spacepron - Daphnis

Goed topic.

[Carn]

Explanation: If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe of about 100 billion stars, 32 million light-years away toward the constellation Pisces, M74 presents a gorgeous face-on view. Classified as an Sc galaxy, the grand design of M74's graceful spiral arms are traced by bright blue star clusters and dark cosmic dust lanes. The above image covers half the width of the full Moon and was obtained using 19 hours of exposure on the 1.23-meter telescope at Calar Alto Observatory in the Sierra de Los Filabres mountain range in Spain. Spanning about 30,000 light-years across the face of M74, it includes exposures recording emission from hydrogen atoms, highlighting the reddish glow of the galaxy's large star-forming regions.

[Nocturnal]

Ik ga even Wonders of the Universe kijken, nieuwe vierdelige serie van de BBC

[Nocturnal]

Ah kut, die presentator zuigt

[Carn]

NASA's Hubble Celebrates 21st Anniversary with "Rose" of Galaxies

Spoiler

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble's eye at an especially photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The new image is available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

"For 21 years, Hubble has profoundly changed our view of the universe, allowing us to see deep into the past while opening our eyes to the majesty and wonders around us," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "I was privileged to pilot space shuttle Discovery as it deployed Hubble. After all this time, new Hubble images still inspire awe and are a testament to the extraordinary work of the many people behind the world's most famous observatory."

Hubble was launched April 24, 1990, aboard Discovery's STS-31 mission. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of current astronomical research from planetary science to cosmology.

"Hubble is America's gift to the world," Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland said. "Its jaw-dropping images have rewritten the textbooks and inspired generations of schoolchildren to study math and science. It has been documenting the history of our universe for 21 years. Thanks to the daring of our brave astronauts, a successful servicing mission in 2009 gave Hubble new life. I look forward to Hubble's amazing images and inspiring discoveries for years to come."

The newly released Hubble image shows a large spiral galaxy, known as UGC 1810, with a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. A swath of blue jewel-like points across the top is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot young blue stars. These massive stars glow fiercely in ultraviolet light.

The smaller, nearly edge-on companion shows distinct signs of intense star formation at its nucleus, perhaps triggered by the encounter with the companion galaxy.

Arp 273 lies in the constellation Andromeda and is roughly 300 million light-years away from Earth. The image shows a tenuous tidal bridge of material between the two galaxies that are separated from each other by tens of thousands of light-years.

A series of uncommon spiral patterns in the large galaxy is a tell-tale sign of interaction. The large, outer arm appears partially as a ring, a feature seen when interacting galaxies actually pass through one another. This suggests the smaller companion dived deep, but off-center, through UGC 1810. The inner set of spiral arms is highly warped out of the plane, with one of the arms going behind the bulge and coming back out the other side. How these two spiral patterns connect is not precisely known.

The larger galaxy in the UGC 1810 - UGC 1813 pair has a mass about five times that of the smaller galaxy. In unequal pairs such as this, the relatively rapid passage of a companion galaxy produces the lopsided or asymmetric structure in the main spiral. Also in such encounters, the starburst activity typically begins in the minor galaxies earlier than in the major galaxies. These effects could be because the smaller galaxies have consumed less of the gas present in their nuclei, from which new stars are born.

The interaction was imaged on Dec. 17, 2010, with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The picture is a composite of data taken with three separate filters on WFC3 that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the spectrum.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. in Washington, D.C.

[Nocturnal]

Net even deel twee van die docu gekeken, ging onder andere over supernova's. Ze komen in elk sterrenstelsel ongeveer eens per eeuw voor maar de laatste in dat van ons was in het jaar 1604. Wetenschappers hebben gezocht naar de ster die het eerst een supernova zou kunnen worden en dat blijkt Betelgeuse te zijn, die slechts 600 lichtjaar van de aarde staat. Het zou nog een miljoen kaar kunnen duren maar het zou ook morgen zo ver kunnen zijn, als het uiteindelijk zo ver is zullen we 's nachts een licht aan de hemel zien met de helderheid van een volle maan, een soort tweede zon.

