Neptune - True Color of Clouds

This image of Neptune was taken by NASA's Voyager 2's wide-angle camera.

Source - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/

NASA Latest Images

Moon-Venus-Mars Skyline
Image Credit & Copyright: Jay Ouellet Explanation: Taken on February 20, five different exposures made in rapid succession were used to created this tantalizing telephoto image. In combination, they reveal a wide range of brightness visible to the eye on that frigid evening, from the urban glow of the Quebec City skyline to the triple conjunction of Moon, Venus and Mars. Shortly after sunset the young Moon shows off its bright crescent next to brilliant Venus. Fainter Mars is near the top of the frame. Though details in the Moon's sunlit crescent are washed out, features on the dark, shadowed part of the lunar disk are remarkably clear. Still lacking city lights the lunar night is illuminated solely by earthshine, light reflected from the sunlit side of planet Earth.

The Rosette Nebula in Hydrogen and Oxygen
Image Credit & Copyright: Arno Rottal (Far-Light-Photography) Explanation: The Rosette Nebula is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers -- but it is the most famous. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros, some 5,000 light years away, the petals of this rose are actually a stellar nursery whose lovely, symmetric shape is sculpted by the winds and radiation from its central cluster of hot young stars. The stars in the energetic cluster, cataloged as NGC 2244, are only a few million years old, while the central cavity in the Rosette Nebula, cataloged as NGC 2237, is about 50 light-years in diameter. The nebula can be seen firsthand with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros).

Unusual Plumes Above Mars
Image Credit & Copyright: W. Jaeschke Explanation: What is creating unusual plumes on Mars? No one is sure. Noted and confirmed by a global contingent of amateur astronomers on photos of the red planet in March 2012, possibly similar plumes have now been found on archived images as far back as 1997. Since the plumes reach 200 kilometers up, they seem too high to be related to wind-blown surface dust. Since one plume lasted for eleven days, it seemed too long lasting to be related to aurora. Amateur astronomers will surely continue to monitor the terminator and edge regions of Mars for new high plumes, and the armada of satellites orbiting Mars may be called upon to verify and study any newly reported plume that become visible. The featured 35-minute time-lapse animation was taken on 2012 March 20 by the plume's discoverer -- an attorney from Pennsylvania, USA.

The Dark River to Antares
Credit & Copyright: Jason Jennings Explanation: Connecting the Pipe Nebula to the colorful region near bright star Antares is a dark cloud dubbed the Dark River, flowing from the picture's left edge. Murky looking, the Dark River's appearance is caused by dust obscuring background starlight, although the dark nebula contains mostly hydrogen and molecular gas. Surrounded by dust, Antares, a red supergiant star, creates an unusual bright yellowish reflection nebula. Above it, bright blue double star Rho Ophiuchi is embedded in one of the more typical bluish reflection nebulae, while red emission nebulae are also scattered around the region. Globular star cluster M4 is just seen above and right of Antares, though it lies far behind the colorful clouds, at a distance of some 7,000 light-years. The Dark River itself is about 500 light years away. The colorful skyscape is a mosaic of telescopic images spanning nearly 10 degrees (20 Full Moons) across the sky in the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius).

Fibrils Flower on the Sun
Image Credit & Copyright: Big Bear Solar Obs., NJIT, Alan Friedman (Averted Imagination) Explanation: When does the Sun look like a flower? In a specific color of red light emitted by hydrogen, as featured here, some regions of the solar chromosphere may resemble a rose. The color-inverted image was taken in 2014 October and shows active solar region 2177. The petals dominating the frame are actually magnetically confined tubes of hot plasma called fibrils, some of which extend longer than the diameter of the Earth. In the central region many of these fibrils are seen end-on, while the surrounding regions are typically populated with curved fibrils. When seen over the Sun's edge, these huge plasma tubes are called spicules, and when they occur in passive regions they are termed mottles. Sunspot region 2177 survived for several more days before the complex and tumultuous magnetic field poking through the Sun's surface evolved yet again.

Palomar 12
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA Explanation: Palomar 12 was not born here. The stars of the globular cluster, first identified in the Palomar Sky Survey, are younger than those in other globular star clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy. Palomar 12's position in our galaxy and measured motion suggest its home was once the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, a small satellite of the Milky Way. Disrupted by gravitational tides during close encounters the satellite galaxy has lost its stars to the larger Milky Way. Now part of the Milky Way's halo, the tidal capture of Palomar 12 likely took place some 1.7 billion years ago. Seen behind spiky foreground stars in the sharp Hubble image, Palomar 12 spans nearly 60 light-years. Still much closer than the faint, fuzzy, background galaxies scattered throughout the field of view, it lies about 60,000 light-years away, toward the constellation Capricornus.

