Note that the sunlight is from the right side, and the cluster area is topographically lower than the southern relatively smooth area along the delimiting boundary. LROC NAC context mosaic M1108725909LR showing the Crüger crater floor, a 7.3 km-wide field of view, image centered on 16.736°S, 292.645°E [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University]. Roughly 20 km-wide field of view from a 62 meter per pixel ...
Swarm of Secondaries on the floor of Crüger
14 May 2013, 19:44 UTC
Western portion of Crüger crater floor. LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) mosaic (M1108725909R and M1108725909L), LRO orbit 15669, November 28, 2012, centered near 16.759°S, 292.627°E, field of view 1670 meters, sunlight from the west, angle of incidence 72.32° at 1.67 meters per pixel resolution, from 79.83 km [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University]. Hiroyuki Sato LROC News Center Crüger is a 45 km diameter crater located between Oceanus Procellarum and Orientale basin. The floor is completely covered in basaltic lava deposits, and is very flat. The western portion of the floor shows slightly high reflectance spots with clustered craters and disturbed surfaces, likely a field of secondary craters. A unique feature of this grouping is the sharp topographic relief delimiting its southern boundary. The upper half of the opening image, the relatively disturbed and hummocky part, corresponds to the cluster area. Note that the sunlight is from the right side, and the cluster area is topographically lower than the southern relatively smooth area along the delimiting boundary. LROC NAC context mosaic M1108725909LR showing the Crüger crater floor, a 7.3 km-wide field of view, image centered on 16.736°S, 292.645°E [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University]. Roughly 20 km-wide field of view from a 62 meter per pixel ...
The Daily Planet
14 May 2013, 18:13 UTC
For the first time in history, a combat aircraft with no pilot onboard took off from an aircraft carrier at sea. Photo: US Navy/Northrop Grumman This morning, for the first time in history, a combat aircraft with no pilot onboard took off from an aircraft carrier at sea. The X-47B demonstrator launched from the USS George H.W. Bush off the coast of Virginia at 11:18 a.m., and flew to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. “Today we saw a small, but significant pixel in the future picture of our Navy,” said Vice Adm. David Buss, commander of the Naval Air Forces, in a released statement. Next up on the list of milestones — flying approaches and landings on a pitching flight deck.
Unmanned X-47B Launches from a Carrier
14 May 2013, 18:13 UTC
For the first time in history, a combat aircraft with no pilot onboard took off from an aircraft carrier at sea. Photo: US Navy/Northrop Grumman This morning, for the first time in history, a combat aircraft with no pilot onboard took off from an aircraft carrier at sea. The X-47B demonstrator launched from the USS George H.W. Bush off the coast of Virginia at 11:18 a.m., and flew to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. “Today we saw a small, but significant pixel in the future picture of our Navy,” said Vice Adm. David Buss, commander of the Naval Air Forces, in a released statement. Next up on the list of milestones — flying approaches and landings on a pitching flight deck.
Centauri Dreams
14 May 2013, 15:39 UTC
We become so bedazzled by the assumptions of our time that we can forget how things looked in different eras. 1973 wasn’t all that many years ago in the cosmic scheme of things, but the early ‘70s were a time of surprising optimism when it came to our future in space. As we saw yesterday, physicist Robert Forward laid out a plan for interstellar expansion to a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1975, even as a thoughtful Michael Michaud worked out his own concepts in a series of papers in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. But nudging ahead of both men by a few years was G. Harry Stine. Already making a name for himself as a science fiction writer under the pseudonym Lee Correy, Stine was a futuristic thinker who fired readers’ imaginations with a cover article in the October, 1973 Analog, an issue whose artwork I reproduce here. Rick Sternbach’s cover caught my eye when I first saw this issue while toiling as a grad student that year, but it was the Stine article, “A Program for Star Flight,” that made me move the magazine to the top of my ‘must read’ list, ...
A Program for Star Flight
14 May 2013, 15:39 UTC
We become so bedazzled by the assumptions of our time that we can forget how things looked in different eras. 1973 wasn’t all that many years ago in the cosmic scheme of things, but the early ‘70s were a time of surprising optimism when it came to our future in space. As we saw yesterday, physicist Robert Forward laid out a plan for interstellar expansion to a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1975, even as a thoughtful Michael Michaud worked out his own concepts in a series of papers in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. But nudging ahead of both men by a few years was G. Harry Stine. Already making a name for himself as a science fiction writer under the pseudonym Lee Correy, Stine was a futuristic thinker who fired readers’ imaginations with a cover article in the October, 1973 Analog, an issue whose artwork I reproduce here. Rick Sternbach’s cover caught my eye when I first saw this issue while toiling as a grad student that year, but it was the Stine article, “A Program for Star Flight,” that made me move the magazine to the top of my ‘must read’ list, ...