Hoe fokking vet.

[Carn]

jep \m/


http://media.skysurvey.org/interactive360/index.html

The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself.

Seen at a depth thousands of times more faint than the dimmest visible star, tens of millions of other suns appear, still perhaps only a hundredth of one percent thought to exist in our galaxy alone. Our Milky Way galaxy is the dominant feature, its dusty arms sweeping through the frame, punctuated by red clouds of glowing hydrogen. To the lower right are our nearest neighbors, each small galaxies themselves with their own hundreds of millions of stars.
Making The SurveyMaking The Survey

On a journey that covered 45,000 miles by air and 15,000 by land—the equivalent of nearly 2½ passes around the equator—I toured much of the American west and twice visited the western Cape of South Africa. Through it I was able to enjoy not only the wonders of the natural world but also the company of my retired father whom I was able to convince had nothing better to do.

Travel was necessary as capturing the full sphere of the night sky brought with it certain limitations. What might be seen in the northern hemisphere isn't always visible from the south and, likewise with the seasons, what may be overhead in the summer is below the horizon in the winter. Complicated by weather and moon cycles, this made for some narrow windows of opportunity which we chased through the remote areas of Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, California and Oregon.

As light pollution continues to spread in America, these western states contain some of the last havens of true darkness, a shade few of us are any longer familiar with in which the Milky Way alone can cast a soft shadow. This darkness was crucial because even the slightest amount could overpower faint starlight and haze the exposures.

As anyone who has tried to capture night scenes with their camera would know, stars present a formidable challenge. They don't stay still and their light is very weak, requiring long exposures and a tripod mount that rotates in sync with Earth's spin. I also wanted to capture the most amount of detail, one that pushed the limits of practicality without testing my sanity, so I decided each piece of the puzzle would be just 12 degrees wide. This was about the width of a palm at arm's length captured by not just one, but six air-cooled cameras each fitted with their own lenses and filters.

It was clear that such a survey would be quite difficult visually hopping from one area of the sky to the next—not to mention possible lapses in coverage—so this called for a more systematic approach. I divided the sky into 624 uniformly spaced areas and entered their coordinates into the computer which gave me assurance that I was on target and would finish without any gaps. Each frame received a total of 60 exposures: 4 short, 4 medium, and 4 long shots for each camera which would help to reduce the amount of noise, overhead satellite trails and other unwanted artifacts.

And so it was with this blueprint that I worked my way through the sky, frame by frame, night after night. The click-clack of the shutters opening and closing became a staccato soundtrack for the many nights spent under the stars. Occasionally, the routine would be pierced by a bright meteor or the cry of a jackal, each compelling a feeling of eerie beauty that seemed to hang in the air. It was an experience that will stay with me a lifetime.

[Carn]

tip: HD.

[Carn]

http://vimeo.com/cabbas/cassini

We've seen spectacular shots from NASA's Cassini spacecraft previously, and now filmmaker Chris Abbas has set a collection of Cassini stills to a little Trent Reznor piano. It's definitely a stirring look at Saturn and its surroundings.

[Carn]

Carn schreef:

[filmpje]

tip: HD.

Most time lapse videos of the night sky show the stars and sky moving above a steady Earth. Here, however, the frames have been digitally rotated so that it is the stars that stay (approximately) steady, and the Earth that moves beneath them. The video dramatically shows the actual rotation of the Earth, called diurnal motion, in a clear and moving way, as if the camera were floating free in space.

The telescopes featured in the video are the Very Large Telescopes (VLT) in Chile, a group of four of the largest optical telescopes deployed anywhere in the world. A discerning observer of the above time lapse movie may also note the use of laser guide stars, zodiacal light, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and fast-moving, sunlight-reflecting, Earth-orbiting satellites.

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[Sherlock]

Ik heb nog een full HD documentaire over Hubble

[Carn]

http://www.vimeo.com/11386048

WOW. fullscreen HD aanbevolen.

Composed entirely of still photographs using innovative visual techniques developed by the filmmaker, Outside In stretches the boundaries of the motion picture form.

