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Saturn Rings, Tethys, Cassini Spacecraft Photo

Saturn Rings, Tethys, Cassini Spacecraft Photo

Stuck on the Rings

Like a drop of dew hanging on a leaf, Tethys appears to be stuck to the A and F rings from this perspective.

Tethys (660 miles, or 1,062 kilometers across), like the ring particles, is composed primarily of ice. The gap in the A ring through which Tethys is visible is the Keeler gap, which is kept clear by the small moon Daphnis (not visible here).

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Tethys. North on Tethys is up and rotated 43 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 14, 2014.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 22 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visithttp://www.nasa.gov/cassini andhttp://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

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X-class Solar Flare, NASA photo, Solar Dynamics Observatory

The sun emitted a significant solar flare on Oct. 19, 2014, peaking at 1:01 a.m. EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is always observing the sun, captured this image of the event in extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 131 Angstroms – a wavelength that can see the intense heat of a flare and that is typically colorized in teal.

This flare is classified as an X1.1-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 flare is twice as intense as an X1, and an X3 is three times as intense.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

More: NASA's SDO Observes an X-class Solar Flare

Image Credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory

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Florida to Louisiana Viewed From the International Space Station

Florida to Louisiana Viewed From the International Space Station
NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman captured this image of Florida to Louisiana just before dawn, taken from the International Space Station, and posted it to social media on Friday, Sept. 12. Wiseman, Commander Max Suraev and Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst began their first full workweek Monday as a three-person crew aboard the space station, while the three additional flight engineers who will round out the Expedition 41 crew spent the day training for next week’s launch to the orbiting complex.
Image Credit: NASA

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Powerful, Pulsating Core of Star

Powerful, Pulsating Core of Star

The blue dot in this image marks the spot of an energetic pulsar -- the magnetic, spinning core of star that blew up in a supernova explosion. NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, discovered the pulsar by identifying its telltale pulse -- a rotating beam of X-rays, that like a cosmic lighthouse, intersects Earth every 0.2 seconds.

The pulsar, called PSR J1640-4631, lies in our inner Milky Way galaxy about 42,000 light-years away. It was originally identified by as an intense source of gamma rays by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) in Namibia. NuSTAR helped pin down the source of the gamma rays to a pulsar.

The other pink dots in this picture show low-energy X-rays detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

In this image, NuSTAR data is blue and shows high-energy X-rays with 3 to 79 kiloelectron volts; Chandra data is pink and shows X-rays with 0.5 to 10 kiloeletron volts.

The background image shows infrared light and was captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SAO

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The Odd Trio, Saturn's Moons, Prometheus, Tethys, Hyperion

The Cassini spacecraft captures a rare family photo of three of Saturn's moons that couldn't be more different from each other! As the largest of the three, Tethys (image center) is round and has a variety of terrains across its surface. Meanwhile, Hyperion (to the upper-left of Tethys) is the "wild one" with a chaotic spin and Prometheus (lower-left) is a tiny moon that busies itself sculpting the F ring.

To learn more about the surface of Tethys (660 miles, or 1,062 kilometers across), see PIA17164. More on the chaotic spin of Hyperion (168 miles, or 270 kilometers across) can be found at PIA07683. And discover more about the role of Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) in shaping the F ring in PIA12786.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 1 degree above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 14, 2014.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 22 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

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Saturn at Equinox

Saturn at Equinox
Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA
Explanation: How would Saturn look if its ring plane pointed right at the Sun? Before August 2009, nobody knew. Every 15 years, as seen from Earth, Saturn's rings point toward the Earth and appear to disappear. The disappearing rings are no longer a mystery -- Saturn's rings are known to be so thin and the Earth is so near the Sun that when the rings point toward the Sun, they also point nearly edge-on at the Earth. Fortunately, in this third millennium, humanity is advanced enough to have a spacecraft that can see the rings during equinox from the side. In August 2009, that Saturn-orbiting spacecraft, Cassini, was able to snap a series of unprecedented pictures of Saturn's rings during equinox. A digital composite of 75 such images is shown above. The rings appear unusually dark, and a very thin ring shadow line can be made out on Saturn's cloud-tops. Objects sticking out of the ring plane are brightly illuminated and cast long shadows. Inspection of these images is helping humanity to understand the specific sizes of Saturn's ring particles and the general dynamics of orbital motion. This week, Earth undergoes an equinox.

