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The Space Shuttle Endeavour comes home on May 1, 2001. (NASA)

May 1, 1979 – The prototype Space Shuttle Enterprise rolls out from the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

(NASA/Kennedy Space Center)

cosmicvastness

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 2016 May 1

Contemplating the Sun

Have you contemplated your home star recently? Featured here, a Sun partially eclipsed on the top left by the Moon is also seen eclipsed by earthlings contemplating the eclipse below. The spectacular menagerie of silhouettes was taken in 2012 from the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area near Page, Arizona, USA, where park rangers and astronomers expounded on the unusual event to interested gatherers. Also faintly visible on the Sun’s disk, just to the lower right of the dark Moon’s disk, is a group of sunspots. Although a partial solar eclipse by the Moon is indeed a good chance to contemplate the Sun, a great chance – and one that is significantly more rare – will occur next week when the Sun undergoes a partial eclipse by the planet Mercury.

cosmicvastness

Flying Through the Aurora’s Green Fog

Expedition 46 flight engineer Tim Peake of the European Space Agency (ESA) shared a stunning image of a glowing aurora taken on Feb. 23, 2016, from the International Space Station. Peake wrote, “The @Space_Station just passed straight through a thick green fog of #aurora…eerie but very beautiful. #Principia”

The dancing lights of the aurora provide spectacular views on the ground, but also capture the imagination of scientists who study incoming energy and particles from the sun. Aurora are one effect of such energetic particles, which can speed out from the sun both in a steady stream called the solar wind and due to giant eruptions known as coronal mass ejections or CMEs.

Credit: ESA/NASA

for-all-mankind

External Tank #94 arrived at the Panama Canal last week (April 25-27) on its voyage from New Orleans to Los Angeles.

The last remaining flight-capable Space Shuttle External Tank, ET-94 was donated by NASA to the California Science Center, where it will be added to their shuttle Endeavour display. The science center also acquired two Solid Rocket Booster mockups from the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center, and plans to create the only vertical space shuttle stack in existence.

Fundraising is nearly completed on the new Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center, where the completed stack will be housed. Construction is slated to begin in 2017 and will last two years.

ET-94 left the Michoud Assembly Facility April 12. Originally slated for a shuttle mission, it was used for testing following the Columbia accident in 2003. External tanks following that mission were lighter than ET-94, and it never saw further use.

Following a 20-day voyage in the Pacific Ocean, ET-94 is expected to arrive at Los Angeles around May 18. Two days later, on May 20, the tank will follow an overland route to the California Science Center. Taking a route similar but longer to Endeavour’s in 2012, the tank is not as wide, making the 15.5 mile journey quicker and easier.

P/c: The Planetary Society.

zerostatereflex

Golf Ball 70,000fps 150mph.

The straight up physics of deformation at high speeds is fascinating. Although what is also fascinating is the one thing we really take for granted. TIME. The high frames per SECOND is the only thing that makes this possible to view.

This is a visual example of what happens when you can see TIME, AND physics. I think we forget how important time is in our lives, yet it’s one of the most fascinating. Without time you have no-thing.

sagansense

Woah I was unprepared for the depth of this post.

bobbycaputo

Here’s What Space Actually Looks Like to the Human Eye

Photos of space are everywhere online. Their beauty is dazzling, showing a universe awash in color and light. But if you’re a skeptic, you’ve likely wondered whether it all truly looks like that in real life.

Michael Benson tries his best to show you in his exhibition Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System. The artist took data from NASA and ESA missions to make 77 images of everything from Pluto to Europa that approximate true color as much as humanly possible. The work spans five decades of space exploration, and presents a realistic, flyby tour of the universe. “I feel like if these places are so alien to our direct experiences anyway, then they should be colored the way they would be seen,” he say

(Continue Reading)

cosmicfunnies

The second week of Lucky Martian Month is here!

This week’s entry: Surface of Mars

http://www.space.com/47-mars-the-red-planet-fourth-planet-from-the-sun.html

http://www.universetoday.com/14885/mars-surface/

http://www.space.com/16895-what-is-mars-made-of.html

spaceexplorationphotography

Apollo 13 service module drifts away with the moon in the distance

Source: https://imgur.com/PK438xz

culturenlifestyle

Stunning Ultra High Definition Moon Photography Made By Self Taught Astrophotographer Merging 32,000 Shots Into One

Polish Photographer Bartosz Wojczyński took an astounding 28 minutes to capture 32,000 images of the moon and the resulting ultra-high definition image was a colossal 73.5 gigabytes in file size. The self-taught amateur astrophotographer dedicated 5-6 hours to merge the images together as one and the extremely accurate and highly detailed image shows an incredible picture of the moon.

Keep reading

fyeahastropics

Milky Way over the Pinnacles in Australia

(via APOD; Image Credit: Michael Goh )

What strange world is this? Earth. In the foreground of the featured image are the Pinnacles, unusual rock spires in Nambung National Park in Western Australia. Made of ancient sea shells (limestone), how these human-sized picturesque spires formed remains unknown. In the background, just past the end of the central Pinnacle, is a bright crescent Moon. The eerie glow around the Moon is mostly zodiacal light, sunlight reflected by dust grains orbiting between the planets in the Solar System. Arching across the top is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Many famous stars and nebula are also visible in the background night sky. The featured 29-panel panorama was taken and composed last September after detailed planning that involved the Moon, the rock spires, and their corresponding shadows. Even so, the strong zodiacal light was a pleasant surprise.

sci-universe

The closest place to the stars

With an altitude of 6268 meters (20564 ft) above sea level, Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador is the highest equatorial mountain. Mount Everest’s peak is at 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) but the Earth is an oblate spheroid in shape, its equatorial diameter greater than its diameter measured pole to pole. Chimborazo’s peak is nearly on top the greatest equatorial bulge, over 2,000 meters farther from the center of the Earth than Everest’s peak. That makes Chimborazo’s summit the place on our planet’s surface closest to the stars.

christinetheastrophysicist

Comet Catalina Through Space

This is a series of images featuring Comet Catalina, formally known as C/2013 US10. This 16-image GIF was compiled by Yasushi Aoshima and shows the comet from Shizuoka, Japan between 14:29 UT and 20:40 UT on January 16, 2016.

Comet Catalina was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in October 2013 and is classified as an Oort cloud comet. The bright blue area around the comet’s nucleus is a region of gas and dust called the coma. Behind the comet are its two tails. Pointing upwards is the ion tail and towards the bottom right is the dust tail. The ion tail points in the direction of the solar wind, while the dust tail follows behind the comet.

Image Credit: Yasushi Aoshima

sci-universe

Since it’s the first thing someone considers buying a new telescope, Israeli astronomer Michael Vlasov illustrates which views can you expect to get through different telescopes.

On his page, he covers the Moon, planets, Sun, Deep sky objects, comets, double stars, light pollution, and shares a lot of other useful information.

the-martian-movie

The Martian short animated version.

sagansense

On point.

humanoidhistory

Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard at work on the Moon, February 6, 1971.

(NASA)

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