Using hundreds of thousands of still images manipulated to create full motion, using “2.75D” photographic fly-through technology. The film will be presented in IMAX quality 5.6K resolution on massive screens and concert-level surround systems to audiences in giant screen institutions, IMAX theaters, planetariums, museums and select 4k digital cinemas.

[Carn]

Awww:



Looking back as it zooms through interplanetary space, less than a month into its 445-million mile, five-year journey to the gas giant Jupiter, NASA's spacecraft Juno captured a portrait of the Earth and moon.

It might not look like much, but that larger white dot is the Earth and the smaller dot to the right is the moon. Juno was 6 million miles away at the time.

"This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves."

[Carn]

(tip: HD!)

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.

[Carn]

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. This stunning false-color view spans about 40 light-years across the region, constructed using infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Compared to its visual wavelength appearance, the brightest portion of the nebula is likewise centered on Orion's young, massive, hot stars, known as the Trapezium Cluster. But the infrared image also detects the nebula's many protostars, still in the process of formation, seen here in red hues. In fact, red spots along the dark dusty filament to the left of the bright cluster include the protostar cataloged as HOPS 68, recently found to have crystals of the silicate mineral olivine within its protostellar envelope.

[Carn]

Here is one of the sharper views of the Sun ever taken. This stunning image shows remarkable details of a dark sunspot across the image bottom and numerous boiling granules which appear like kernels of corn across the top. Taken in 2002, the picture was made using the Swedish Solar Telescope operating on the Canary Island of La Palma. The high resolution image was achieved using sophisticated adaptive optics, digital image stacking, and other processing techniques to counter the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere. Currently a sunspot group is crossing the Sun that is so large it can be easily seen by the cautious observer even without magnification.

[capibara]

Fuck synthesizers!

[Carn]

Explanation: Part of Mars is defrosting. Around the South Pole of Mars, toward the end of every Martian summer, the warm weather causes a section of the vast carbon-dioxide ice cap to evaporate. Pits begin to appear and expand where the carbon dioxide dry ice sublimates directly into gas. These ice sheet pits may appear to be lined with gold, but the precise composition of the dust that highlights the pit walls actually remains unknown. The circular depressions toward the image center measure about 60 meters across. The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars-orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the above image in late July. In the next few months, as Mars continues its journey around the Sun, colder seasons will prevail, and the thin air will turn chilly enough not only to stop the defrosting but once again freeze out more layers of solid carbon dioxide.

[Carn]

One of the most active sunspot groups in years is currently crossing the Sun. AR 1302 first came around the Sun's edge last week and is so large it can be seen without a telescope. Coronal Mass Ejections from AR 1302 have already caused strong geomagnetic storms including notable aurora activity around both of Earth's poles. Pictured above, plasma was left magnetically hanging above the Sun's surface after AR 1302 emitted an X-class solar flare last Thursday. Earth is illustrated in the inset for a size comparison. Although another X-class flare was emitted on Saturday, no flares from AR 1302 have been aimed directly at the Earth, as yet. The AR 1302 sunspot group will continue to evolve but likely remain visible on the Sun for the next week.

[Carn]

met dank aan deadlock!



The first images are in from the immense ALMA radio-telescope array, under construction at 16,500 feet in the Chilean desert, and they reveal a galactic collision of near-unimaginable violence and equally mind-boggling beauty.

The images show the collision of paired galaxies, NGC 4038/4039, which combine in what's become known as the Antennae formation. The two spiral galaxies that form the Antennae are merging into one, with the resulting compression of gas and dust birthing new stars.
Clouds of gas and dust at the Antennae Galaxies’ impact zone, 45 million light-years away

The Antennae are 45 million light years away, and the galaxies comprising it began their dance around 600 million years ago. While those numbers may sound large, 45 million light years is comparatively at arms length in galactic terms, and with the universe – ours, at least – estimated to be 13.7 billion years, give or take one per cent, 600 million years makes the Antennae mash-up a relative toddler.