M106: A Spiral Galaxy with a Strange Center
Image Credit: NASA, ESO , NAOJ, Giovanni Paglioli; Assembling and processing: R. Colombari and R. Gendler Explanation: What's happening at the center of spiral galaxy M106? A swirling disk of stars and gas, M106's appearance is dominated by blue spiral arms and red dust lanes near the nucleus, as shown in the featured image. The core of M106 glows brightly in radio waves and X-rays where twin jets have been found running the length of the galaxy. An unusual central glow makes M106 one of the closest examples of the Seyfert class of galaxies, where vast amounts of glowing gas are thought to be falling into a central massive black hole. M106, also designated NGC 4258, is a relatively close 23.5 million light years away, spans 60 thousand light years across, and can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici).

Two Hours Before Neptune
Image Credit: Voyager 2, NASA Explanation: Two hours before closest approach to Neptune in 1989, the Voyager 2 robot spacecraft snapped this picture. Clearly visible for the first time were long light-colored cirrus-type clouds floating high in Neptune's atmosphere. Shadows of these clouds can even be seen on lower cloud decks. Most of Neptune's atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium, which is invisible. Neptune's blue color therefore comes from smaller amounts of atmospheric methane, which preferentially absorbs red light. Neptune has the fastest winds in the Solar System, with gusts reaching 2000 kilometers per hour. Speculation holds that diamonds may be created in the dense hot conditions that exist under the cloud tops of Uranus and Neptune. Twenty-six years later, NASA's New Horizons is poised to be the first spacecraft to zoom past Pluto this July.

Solar System Portrait
Image Credit: Voyager Project, NASA Explanation: On another Valentine's Day 25 years ago, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back one last time to make this first ever Solar System family portrait. The complete portrait is a 60 frame mosaic made from a vantage point 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In it, Voyager's wide angle camera frames sweep through the inner Solar System at the left, linking up with gas giant Neptune, the Solar System's outermost planet, at the far right. Positions for Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are indicated by letters, while the Sun is the bright spot near the center of the circle of frames. The inset frames for each of the planets are from Voyager's narrow field camera. Unseen in the portrait are Mercury, too close to the Sun to be detected, and Mars, unfortunately hidden by sunlight scattered in the camera's optical system. Closer to the Sun than Neptune at the time, small, faint Pluto's position was not covered.

Aurora on Ice
Image Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Vetter (Nuits sacrées) Explanation: Not from a snowglobe, this expansive fisheye view of ice and sky was captured on February 1, from Jökulsárlón Beach, southeast Iceland, planet Earth. Chunks of glacial ice on the black sand beach glisten in the light of a nearly full moon surrounded by a shining halo. The 22 degree lunar halo itself is created by ice crystals in high, thin clouds refracting the moonlight. Despite the bright moonlight, curtains of aurora still dance through the surreal scene. In early February, their activity was triggered by Earth's restless magnetosphere and the energetic wind from a coronal hole near the Sun's south pole. Bright Jupiter, also near opposition, is visible at the left, beyond the icy lunar halo.

Exploring the Antennae
Image Data: Subaru, NAOJ, NASA/ESA/Hubble, R.W. Olsen - Processing: Federico Pelliccia and Rolf Wahl Olsen Explanation: Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. The stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm, lasting hundreds of millions of years. But their large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, this stunning composited view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. The remarkable collaborative image is a mosaic constructed using data from small and large ground-based telescopes to bring out large-scale and faint tidal streams, composited with the bright cores imaged in extreme detail by the Hubble Space Telescope. Of course, the suggestive visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae.

M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy
Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA - Processing & Licence: Judy Schmidt Explanation: Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars with well-defined spiral arms that is similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100 (alias NGC 4321) is 56 million light-years distant toward the constellation of Berenice's Hair (Coma Berenices). This Hubble Space Telescope image of M100 was made in 2009 and reveals bright blue star clusters and intricate winding dust lanes which are hallmarks of this class of galaxies. Studies of variable stars in M100 have played an important role in determining the size and age of the Universe. If you know exactly where to look, you can find a small spot that is a light echo from a bright supernova that was recorded a few years before the image was taken.
Source - NASA

An Extremely Long Filament on the Sun

Image Source - http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1502/superfilament_hardy_1910.jpg

Image Credit & Copyright: Oliver Hardy

Explanation: Yesterday, the Sun exhibited one of the longest filaments ever recorded. It may still be there today. Visible as the dark streak just below the center in the featured image, the enormous filament extended across the face of the Sun a distance even longer than the Sun's radius -- over 700,000 kilometers.

A filament is actually hot gas held aloft by the Sun's magnetic field, so that viewed from the side it would appear as a raised prominence. The featured image shows the filament in light emitted by hydrogen and therefore highlights the Sun's chromosphere. Sun-following telescopes including NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) are tracking this unusual feature, with SDO yesterday recording a spiraling magnetic field engulfing it.

Since filaments typically last only from hours to days, parts of this one may collapse or erupt at any time, either returning hot plasma back to the Sun or expelling it into the Solar System. Is the filament still there? You can check by clicking on SDO's current solar image.