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Unusual Rocks near Pahrump Hills on Mars

Unusual Rocks near Pahrump Hills on Mars
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS

Explanation: How did these Martian rocks form? As the robotic Curiosity rover has approached Pahrump Hills on Mars, it has seen an interesting and textured landscape dotted by some unusual rocks. The featured image shows a curiously round rock spanning about two centimeters across. Seemingly a larger version of numerous spherules dubbed blueberries found by the Opportunity rover on Mars in 2004, what caused this roundness remains unknown. Possibilities include frequent tumbling in flowing water, sprayed molten rock in a volcanic eruption, or a concretion mechanism. The inset image, taken a few days later, shows another small but unusually shaped rock structure. As Curiosity rolls around and up Mount Sharp, different layers of the landscape will be imaged and studied to better understand the ancient history of the region and to investigate whether Mars could once have harbored life.

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Solar Dynamics Observatory, Late Summer Solar Flare

On Aug. 24, 2014, the sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 8:16 a.m. EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the flare, which erupted on the left side of the sun. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare is classified as an M5 flare. M-class flares are ten times less powerful than the most intense flares, called X-class flares.

Image Credit: NASA/SDO

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Earth From Space, An Astronaut View

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on Tuesday morning, Sept. 2, 2014. "My favorite views from #space – just past #sunrise over the ocean," the Expedition 40 astronaut tweeted.

The Expedition 40 crew has been busy aboard the Space Station, recently performing health checks and humanoid robot upgrades. In the meantime, a trio of orbital residents is packing up gear as they prepare to return home in less than two weeks. Commander Steve Swanson powered down and stowed Robonaut 2 after wrapping up its mobility upgrades this week. He installed new legs on the humanoid robot including external and internal gear as well as cables. This sets the stage for more upgrades in the fall before Robonaut takes its first steps as an assistant crew member. Robonaut was designed to enhance crew productivity and safety while also aiding people on Earth with physical disabilities.

Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid)

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The Beat of a Midsize Black Hole (video)

NASA | RXTE Satellite Catches the Beat of a Midsize Black Hole -

Aug 18, 2014--Astronomers from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have uncovered rhythmic pulsations from a rare breed of black hole in archival data from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite. The signals provide compelling evidence that the object, known as M82 X-1, is one of only a few midsize black holes known.

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Largest and Brightest Supermoon 2014, Perigee Moon

Supermoon 2014: Giant moon lights up sky across the globe -


Stargazers around the globe have been dazzled by the biggest and brightest "supermoon" of the year. This year's Perseid meteor shower in one of the most dramatic and anticipated astronomical events of the year. According to NASA, the moon is said to be 14 per cent closer to Earth making it appear larger than usual. Report by Sarah Kerr. Published on Aug 11, 2014

Largest & Brightest Supermoon Of The Year Over South Florida « CBS Miami: "The full moon on August 10th will be the closest and largest full moon in 2014. When the moon is full as it makes its closest pass to Earth, it becomes a “Supermoon,” and will be up to 31,000 miles closer to Earth than other full moons this year. According to NASA, this weekend’s full moon will be 14-percent closer and 30-percent brighter than other full moons of the year. The scientific term for the phenomenon is “perigee moon” or the point when the moon is closest to the Earth in its monthly orbit. The moon will appear much larger than normal, especially on the horizon."