These first images were taken with only 22 of ALMA's 66 eventual dishes in place – more images can be found here. When the final dish is fired up sometime in 2013, the billion-dollar array will range over approximately 100 square miles of the high, dry desert.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10...ges_from_alma/

[Carn]

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera
by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from
August to October, 2011.

HD, refurbished, smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc.

Music: Jan Jelinek - Do Dekor (Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records) | ~scape 007 cd
janjelinek.com | scape-music.de

Editing: Michael König | koenigm.com

Image Courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory,
NASA Johnson Space Center, The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth
eol.jsc.nasa.gov

Shooting locations in order of appearance:

1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night

[Carn]

[Carn]

[Carn]

The picture above shows the smaller moon Tethys peeping out from behind the hazy, more colorful Titan



Titan passes in front of Saturn and its rings.



Titan in front of Dione, and the two of them in front of Saturn.

[Carn]

The dazzling star Eta Carinae itself appears at the lower left of the new picture. It is surrounded by clouds of gas that are glowing under the onslaught of fierce ultraviolet radiation. Across the image there are also many compact blobs of dark material that remain opaque even in the infrared. These are the dusty cocoons in which new stars are forming.

Over the last few million years this region of the sky has formed large numbers of stars both individually and in clusters. The bright star cluster close to the centre of the picture is called Trumpler 14. Although this object is seen well in visible light, many more fainter stars can be seen in this infrared view. And towards the left side of the image a small concentration of stars that appear yellow can be seen. This grouping was seen for the first time in this new data from the VLT: these stars cannot be seen in visible light at all. This is just one of many new objects revealed for the first time in this spectacular panorama.

[Carn]

This extreme closeup of Saturn's moon Enceladus is the work of the Cassini orbiter, which snapped this awesome image way back in January 2011. Here, the satellite glows a golden brown as it basks in the light of its planet.

Normally, Enceladus would appear almost purely white, but Cassini has captured the moon when it is bathed in the sunlight reflected off of Saturn's cloud cover, which is basically the equivalent of a color filter millions of miles wide and giving the moon its healthy-looking tan. You can check out the full image of Enceladus below - click on the image for a closer look. In the meantime, here's a NASA description of the unusual ridges and other features that scare the moon's surface:


As most of the illumination comes from the image left, a labyrinth of ridges throws notable shadows just to the right of the image center, while the kilometer-deep canyon Labtayt Sulci is visible just below. The bright thin crescent on the far right is the only part of Enceladus directly lit by the Sun. The above image was taken last year by the robotic Cassini spacecraft during a close pass by by the enigmatic moon. Inspection of the lower part of this digitally sharpened image reveals plumes of ice crystals thought to originate in a below-surface sea.

[Carn]

Beside a Giant

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looks small here, pictured to the right of the gas giant in this Cassini spacecraft view.

Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across) is in the upper right. Saturn's rings appear across the top of the image, and they cast a series of shadows onto the planet across the middle of the image.

The moon Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) appears as a tiny white speck above the rings in the far upper right of the image. The shadow cast by Prometheus can be seen as a small black speck on the planet on the far left of the image, between the shadows cast by the main rings and the thin F ring. The shadow of the moon Pandora also can be seen on the planet south of the shadows of all the rings, below the center of the image towards the right side of the planet. Pandora is not shown here.

This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 1 degree below the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 5, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 426,000 miles (685,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 20 degrees. Image scale is 23 miles (37 kilometers) per pixel on Saturn. 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.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

[Carn]

[Martiño]

Carn schreef:

[filmpje]

ik vraag me af wat die ringen voor gevolgen zouden hebben voor het klimaat op het halfrond dat zich in de winter bevindt... Sommige gebieden zullen dan een groot gedeelte van de dag in een enorme schaduw zitten. Lijkt me geen pretje

[Carn]

Martiño schreef:

ik vraag me af wat die ringen voor gevolgen zouden hebben voor het klimaat op het halfrond dat zich in de winter bevindt... Sommige gebieden zullen dan een groot gedeelte van de dag in een enorme schaduw zitten. Lijkt me geen pretje

Mwah, beetje matig gerendered denk ik, die ringen bestaan volgens mij grotendeels uit stof e.d.; dat laat behoorlijk wat licht door, of reflecteert wel het een en ander

[Martiño]

nouja, het reflecteert wel zonlicht (anders zie je de ringen ook niet), en wat gereflecteerd wordt komt niet op aarde aan dus het zal wel wat invloed hebben.

