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Space Shuttle Endeavour Over Earth (NASA, International Space Station Science, 02/09/10)
Though astronauts and cosmonauts often encounter striking scenes of Earth’s limb, this very unique image, part of a series over Earth’s colorful horizon, has the added feature of a silhouette of the space shuttle Endeavour. The image was photographed by an Expedition 22 crew member prior to STS-130 rendezvous and docking operations with the International Space Station. Docking occurred at 11:06 p.m. (CST) on Feb. 9, 2010. The orbital outpost was at 46.9 south latitude and 80.5 west longitude, over the South Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern Chile with an altitude of 183 nautical miles when the image of the was recorded. The orange layer is the troposphere, where all of the weather and clouds which we typically watch and experience are generated and contained. This orange layer gives way to the whitish Stratosphere and then into the Mesosphere. In some frames the black color is part of a window frame rather than the blackness of space.
(via Flickr)
Inspirational… Totally inspirational. I wish I had this on my bedroom wall. What an image to imprint on your mind when you go to sleep. What a vision to wake up to.
I want my own shuttle.
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Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode.
– Lawrence M. Krauss (via raising-romulus)
So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today. -
Slingshot
There are two possible explanations for this ‘slingshot’ in space: kickback by a triple black hole system, or the effects of gravitational waves produced after two supermassive black holes merged a few million years earlier.
The discovery of this object comes from a large, multi-wavelength survey, known as the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS). This survey includes data from Chandra, HST, XMM- Newton, as well as ground-based observatories. Of the 2,600 X-ray sources found in COSMOS, only one — named CID-42 and located in a galaxy about 3.9 billion light years away — coincides with two very close, compact optical sources. -
Jupiter, August 2008, 10” Perseus Scope
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astrophysics is simple
via youtube.com originally from jwz
and this would be why in texts you always get to deal with frictionless point masses, cause when you start to factor in the reality of the universe, the complexity is simply frightening, yet beautiful.
Posted via email from virtual meta musings… posterized. | Comment »
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Space…. is fucking sexy.
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the pleiades.
if you look at the bottom of the moon and directly left, the nearest dull star is sterope. one below and a bit farther to the left is maia, my goddess of choice. she’s mother to hermes (so the “grandmother of magic”), the namesake of the month of may, and is the goddess of spring and rebirth. she, along with the other six sisters- the pleiades, sit on the shoulder of the taurus constellation.
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Icy Triton
Taken in 1989 by Voyager 2 during its flyby of the Neptune system, this is a global color mosaic of Triton. The color was synthesized by combining high-resolution images taken through orange, violet and ultraviolet filters; these images were displayed as red, green, and blue images and combined to create this color version.
With a radius about 22 percent smaller than Earth’s moon, Triton is the largest satellite of Neptune and is one of the few bodies in the solar system known to have a nitrogen-dominated atmosphere. The others are Earth and Saturn’s giant moon, Titan.
Triton is so cold that most of its nitrogen is condensed as frost, making it the only satellite in the solar system known to have a surface made mainly of nitrogen ice. The pinkish deposits constitute a vast south polar cap believed to contain methane ice, which would have reacted under sunlight to form pink or red compounds. The dark streaks overlying these pink ices are believed to be an icy and perhaps carbonaceous dust deposited from huge geyser-like plumes, some of which were found to be active during the Voyager 2 flyby.
The bluish-green band visible in this image extends all the way around Triton near the equator; it may consist of relatively fresh nitrogen frost deposits. The greenish areas includes what is called the cantaloupe terrain, whose origin is unknown, and a set of “cryovolcanic” landscapes apparently produced by icy-cold liquids (now frozen) erupted from Triton’s interior.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS -
Sunset on Mars. Neat-o!