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ISEE-3, A Spacecraft for All, Chrome Experiment (video)

A Spacecraft for All: A Chrome Experiment - YouTube: "

Explore the amazing 36-year-long journey of the International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) with the ISEE-3 Reboot team in this new Chrome Experiment. Published on Aug 8, 2014.

http://spacecraftforall.com

A Google Chrome Experiment Visualizes The 36-Year Journey Of A Spacecraft | Co.Design | business + design: In 1978, NASA launched the ISEE-3, a spacecraft designed to study the Earth’s magnetic field and its interactions with solar wind. It would later become the first spacecraft visit a comet. NASA decomissioned the spacecraft in 1997, leaving it to orbit the Sun as very expensive space trash. This year, a team of engineers, programmers, and scientists launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $159,000 to try to contact ISEE-3 and take control of its operations, sending it out to chase comets again, this time for citizen science. A new Chrome Experiment from Google Creative Lab called A Spacecraft for All tells the story of ISEE-3’s history and the recent revival effort through a combination and interactive graphics...

36-Year-Old NASA Probe's Engines Successfully Fired Up by Private Team - Scientific American: "An old NASA spacecraft under the control of a private team fired its thrusters yesterday (July 2) for the first time in a generation. NASA's International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 probe (ISEE-3), which the agency retired in 1997, performed the maneuver in preparation for a larger trajectory correction next week. The spacecraft hadn't fired its engines since 1987, ISEE-3 Reboot Project team members said. It took several attempts and days to perform the roll maneuver because ISEE-3 was not responding to test commands. But this time, controllers got in touch. They increased the roll rate from 19.16 revolutions per minute to 19.76 RPM, putting it within mission specifications for trajectory corrections...."

more info: http://spacecollege.org/isee3/

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Re-thinking an Alien World, 55 Cancri e (video)

ScienceCasts: Re-thinking an Alien World -  


A distant super-Earth named ""55 Cancri e"" is wetter and weirder than astronomers thought possible. The discovery has researchers re-thinking the nature of alien worlds.

Visit http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/... for more.

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A Narrow Miss of Earth, Carrington-class CME (video)

ScienceCasts: Carrington-class CME Narrowly Misses Earth - YouTube:

Two years ago, an intense solar storm narrowly missed Earth. If it had hit, researchers say, we could still be picking up the pieces.

Visit http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/... for more.

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Cool Andromeda

Space Images: Cool Andromeda - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "Andromeda, also known as M31, is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way at a distance of 2.5 million light-years, making it an ideal natural laboratory to study star formation and galaxy evolution. Sensitive to the far-infrared light from cool dust mixed in with the gas, Herschel seeks out clouds of gas where stars are born. The new image reveals some of the very coldest dust in the galaxy -- only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero -- colored red in this image. By comparison, warmer regions such as the densely populated central bulge, home to older stars, take on a blue appearance. Intricate structure is present throughout the 200,000-light-year-wide galaxy with star-formation zones organized in spiral arms and at least five concentric rings, interspersed with dark gaps where star formation is absent. Andromeda is host to several hundred billion stars. This new image of it clearly shows that many more stars will soon to spark into existence."

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Flame Nebula image

Space Images: Inside the Flame Nebula - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "Stars are often born in clusters or groups, in giant clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers have studied two star clusters using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared telescopes and the results show that the simplest ideas for the birth of these clusters cannot work. This composite image shows one of the clusters, NGC 2024, which is found in the center of the so-called Flame Nebula about 1,400 light years from Earth. In this image, X-rays from Chandra are seen as purple, while infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are colored red, green and blue. A study of NGC 2024 and the Orion Nebula Cluster, another region where many stars are forming, suggest that the stars on the outskirts of these clusters are older than those in the central regions. This is different from what the simplest idea of star formation predicts, where stars are born first in the center of a collapsing cloud of gas and dust when the density is large enough. The research team developed a two-step process to make this discovery. First, they used Chandra data on the brightness of the stars in X-rays to determine their masses. Next, they found out how bright these stars were in infrared light using data from Spitzer, the 2MASS telescope and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope. By combining this information with theoretical models, the ages of the stars throughout the two clusters could be estimated. According to the new results, the stars at the center of NGC 2024 were about 200,000 years old while those on the outskirts were about 1.5 million years in age. In Orion, the age spread went from 1.2 million years in the middle of the cluster to nearly 2 million years for the stars toward the edges...."


