Space and astronomy news
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/U.Mich./S.Oey, IR: NASA/JPL, Optical: ESO/WFI/2.2-m. Zoom by John Williams/TerraZoom using Zoomify When NASA combines images from different telescopes, they create dazzling scenes of celestial wonder and in the process we learn a few more things. Behold this wonder of combined light, known as LHA 120-N 44, or N 44 for short. Zoom …
Just one of several weather stations set up at Chott El Jerid, a Tunisian saltpan, measuring temperature, humidity, ultraviolet radiation, wind direction and velocity. Image credit: Felipe Goméz/Europlanet From orbit and on the ground, Mars looks inhospitable. But it doesn’t look much different than the freezing Antarctic plains, sun-baked saltpans in Tunisia or Spain’s corrosively …
Continue reading “Finding Life in All the Unlikely, Unexpected Places”
A composite image of Chandra X-ray data shows a rainbow of reds, yellows, green, blue and purple, from lower to higher energies. Optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey, shown in pale yellow and blue, offer a starry background for the image. Optical: DSS An arc of hot gas that spewed from the Kepler Supernova …
If you’re going to put your name in lights, you might as well go big; REALLY big. And with millions of galaxies forming all sorts of shapes including letters, numbers and punctuation, GalaxyZoo has created a way for you to do just that. More than 250,000 people, sorting through about a million images, have taken …
Continue reading “Holy Galaxify Batman! Galaxy Zoo Allows Users to Put Their Name in Big Lights”
The giant moon Titan passes in front of Saturn in this natural-color, wide-angle view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI [SPOILER ALERT: Viewing these images will force you to change your computer wallpaper] Here on Earth, it’s almost time for the burst of fall color that signals the change of seasons in the Northern …
Continue reading “Changing Hues Signal Transition of Seasons at Saturn”
Images from the Curiosity rover on Mars are truly spectacular but a large mosaic from the THEMIS camera aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter gives a grand perspective of our new foothold on Mars. Take some time to rove and explore Gale Crater. The viewer, created using a web-imaging technology from Zoomify, is set to move …
A quick check of Hubble’s gallery shows just 1,300 images; however more than raw 700,000 images reside in a vast archive with hundreds of potentially jaw-dropping astronomical scenes just waiting to be uncovered. That was the idea behind the European Space Agency’s international contest called Hubble’s Hidden Treasures. And now with the hard work of …
Using the dim light of distant stars reflecting off of the surface of the Moon, scientists using a spectrometer aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have found traces of the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere. But don’t expect to take off your protective spacesuit. The Moon’s atmosphere is made of helium. “The question now becomes, does the helium …
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Behold the battered terrain of the massive crater Odysseus in this new image from Cassini. Check out the cassinified image of the fractured surface When Voyager first imaged the huge Herschel Crater on Mimas, scientists could not help comparing the small and battered moon to the Death Star in George Lucas’ …
Continue reading “Look at the Size of that Thing! – A Close Look at Odysseus Crater”
The Badwater Basin region of California’s Death Valley acquired by NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite (EO-1) on October 23, 2002. Alluvial fans in the image are remarkably similar to the terrain that the Curiosity rover will explore on Mars. Image and annotations from