Stories tagged space exploration
Starry Night: Vincent Van Gogh's masterpiece.Courtesy WikipediaCheck out this nifty homage to Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting Starry Night put together by Alex Parker a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Parker obviously must not have had much research work last April when the Hubble Telescope was celebrating its 22nd birthday, so he spent all the free time putting together this really cool recreation of the Van Gogh astronomical masterpiece using photo-mosaic software and several of Hubble’s stunning Top 100 images found here.
Tags : It's been, oh, maybe 3 weeks since I posted the last hi-def POV video of Curiosity's amazing descent to the surface of Mars but this time it's in Ultra High Def and at 30fps! Who wouldn't want to see that? And with audio no less. Not sure if the audio is dubbed in or was actually captured with the video. Compared to Earth Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere but because sound can travel through several different types of media - air, liquids, solids, etc - audio capture would probably be possible but I'm not sure NASA set the rover up for that. Whatever the case, the imagery is worth seeing.
This truly stunning hi-def footage captured by NASA satellites positioned around our Sun, show various views of a coronal mass ejection that occurred August 31, 2012. Wow!!
FROM THE YOUTUBE SITE:
"On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled away from the sun at over 900 miles per second. This movie shows the ejection from a variety of viewpoints as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).“
Martian unconformity at Mount Sharp: The line of white dots marks the contact point between the two disparate layers of rock.Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
A photograph captured by the Mars rover, Curiosity, shows an unconformity in the strata of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside nearby Gale Crater. An unconformity is a geological feature marking a stop in sedimentation and erosion of a surface before the overlying layer is deposited. The photo above shows the two distinct rock layers (marked by a line of white dots) that make up the unconformity. The upper layer, which is tilted left to right in relation to the lower layer, contains no evidence of hydrated minerals found in the lower layer. This idicates the two layers were laid down in different environments.
Man on the MoonCourtesy Mark Ryan, Georges Méliès, and NASA
Where are all the Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 mission moon photos?
That's one big step for a man: Just days before the launch of the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong is photographed practicing his descent from the Lunar Module.Courtesy NASAWith the passing on Saturday of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, there has been a lot of media coverage of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Armstrong, very private in his non-astronaut life, seems to be a bit camera shy during his time on the moon too. You can read – and see – all about it here.
Check out this photo NASA's Curiosity rover sent back of the neighborhood on Mars where it landed last Monday, and compare it with and a photo of the Mojave desert here on Earth. If you disregard the vegetation the similarities are remarkable.
Curiosity's new neighborhood: The first full-resolution photos of Curiosity's surroundings on the Martian surface. The rim of Gale Crater make up the mountains in the distance.Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Earth's Mojave Desert: the cholla cactus in Joshua Tree National Park make the landscape look even more alien than that of Mars, don't you think?Courtesy Mark Ryan
First photos of Mars: Curiosity's shadow and Mar's horizon taken from two different cameras on the rover.Courtesy NASA via UStreamThe Mars rover Curiosity managed to make it through seven minutes of terror and land safely and pretty much flawlessly this morning on the surface of the Red Planet. The amazingly complicated landing, which took place around 12:25 CDT, was broadcast on the internet and on NASA-TV. It was very thrilling to watch, and a great accomplishment for all the scientists involved. They were ecstatic, as you can well imagine.
You'll be able to view additional photographs as they come in at NASA's website. You can also replay a computer simulation of the landing here.
Neil Armstrong: first man to walk on the Moon.Courtesy NASA via WikipediaToday, Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the Moon, celebrates his 82nd birthday. Armstrong was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio on this day in 1930. Some thirty-eight years later, in July of 1969, Armstrong and two other US astronauts, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins traveled to the Moon in the Apollo 11 spacecraft. As Collins orbited the Moon in the command service module (CSM), the other two crew members descended to the surface in the lunar module (LM). After successfully landing on the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong climbed down the LM ladder and took his historic first step onto the surface at 2:56 UTC July 21, 1969. Aldrin joined Armstrong about 20 minutes later, and the two astronauts spent the next 2-1/2 hours of the mission investigating the lunar surface, setting up science-gathering equipment, and collecting rock and soil samples, before blasting off the surface to rejoin Collins for the return trip to Earth.