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Men Landed on the Moon 45 Years Ago

After liftoff from the Moon, the lunar module approaches CSM for docking, with earthrise in background. (NASA) -- Apollo 11

more info:
45 Years Ago We Landed Men on the Moon - In Focus - The Atlantic


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Galaxy computer simulation

Space Images: Cosmic Swirly Straws Feed Galaxy - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "Created with the help of supercomputers, this simulation shows the formation of a massive galaxy during the first 2 billion years of the universe. Hydrogen gas is gray, young stars appear blue, and older stars are red. The simulation reveals that gas flows into galaxies along filaments akin to cosmic bendy, or swirly, straws. Jillian Bellovary of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.; Fabio Governato of the University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Washington's N-Body Shop helped create the simulation. The work was conducted in part using the resources of the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education at Vanderbilt University."


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The Fermi Paradox, Where is Everybody?

The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why: "Explanation Group 1: There are no signs of higher (Type II and III) civilizations because there are no higher civilizations in existence. Those who subscribe to Group 1 explanations point to something called the non-exclusivity problem, which rebuffs any theory that says, “There are higher civilizations, but none of them have made any kind of contact with us because they all _____.” Group 1 people look at the math, which says there should be so many thousands (or millions) of higher civilizations, that at least one of them would be an exception to the rule. Even if a theory held for 99.99% of higher civilizations, the other .01% would behave differently and we’d become aware of their existence. Therefore, say Group 1 explanations, it must be that there are no super-advanced civilizations. And since the math suggests that there are thousands of them just in our own galaxy, something else must be going on. This something else is called The Great Filter. The Great Filter theory says that at some point from pre-life to Type III intelligence, there’s a wall that all or nearly all attempts at life hit. There’s some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond. That stage is The Great Filter."

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Saturn's C and B Rings From the Inside Out

Saturn's C and B Rings From the Inside Out - This image, taken on June 30, 2004 during Cassini's orbital insertion at Saturn, shows, from left to right, the outer portion of the C ring and inner portion of the B ring. The B ring begins a little more than halfway across the image. The general pattern is from "dirty" particles indicated by red to cleaner ice particles shown in turquoise in the outer parts of the rings.

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Swirls from NASA's Hubble

Swirls from NASA's Hubble:
This new Hubble image shows NGC 1566, a beautiful galaxy located approximately 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish). NGC 1566 is an intermediate spiral galaxy, meaning that while it does not have a well-defined bar-shaped region of stars at its center — like barred spirals — it is not quite an unbarred spiral either.
The small but extremely bright nucleus of NGC 1566 is clearly visible in this image, a telltale sign of its membership of the Seyfert class of galaxies. The centers of such galaxies are very active and luminous, emitting strong bursts of radiation and potentially harboring supermassive black holes that are many millions of times the mass of the sun.
NGC 1566 is not just any Seyfert galaxy; it is the second brightest Seyfert galaxy known. It is also the brightest and most dominant member of the Dorado Group, a loose concentration of galaxies that together comprise one of the richest galaxy groups of the southern hemisphere. This image highlights the beauty and awe-inspiring nature of this unique galaxy group, with NGC 1566 glittering and glowing, its bright nucleus framed by swirling and symmetrical lavender arms.
This image was taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the near-infrared part of the spectrum. A version of the image was entered into the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition by Flickr user Det58.

Image Credit:  ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Flickr user Det58


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Galaxy NGC 4485 in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs)

This image from NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxy NGC 4485 in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). The galaxy is irregular in shape, but it hasn’t always been so. Part of NGC 4485 has been dragged towards a second galaxy, named NGC 4490 — which lies out of frame to the bottom right of this image.

Between them, these two galaxies make up a galaxy pair called Arp 269. Their interactions have warped them both, turning them from spiral galaxies into irregular ones. NGC 4485 is the smaller galaxy in this pair, which provides a fantastic real-world example for astronomers to compare to their computer models of galactic collisions. The most intense interaction between these two galaxies is all but over; they have made their closest approach and are now separating. The trail of bright stars and knotty orange clumps that we see here extending out from NGC 4485 is all that connects them — a trail that spans some 24 000 light-years.
Many of the stars in this connecting trail could never have existed without the galaxies’ fleeting romance. When galaxies interact hydrogen gas is shared between them, triggering intense bursts of star formation. The orange knots of light in this image are examples of such regions, clouded with gas and dust.