[Carn]

light-scattering dan ;P

[Martiño]

Ja, maar ook als hij scattert, dan komt er weer minder zonlicht bij de aarde. Dus dan krijg je hele vreemde, wisselende, koele regio's op het oppervlak. Denk dat het er dan hier heel anders uit zou zien

[Carn]

You're looking at a picture of Active Region 1429 — that's the decidedly dull name that NOAA has given the sunspot region behind some of the most wicked solar flares and coronal mass ejections astronomers have seen in close to decade.
Remember all that news last week about downed radio communications and rerouted plane flights? You've got AR1429 to thank for that. And while this particular flare has almost rotated entirely out of Earth's view, astronomers say we can expect even more instances of violent solar activity in the months and years ahead, as we approach what's called the solar maximum — the period of peak solar activity in the Sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle.

This particular photo was captured on March 11 by astrophotographer Alan Friedman. Friedman used what's called an Hα filter to photograph the narrow (albeit visible) wavelength of light emitted by hydrogen atoms on the surface of the Sun. He then inverted the image so that the hottest regions would appear darker than their surroundings.

[<*)_><]

Mag deze hier ook?

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/lo...in_space.shtml

Carn schreef:

[afbeelding]


Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. This stunning false-color view spans about 40 light-years across the region, constructed using infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Compared to its visual wavelength appearance, the brightest portion of the nebula is likewise centered on Orion's young, massive, hot stars, known as the Trapezium Cluster. But the infrared image also detects the nebula's many protostars, still in the process of formation, seen here in red hues. In fact, red spots along the dark dusty filament to the left of the bright cluster include the protostar cataloged as HOPS 68, recently found to have crystals of the silicate mineral olivine within its protostellar envelope.

win!

yeahhh

[Carn]

The War and Peace Nebula explodes with violent star creation
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a gorgeous new picture of the War and Peace Nebula, or what the cool kids call NGC 6357. It's located 8,000 lightyears away in the constellation of Scorpius. By using the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have been able to look at the detail of the nebula's outer parts for the very first time.
A wider and higher-resolution version of the top image can be found here.

Astronomers gave it the name "War and Peace" because the western part of the nebula resembled a dove, while the other half looked like a skull.

The new image shows a river of dust streaming across the center that absorbs the light from more distant objects. At the right side of the picture is a small cluster of brilliant blue-white young stars that have formed from the congealing gas. These baby stars are only about a few million years old. The intense ultraviolet radiation from these new stars is hollowing out a cavity in the surrounding gas and dust, sculpting it in strange and beautiful ways.

And be sure to check out the bottom right corner which features a dusty column similar to the famous "pillar of creation" in the Eagle Nebula.

Image courtesy ESO.

[Martiño]

Oke, die schedel kan ik er nog wel uithalen maar die duif zie ik toch echt niet

Carn schreef:

[afbeelding]

Er zit een aars op de zon

[Carn]

This image provided by NASA shows the Solar Dynamic Observatory's ultra-high-definition view of Venus, black dot at top center, passing in front of the sun on Tuesday, June 5, 2012. The next transit of Venus won't be for another 105 years. (NASA/Solar Dynamic Observatory/AP)

This image provided by NASA shows the image captured by Hinode on June 5, 2012 of the transit of Venus -- the last instance of this rare phenomenon until 2117. Hinode is a joint JAXA/NASA mission to study the connections of the sun's surface magnetism, primarily in and around sunspots. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages Hinode. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., is the lead U.S. investigator for the X-ray Telescope



A quartet of Saturn's moons, from tiny to huge, surround and are embedded within the planet's rings in this Cassini composition.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is in the background of the image, and the moon's north polar hood is clearly visible. See PIA08137 to learn more about that feature on Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across). Next, the wispy terrain on the trailing hemisphere of Dione (698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers across) can be seen on that moon which appears just above the rings at the center of the image. See PIA10560 and PIA06163 to learn more about Dione's wisps. Saturn's small moon Pandora (50 miles, or 81 kilometers across) orbits beyond the rings on the right of the image. Finally, Pan (17 miles, or 28 kilometers across) can be seen in the Encke Gap of the A ring on the left of the image.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 17, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 27 degrees. Image scale is 8 miles (13 kilometers) per pixel on Dione.



Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.

Hubble's panchromatic vision, stretching from ultraviolet through near-infrared wavelengths, reveals the vibrant glow of young, blue star clusters and a glimpse into regions normally obscured by the dust. (NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage)

[Carn]

ohja; hier mogen natuurlijk ook MSL foto's straks. .

up

[Carn]

A giant of a moon appears before a giant of a planet undergoing seasonal changes in this natural color view of Titan and Saturn from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, measures 3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers, across and is larger than the planet Mercury. Cassini scientists have been watching the moon's south pole since a vortex appeared in its atmosphere in 2012. See PIA14919 and PIA14920 to learn more about this mass of swirling gas around the pole in the atmosphere of the moon.

As the seasons have changed in the Saturnian system, and spring has come to the north and autumn to the south, the azure blue in the northern Saturnian hemisphere that greeted Cassini upon its arrival in 2004 is now fading. The southern hemisphere, in its approach to winter, is taking on a bluish hue. This change is likely due to the reduced intensity of ultraviolet light and the haze it produces in the hemisphere approaching winter, and the increasing intensity of ultraviolet light and haze production in the hemisphere approaching summer. The presence of the ring shadow in the winter hemisphere enhances this effect. The reduction of haze and the consequent clearing of the atmosphere make for a bluish hue: the increased opportunity for direct scattering of sunlight by the molecules in the air makes the sky blue, as on Earth. The presence of methane, which generally absorbs in the red part of the spectrum, in a now clearer atmosphere also enhances the blue.

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ring plane.

This mosaic combines six images -- two each of red, green and blue spectral filters -- to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 6, 2012, at a distance of approximately 483,000 miles (778,000 kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 29 miles (46 kilometers) per pixel on Titan.

[EleventhHour]

Ik voel me altijd nogal klein als ik de foto's in dit topic bekijk

[Carn]

I first encountered this amazing infographic hanging on a professor’s office wall when I was visiting law schools back in 1999. I’ve been trying, off and on, to run down my own copy ever since. It’s been one of those back-burner projects that I’ll poke at when it comes to mind, every now and again, but until quite recently all my leads had come up dry. All I really knew about the poster was that it had been created in the 80s by analysts at Rockwell International and that it was called the “Integrated Space Plan.”
From Wikipedia:

Rockwell International was a major American manufacturing conglomerate in the latter half of the 20th century, involved in aircraft, the space industry, both defense-oriented and commercial electronics, automotive and truck components, printing presses, valves and meters, and industrial automation. It was the ultimate incarnation of a series of companies founded by Willard Rockwell. At its apex in the 1990s, Rockwell International was No. 27 on the Fortune 500 list, with assets of over $8 billion and sales of $27 billion.
…
At the end of the 1980s, the company sold its valve and meter division, formerly Rockwell Manufacturing, to British Tyre & Rubber. It also sold its printing press division to an internal management team. Following the “peace dividend” after the fall of the Soviet bloc, the company sold its defense and aerospace business, including what was once North American Aviation and Rocketdyne, to Boeing Integrated Defense Systems in December 1996.

About a month ago, all the little threads I’d been pulling on suddenly unraveled, and I was able to connect with a generous donor willing to entrust an original copy of the poster to me long enough to have it scanned at high resolution. It’s a large document, at 28 x 45″, but fortunately it’s monochrome, and reproduces well using 1-bit color at 600dpi, so even uncompressed bitmaps come in at under 5MB.





groot:

Spoiler

http://makezineblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/space-plan-scan-touched-up-0011.png

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