The Daily Galaxy
14 May 2013, 15:06 UTC
"We don't understand yet how some of the most important molecules here on Earth are made in space. But our discovery of hydrogen peroxide with APEX seems to be showing us that cosmic dust is the missing ingredient in the process," says Berengere Parise, head of the Emmy Noether research group on star formation and astrochemistry at the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) a key molecule for both astronomers and chemists was discovered close to the star Rho Ophiuchi, about 400 light-years away in 2011 with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX), situated on the 5000-metre-high Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes. The region contains very cold (around -250 degrees Celsius), dense clouds of cosmic gas and dust, in which new stars are being born. Its formation is closely linked to two other familiar molecules, oxygen and water, which are critical for life. Because much of the water on our planet is thought to have originally formed in space, scientists are eager to understand how it is created. Hydrogen peroxide is thought to form in space on the surfaces of cosmic dust grains — very fine particles similar to sand and soot — when hydrogen ...
Cosmic Dust --"A Clue to Origin of Earth's Oxygen and Water?"
14 May 2013, 15:06 UTC
"We don't understand yet how some of the most important molecules here on Earth are made in space. But our discovery of hydrogen peroxide with APEX seems to be showing us that cosmic dust is the missing ingredient in the process," says Berengere Parise, head of the Emmy Noether research group on star formation and astrochemistry at the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) a key molecule for both astronomers and chemists was discovered close to the star Rho Ophiuchi, about 400 light-years away in 2011 with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX), situated on the 5000-metre-high Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes. The region contains very cold (around -250 degrees Celsius), dense clouds of cosmic gas and dust, in which new stars are being born. Its formation is closely linked to two other familiar molecules, oxygen and water, which are critical for life. Because much of the water on our planet is thought to have originally formed in space, scientists are eager to understand how it is created. Hydrogen peroxide is thought to form in space on the surfaces of cosmic dust grains — very fine particles similar to sand and soot — when hydrogen ...
Pillow Astronaut
14 May 2013, 13:04 UTC
Happy 40th Anniversary to SKYLAB, the first American space station! I'm continually amazed at how Skylab Missions, sandwiched between Apollo and the Space Shuttle programs, tends to be the Forgotten Orbiting Tin Can. Compared to modules on other stations, and short-term capsules used in Mercury, Gemini, & Apollo -- Skylab practically had a ballroom! Most of the best "micro-gravity acrobatics" videos came from this amazing program in the mid-1970s.I was born just as the Moon landing program was revving up; my parents tell me I watched lunar footage on television, though I have no recollection. Honestly, Skylab is the first program I can remember seeing on television as a child: how they ran experiments in weightlessness, how the station hosted the first medical doctor in space (astronaut Joseph Kerwin) – and of course, how debris unfortunately plummeted onto Western Australia in July of 1979.They had animals in space! I found that captivating, and plied my father with questions about how fish could swim in space, how spiders adapted, and how humans were affected by the longest space flights up to that time. Skylab was the first program to study bones, muscles, blood, heart function,and metabolism.Skylab featured in my October 1974 ...
Skylab 40th Anniversary
14 May 2013, 13:04 UTC
Happy 40th Anniversary to SKYLAB, the first American space station! I'm continually amazed at how Skylab Missions, sandwiched between Apollo and the Space Shuttle programs, tends to be the Forgotten Orbiting Tin Can. Compared to modules on other stations, and short-term capsules used in Mercury, Gemini, & Apollo -- Skylab practically had a ballroom! Most of the best "micro-gravity acrobatics" videos came from this amazing program in the mid-1970s.I was born just as the Moon landing program was revving up; my parents tell me I watched lunar footage on television, though I have no recollection. Honestly, Skylab is the first program I can remember seeing on television as a child: how they ran experiments in weightlessness, how the station hosted the first medical doctor in space (astronaut Joseph Kerwin) – and of course, how debris unfortunately plummeted onto Western Australia in July of 1979.They had animals in space! I found that captivating, and plied my father with questions about how fish could swim in space, how spiders adapted, and how humans were affected by the longest space flights up to that time. Skylab was the first program to study bones, muscles, blood, heart function,and metabolism.Skylab featured in my October 1974 ...
Bad Astronomy
14 May 2013, 12:00 UTC
Los Angeles is a fun town—as long as you’re not a) driving around in it, or 2) trying to see any stars except for the TV and movie kind. It’s a big city, and a lot of the light used to illuminate it goes into the sky. We call this “light pollution”, because it’s wasted, and also because it can ruin the view of the sky. LA is particularly bad because it’s spread out over a huge area, and to see anything at all in the sky you have to get really, really far out of town. So I will admit to being pretty skeptical when I first saw the picture below: it purports to show the Milky Way—the faint fuzzy band of light strewn across the sky from our galaxy itself—seen over LA! Seriously, right? That’s nuts. But it’s also real. It was taken by Aaron Kiely, who works on spacecraft data at NASA’s JPL, and who’s familiar with techniques to squeeze extra information out of them. That lends him more credence right away. He also has a more detailed explanation of how he put the image together on his Flickr page, and after reading it I was satisfied ...