European Space Agency
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Kathy van Pelt

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13 billion years of galaxy evolution, Virtual Universe (video)

A virtual Universe -

Scientists at MIT have traced 13 billion years of galaxy evolution, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day. Their simulation, named Illustris, captures both the massive scale of the Universe and the intriguing variety of galaxies -- something previous modelers have struggled to do. It produces a Universe that looks remarkably similar to what we see through our telescopes, giving us greater confidence in our understanding of the Universe, from the laws of physics to our theories about galaxy formation. Published on May 7, 2014

Read the research paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/...

And the Nature News story: http://www.nature.com/news/model-univ...

Most Expensive Object Ever Is In Space (video)

The Most Expensive Object Ever (Lives in Space): Video - Bloomberg:
(Allow video to load after clicking play)

The International Space Station is the single most expensive object ever created. Bloomberg takes a look at the numbers behind the near zero gravity laboratory in the series "The Next Space Race." (Source: Bloomberg May 12)


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Saturn's Streaming Hexagon

Saturn's Streaming Hexagon
This colorful view from NASA's Cassini mission, known as "the hexagon," is the highest-resolution view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn's north pole. (source: NASA)


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Earth from Space

NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured this stunning view of the Americas on Earth Day, April 22, 2014

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Galaxy Andromeda, M31

Cool Andromeda
In this new view of the Andromeda, also known as M31, galaxy from the Herschel space observatory, cool lanes of forming stars are revealed in the finest detail yet. (source: NASA)

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Wake Up Long-Dormant Spacecraft ISEE-3

ISEE-3 image (source: NASA)

The third International Solar-Environment Explorer (ISEE-3) was the first spacecraft to monitor solar wind, while it was perched in orbit between the Sun and the Earth.

Everyone But NASA Wants To Wake Up This Long-Dormant Spacecraft | Motherboard: "...In 1997, the ICE mission operations were terminated, although the spacecraft's on-board instrumentation was still working and there was still fuel available. NASA's Deep Space Network checked in with the ISEE-3 back in 2008, and its spacecraft's transmitter remains on, but that's all that's really known at this point. It had a second life as a comet hunter, though, so why not a third? "It's the most cost-effective spacecraft we ever had and I'd like to make it even more cost-effective. It can do more missions," said Bob Farquhar, the "orbit maestro" who originally turned the ISEE-3 into the ICE and got America to a comet before any other country...."


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Cool Andromeda

Cool Andromeda
In this new view of the Andromeda, also known as M31, galaxy from the Herschel space observatory, cool lanes of forming stars are revealed in the finest detail yet. (source: NASA/JPL)

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Martian Impact Crater

Martian Impact Crater
A dramatic, fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013. The crater is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone. (source: NASA)

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Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I

At about 89,000 miles in diameter, Jupiter could swallow 1,000 Earths. It is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere. Such winds sustain spinning anticyclones like the Great Red Spot -- a raging storm three and a half times the size of Earth located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. In January and February 1979, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft zoomed toward Jupiter, capturing hundreds of images during its approach, including this close-up of swirling clouds around Jupiter's Great Red Spot. This image was assembled from three black and white negatives. The observations revealed many unique features of the planet that are still being explored to this day. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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Hubble Frontier Field Abell 2744

Hubble Frontier Field Abell 2744

This long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image of massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (foreground) is the deepest ever made of any cluster of galaxies. It shows some of the faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected in space.

The immense gravity in Abell 2744 is being used as a lens to warp space and brighten and magnify images of more distant background galaxies. The more distant galaxies appear as they did longer than 12 billion years ago, not long after the big bang.

The Hubble exposure reveals almost 3,000 of these background galaxies interleaved with images of hundreds of foreground galaxies in the cluster. Their images not only appear brighter, but also smeared, stretched and duplicated across the field. Because of the gravitational lensing phenomenon, the background galaxies are magnified to appear as much as 10 to 20 times larger than they would normally appear. Furthermore, the faintest of these highly magnified objects is 10 to 20 times fainter than any galaxy observed previously. Without the boost from gravitational lensing, the many background galaxies would be invisible.

