Devour, 2013
At first glance, these objects may look like planets, but they are actually photos of the bottoms of frying pans.
The bottoms of frying pans, folks.
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown….
Set to HD, full screen.
LYRICS= awesome
This is animation.
Each frame represents one hour;
the whole, one year.
The moon keeps the same face to us,
but not exactly the same face.
Because of the tilt and shape of its orbit
we see the moon from slightly different angles.
In a time lapse it looks like it’s wobbling.
This is libration.
That rocking and tilting is real,
it’s called libration.
The moon’s orbit is not a circle,
but an ellipse.
The speed varies,
but the spin is constant.
Together these geometries
let us look East a little more,
then West a little more.
And the orbit’s tilt
let’s us look South a little more,
then North a little more.
This is libration.
The moon’s libration.
In the words of Phil Plait, “Holy. Haleakala. The simple and sheer amazingness of this picture cannot be overstated. Here we have a picture taken by a camera on board a space probe that’s been orbiting Mars for six years, reset and re-aimed by programmers hundreds of millions of kilometers away using math and science pioneered centuries ago, so that it could catch the fleeting view of another machine we humans flung across space, traveling hundreds of million of kilometers to another world at mind-bending speeds, only to gently – and perfectly – touch down on the surface mere minutes later.
The news these days is filled with polarization, with hate, with fear, with ignorance. But while these feelings are a part of us, and always will be, they neither dominate nor define us. Not if we don’t let them. When we reach, when we explore, when we’re curious – that’s when we’re at our best. We can learn about the world around us, the Universe around us. It doesn’t divide us, or separate us, or create artificial and wholly made-up barriers between us. As we saw on Twitter, at New York Times Square where hundreds of people watched the landing live, and all over the world: science and exploration bind us together. Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people.”
Truth.
Mars Curiosity lander will break into the Martian atmosphere with a scheduled decent August 6th. NASA is using a parachute and then a crazy risky rocket propelled crane to lower the lander onto the surface. Stay tuned! It will be exciting.
You think it’s like this, but it’s really like this.
The Sun and Inner Planets Moving Through Space
(via 14-billion-years-later)
Because I never get tired of time lapse videos taken from space, here is one created by Tomislav Safundžić called This is Our Planet.
20th Century history was bad ass.
“Space Cadet” from BBC archives
The Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. It provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television. On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event, the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, in order to produce this stunning video in ultraviolet and visible light.
Emily Lakdawalla is a scientist, science journalist, and tireless advocate for space exploration. She also does handcrafts, and sells her stuff at her Etsy site called SpaceCraft. This is the MESSENGER which is currently orbiting Mercury and investigating its geologic history in great detail.
All the water on Europa compared to Earth. It makes us look parched!
My 9th graders are starting a planetary science unit. What can I say about this devastating and jaw-dropping picture of our nearest spiral neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy?
It’s comprised of two colors: what you see here as blue is higher-energy ultraviolet light, and red is lower energy (closer to the kind of light we see). Right away you can see that objects emitting the higher-energy UV are confined to the spiral arms, and lower-energy emitters are spread out across the galaxy. That’s exactly what I would expect: massive stars, the kind that really blast out UV, don’t live very long. They’re born, live out their short lives, and die (as supernovae) pretty much near the spot where they formed, which is in spiral arms. Lower mass stars live long enough to gradually move away from their nurseries, populating the rest of the galaxy.
This photo has been circulating around the internet as people drool and swoon over Saturday’s annular eclipse. (yes, annular not annual. big difference)
The only thing: the picture is a piece of art from 2009 by a Japanese artist who goes by the name A4size-ska on DeviantArt.
Read more here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/05/22/a-fake-and-a-real-view-of-the-solar-eclipse-from-space/
The Soyuz TMA-1 landing.
