Space Shuttle and Space Station Photographed Together
Image Credit: NASA
Image Credit: NASA
Explanation:
How was this picture taken?
Usually, pictures of the shuttle, taken from space, are snapped from the space station.
Commonly, pictures of the
space station are snapped from the
shuttle.
How, then, can there be a picture of both the
shuttle and the station together, taken from space?
The answer is that during the Space Shuttle Endeavour's last trip to the
International Space Station in 2011 May, a
supply ship departed the station with astronauts that captured a
series of rare views.
The supply ship was the Russian
Soyuz TMA-20 which landed in
Kazakhstan
later that day.
The above spectacular image well captures the relative sizes of the station and docked shuttle.
Far below, clouds of Earth are
seen above a blue sea.
Milky Way over Yellowstone
Image Credit & Copyright: Dave Lane
Image Credit & Copyright: Dave Lane
Explanation:
The Milky Way was not created by an evaporating lake.
The colorful pool of water, about 10 meters across, is known as
Silex Spring and is located in
Yellowstone National Park in
Wyoming,
USA.
Illuminated artificially, the colors are caused by layers of
bacteria
that grow in the
hot spring.
Steam rises off
the spring, heated by a
magma chamber deep underneath known as the
Yellowstone hotspot.
Unrelated and far in the distance, the
central band of our
Milky Way Galaxy arches high overhead, a band lit by billions of stars.
The above picture is a 16-image panorama taken late last month.
If the Yellowstone hotspot causes another supervolcanic eruption as it did
640,000 years ago, a
large part of North America would be affected.
The Starry Sky under Hollow Hill
Image Credit & Copyright: Phill Round
Explanation: Look up in New Zealand's Hollow Hill Cave and you might think you see a familiar starry sky. And that's exactly what Arachnocampa luminosa are counting on. Captured in this long exposure, the New Zealand glowworms scattered across the cave ceiling give it the inviting and open appearance of a clear, dark night sky filled with stars. Unsuspecting insects fooled into flying too far upwards get trapped in sticky snares the glowworms create and hang down to catch food. Of course professional astronomers wouldn't be so easily fooled, although that does look a lot like the Coalsack Nebula and Southern Cross at the upper left
Image Credit & Copyright: Phill Round
Explanation: Look up in New Zealand's Hollow Hill Cave and you might think you see a familiar starry sky. And that's exactly what Arachnocampa luminosa are counting on. Captured in this long exposure, the New Zealand glowworms scattered across the cave ceiling give it the inviting and open appearance of a clear, dark night sky filled with stars. Unsuspecting insects fooled into flying too far upwards get trapped in sticky snares the glowworms create and hang down to catch food. Of course professional astronomers wouldn't be so easily fooled, although that does look a lot like the Coalsack Nebula and Southern Cross at the upper left
Explanation:
Open star cluster NGC 7380 is still embedded in
its natal cloud
of interstellar gas and dust popularly known as the
Wizard Nebula.
Seen with foreground and background stars
along the
plane of our Milky Way galaxy
it lies some 8,000 light-years distant, toward the constellation
Cepheus.
A full moon would easily fit inside this telescopic view of
the 4 million year
young
cluster and associated nebula, normally
much too faint to be seen by eye.
Made with telescope and camera firmly planted on Earth,
the image reveals multi light-year sized shapes and structures
within the Wizard in a color palette made
popular in Hubble Space Telescope images.
Recorded with narrowband filters, the visible wavelength light
from the nebula's hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur atoms is transformed
into green, blue, and red colors in the final digital composite.
But there is still a
trick
up the Wizard's sleeve.
Sliding your cursor over the image
(or following this
link)
will make the stars disappear, leaving only the cosmic gas and
dust of the Wizard Nebula.
Explanation:
Why would the sky look like a giant target?
Airglow.
Following a giant thunderstorm over
Bangladesh
in late April, giant circular ripples of glowing air appeared over
Tibet,
China, as
pictured above.
The unusual
pattern is created by atmospheric
gravity waves, waves of alternating air pressure that can grow with height as the air thins, in this case about 90 kilometers up.
Unlike auroras powered by collisions with energetic charged particles and seen at high latitudes, airglow is due to
chemiluminescence,
the production of light in a chemical reaction.
More typically seen near the horizon,
airglow keeps the night sky from ever being completely dark.
image source - www.nasa.gov