The Hubble exposure will be combined with images from Spitzer and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to provide new insight into the origin and evolution of galaxies and their accompanying black holes.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA

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Martian Chiaroscuro

Martian Chiaroscuro - Explanation: Deep shadows create dramatic contrasts between light and dark in this high-resolution close-up of the martian surface. Recorded on January 24 by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the scene spans about 1.5 kilometers across a sand dune field in a southern highlands crater. Captured when the Sun was just 5 degrees above the local horizon, only the dune crests are caught in full sunlight. With the long, cold winter approaching the red planet's southern hemisphere, bright ridges of seasonal frost line the martian dunes.

Image Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

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Solar Flare in Different Wavelengths of Light

First Moments of a Solar Flare in Different Wavelengths of Light
On Feb. 24, 2014, the sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 7:49 p.m. EST. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which keeps a constant watch on the sun, captured images of the event. These SDO images from 7:25 p.m. EST on Feb. 24 show the first moments of this X-class flare in different wavelengths of light -- seen as the bright spot that appears on the left limb of the sun. Hot solar material can be seen hovering above the active region in the sun's atmosphere, the corona. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation, appearing as giant flashes of light in the SDO images. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. source: NASA

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Martian Sand Dunes in Spring

Martian Sand Dunes in Spring

Mars’ northern-most sand dunes are beginning to emerge from their winter cover of seasonal carbon dioxide (dry) ice. Dark, bare south-facing slopes are soaking up the warmth of the sun.

The steep lee sides of the dunes are also ice-free along the crest, allowing sand to slide down the dune. Dark splotches are places where ice cracked earlier in spring, releasing sand. Soon the dunes will be completely bare and all signs of spring activity will be gone.

This image was acquired by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Jan. 16, 2014. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates the HiRISE camera, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. photo: NASA

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Painted Stone, Asteroids in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (video)

Painted Stone: Asteroids in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey from Alex Parker on Vimeo.
Over 100,000 asteroids and their colors, as seen by a single remarkable survey telescope.

This animation shows the orbital motions of over 100,000 of the asteroids observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), with colors illustrating the compositional diversity measured by the SDSS five-color camera. The relative sizes of each asteroid are also illustrated.

All main-belt asteroids and Trojan asteroids with orbits known to high precision are shown. The animation is rendered with a timestep of 3 days.

The compositional gradient of the asteroid belt is clearly visible, with green Vesta-family members in the inner belt fading through the blue C-class asteroids in the outer belt, and the deep red Trojan swarms beyond that.

Occasional diagonal slashes that appear in the animation are the SDSS survey beams; these appear because the animation is rendered at near the survey epoch.

The average orbital distances of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter are illustrated with rings.

Colors represented with the same scheme as Parker et al. (2008):
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?arXiv:0807.3762

Concept and rendering by Alex H. Parker: http://www.alexharrisonparker.com/

Funding for the creation and distribution of the SDSS Archive has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, and the Max Planck Society. The SDSS Web site is http://www.sdss.org/.

The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC) for the Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are The University of Chicago, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, The Johns Hopkins University, the Korean Scientist Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington.

Music: Tamxr by LJ Kruzer (http://www.ljkruzer.co.uk/)

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View of Earth and Moon from Mars

Catalog Page for PIA17936: "This view of the twilight sky and Martian horizon taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover includes Earth as the brightest point of light in the night sky. Earth is a little left of center in the image, and our moon is just below Earth. Two annotated versions of this image are also available in Figures 1 and 2. Researchers used the left eye camera of Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) to capture this scene about 80 minutes after sunset on the 529th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (Jan. 31, 2014). The image has been processed to remove effects of cosmic rays. A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright "evening stars." The distance between Earth and Mars when Curiosity took the photo was about 99 million miles (160 million kilometers)...."

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Ancients, Time Lapse

Ancients from Nicholas Buer on Vimeo.

This film follows the ancient cycle of sunset, to night, to sunrise. A continuous loop of perpetual movement that has been unbroken since the dawn of time, and the only true constant in our lives.

I shot this film over 12 days around the San Pedro de Atacama region of Northern Chile. San Pedro is an oasis town in the Atacama and sits at an altitude of 2600m. The town is a great base to explore the fascinating landscapes that surround it, and everything just goes up and up.

The Atacama is well-known for what are arguably the cleanest, darkest skies on Earth. The dry air adds an extra transparency and this coupled with the altitude creates a night sky like no other. I visited at a time when Venus was situated quite close to the centre of the Milky Way; an astronomical event that only takes place every 8 years or so. I also timed my visit with the Autumn equinox which is a good time of year to capture Zodiacal light; the celestial phenomenon caused by sunlight scattering interplanetary space dust in the Zodiacal cloud. It stretches across the ecliptic and glows for a short while after sunset like a UFO beam and I was lucky enough to witness this every night I stepped out into the dark.

In my opinion an adventure is not complete unless there are challenges, and this trip was no different. My luggage was lost for the first 6 days I was there so for half of my trip I had no tripods and no motion control equipment. I shot many time-lapses in this film with my cameras on buckets weighted down with rocks! it was far from ideal but I was determined not to miss an opportunity to capture this wonderful sky. I battled through with little food and less sleep, language barriers and I even broke down in the middle of nowhere at one point, but at least the sunset was nice that evening! I found the Atacama to be a very harsh landscape; the dry air makes your skin crack and split, the winds pummel you with every gust and the altitude slows you down and affects your ability to hike with heavy equipment. By the end of this trip me, my kit and my car had taken a real battering but it was all worth it, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Music composed by Shudan, please support this amazing artist by clicking here:
facebook.com/shudanmusic

All footage is available in resolutions up to 4k. If you would like to licence any of my clips or talk about a project you have in mind please contact me at:
contact@nicholasbuer.com

You can connect/follow me on all the usual social media sites:
facebook.com/nicholasbuerphotography
twitter.com/nicholasbuer
gplus.to/nicholasbuer
flickr.com/nicholasbuer
instagram.com/nicholasbuer

To see more work please visit www.nicholasbuer.com

For motion control I used the Stage One Dolly System by Dynamic Perception:
www.dynamicperception.com

© Nicholas Buer 2014

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VASIMR Plasma Rocket (video)

NASA Public Affairs Officer Dan Huot interviews Ken Bollweg, VASIMR Project Manager, about VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket), recent testing progress and future applications. Published on May 17, 2013

The VASIMR Plasma Rocket: Bridging the Gap in Space Travel | Space Industry News: "VASIMR stands for Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, which makes use of argon gas (one of the most stable gasses known to man) and a renewable source of energy found in space, radio waves in the form of light. The main difference with this type of rocket is being able to use mostly renewable energy in the propulsion system, which gives the rocket a greater lifespan than similar, modern-day rocket technologies. The plasma technology has multiple applications such as the cleaning and coating of surfaces in a plasma coating system at nano-level. The uses of plasma, the 4th state of substances, are just being touched on now with recent advances in science." (read more at link above)

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VASIMR Lunar Tug Concept

VASIMR Lunar Tug Concept - An unmanned cargo capability based on VASIMR propulsion offers significant cost savings to NASA and commercial lunar exploration programs. VASIMR can deliver twice as much payload to the lunar surface, compared to chemical propulsion, if used as a 'tug boat' between Low Earth Orbit and Low Lunar Orbit. At the present, chemical propulsion always has to be used to climb out of Earth's atmosphere and into a Low Earth Orbit, in addition to the final lunar landing descent.

Beyond VX-200 (VASIMR Experimental, 200 kW) and VF-200 (VASIMR Flight, 200 kW) demonstrations, the Ad Astra Rocket Company plans to fill a developing high power transportation niche near Earth for orbit maintenance of large space structures for commerce and tourism and satellite repositioning, retrieval and re supply. Longer term applications for which VASIMR may be ideally suited include: the delivery of large payloads to the lunar surface, recovery of space resources from asteroids and comets and propelling cargo and human missions to Mars and beyond.

More at:
www.AdAstraRocket.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable...

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Earth and Moon Seen by Passing Juno Spacecraft (video)

Earth and Moon Seen by Passing Juno Spacecraft 
When NASA's Juno spacecraft flew past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, it received a boost in speed of more than 8,800 mph (about 7.3 kilometer per second), which set it on course for a July 4, 2016, rendezvous with Jupiter. 

One of Juno's sensors, a special kind of camera optimized to track faint stars, also had a unique view of the Earth-moon system. The result was an intriguing, low-resolution glimpse of what our world would look like to a visitor from afar. 

The cameras that took the images for the movie are located near the pointed tip of one of the spacecraft's three solar-array arms. They are part of Juno's Magnetic Field Investigation (MAG) and are normally used to determine the orientation of the magnetic sensors. These cameras look away from the sunlit side of the solar array, so as the spacecraft approached, the system's four cameras pointed toward Earth. Earth and the moon came into view when Juno was about 600,000 miles (966,000 kilometers) away -- about three times the Earth-moon separation. 

During the flyby, timing was everything. Juno was traveling about twice as fast as a typical satellite, and the spacecraft itself was spinning at 2 rpm. To assemble a movie that wouldn't make viewers dizzy, the star tracker had to capture a frame each time the camera was facing Earth at exactly the right instant. The frames were sent to Earth, where they were processed into video format. 

The music accompaniment is an original score by Vangelis.

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Boomerang nebula

Boomerang nebula - source: NASA

The Boomerang nebula, called the "coldest place in the universe," reveals its true shape to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope. The background blue structure, as seen in visible light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows a classic double-lobe shape with a very narrow central region. ALMA's resolution and ability to see the cold gas molecules reveals the nebula's more elongated shape, as seen in red.

ALMA, an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by European Southern Observatory, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

source: NASA

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Star Waves

Star Waves - source: NASA

The giant star Zeta Ophiuchi is having a "shocking" effect on the surrounding dust clouds in this infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Stellar winds flowing out from this fast-moving star are making ripples in the dust as it approaches, creating a bow shock seen as glowing gossamer threads, which, for this star, are only seen in infrared light.

Zeta Ophiuchi is a young, large and hot star located around 370 light-years away. It dwarfs our own sun in many ways -- it is about six times hotter, eight times wider, 20 times more massive, and about 80,000 times as bright. Even at its great distance, it would be one of the brightest stars in the sky were it not largely obscured by foreground dust clouds.

This massive star is travelling at a snappy pace of about 54,000 mph (24 kilometers per second), fast enough to break the sound barrier in the surrounding interstellar material. Because of this motion, it creates a spectacular bow shock ahead of its direction of travel (to the left). The structure is analogous to the ripples that precede the bow of a ship as it moves through the water, or the sonic boom of an airplane hitting supersonic speeds.

The fine filaments of dust surrounding the star glow primarily at shorter infrared wavelengths, rendered here in green. The area of the shock pops out dramatically at longer infrared wavelengths, creating the red highlights. A bright bow shock like this would normally be seen in visible light as well, but because it is hidden behind a curtain of dust, only the longer infrared wavelengths of light seen by Spitzer can reach us. Bow shocks are commonly seen when two different regions of gas and dust slam into one another. Zeta Ophiuchi, like other massive stars, generates a strong wind of hot gas particles flowing out from its surface. This expanding wind collides with the tenuous clouds of interstellar gas and dust about half a light-year away from the star, which is almost 800 times the distance from the sun to Pluto. The speed of the winds added to the star's supersonic motion result in the spectacular collision seen here.

Our own sun has significantly weaker solar winds and is passing much more slowly through our galactic neighborhood so it may not have a bow shock at all. NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft are headed away from the solar system and are currently about three times farther out than Pluto. They will likely pass beyond the influence of the sun into interstellar space in the next few years, though this is a much gentler transition than that seen around Zeta Ophiuchi....JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer.

source: NASA

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