Dwarf planet Ceres has huge UFO Base..!!

Date of Image taken - 19-Feb-2015
Image Source - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia19185
What NASA said - "
This image was taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft of dwarf planet Ceres on Feb. 19 from a distance of nearly 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers). It shows that the brightest spot on Ceres has a dimmer companion, which apparently lies in the same basin.

Dawn is due to be captured into orbit around Ceres on March 6."

In my opinion, NASA has been observing this dwarf Planet due to UFO base. This base is clear with shining as it was built with Advanced Alien Technology. I will try to get more details on it soon.

NASA Covers Mask to Real Statue on Mars ( Proof is here )

Date of Image available - 2015 February 9
Nasa Source - http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1502/LayeredRocks_curiosity_4006.jpg

What NASA said - "
Layered Rocks near Mount Sharp on Mars
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS Explanation: What caused these Martian rocks to be layered? The leading hypothesis is an ancient Martian lake that kept evaporating and refilling over 10 million years -- but has now remained dry and empty of water for billions of years. The featured image, taken last November by the robotic Curiosity rover, shows one-meter wide Whale Rock which is part of the Pahrump Hills outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp. Also evident in the image is cross-bedding -- rock with angled layers -- which were likely facilitated by waves of sand. Curiosity continues to find many layered rocks like this as it continues to roll around and up 5.5-km high Mount Sharp.
"
This is NASA said to us.

In the source image, on the top left side, you can see this strange Stone. It may not natural stone. It has Strange carvings. May be it is a statue or an UFO.

NASA covers it with two rectangular blurring masks. I made some colour changes to it to know the truth behind it. So that it appears like below

Nasa may not give the real image to us. But one day reality will win.

5 Year Time-lapse of the Sun by NASA

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of their Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) yesterday,NASA released this comprehensive time-lapse of the amazing sun. It took them 5 years to record this time-lapse which they squeezed into 3 minutes.

NASA reveals 'dark' side of the Moon in stunning video

The US space agency has released a stunning video revealing the far side of the Moon that cannot be seen from the Earth. Using data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), NASA's scientific visualisation studio produced a video of the far side that shows that there are many more and larger craters than on the side which faces the Earth.

What it does not have is large dark spots called maria. Although "dark" is a misnomer, the side of the Moon humans cannot see is illuminated by the Sun in just the same way as the Earth.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been mapping the Moon since 2009. NASA stitched together hundreds of terabytes of data to create the animation.

In 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 probe sent back the first grainy images of the moon's dark side.

Small Cute UFO..!!

Date of Sighting - 15-May-2014
Place of Sighting - Whitehaven, GB
Description of Sighting Report - "Me and my partner were in our local church yard/park and i took a picture on my phone camera of him and the dog, it wasn't till i got home later on and i loaded it on to my computer that i noticed there was something in the sky in the picture, i zoomed in on it and could not identify it as a flying bird or something else and it has puzzled me since so i thought i would contact you to see if you thought it was a UFO or not."

Image Source - http://www.mufoncms.com/files_jeud8334j/63211_submitter_file1__20130502140618.jpg

Close to the Sun

A conceptual animation of a solarium immerses viewers in footage of solar flares. 

 

NASA is inviting the public to step inside a new, immersive exhibit that shows off the sights and sounds of the fiery star. 

On permanent exhibition beginning Tuesday at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the solarium blends the sights and sounds of the sun to create a one-of-a-kind experience -- minus those incinerating temperatures.

Pulling from the resources of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, the installation has incredible imagery that includes erupting solar flares, the yellow-orange swirls of the solar atmosphere and unexpected explosions of solar matter that can be up to 50 times larger than earth.

Genna Duberstein, lead producer on the project, told ABC News it took four years to bring the idea to life. She said stepping inside has a "time-bending, mind-numbing property to it." 

"It kind of makes you have to forget about your phone and your to-do list and you just stop and observe and it really brings you into the moment," she said. "You see flickers of light and dark shapes and you lose all sense of time." 

The Solar Dynamics Observatory captures the incredible action of the sun using the ones and zeroes of binary code, according to NASA. The code is then processed into black and white photos, which are later colorized by scientists to provide a more realistic look at the solar activity.

Hubble spots smiley face in space

A massive galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849 looks like a smiley face in an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

 

Source - http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1506a/

Tale of Two Black Holes

The real monster black hole is revealed in this image from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array of colliding galaxies Arp 299. In the center panel, the NuSTAR high-energy X-ray data appear in various colors overlaid on a visible-light image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The panel on the left shows the NuSTAR data alone, while the visible-light image is on the far right.

Before NuSTAR, astronomers knew that the each of the two galaxies in Arp 299 held a supermassive black hole at its heart, but they weren't sure if one or both were actively chomping on gas in a process called accretion. The new high-energy X-ray data reveal that the supermassive black hole in the galaxy on the right is indeed the hungry one, releasing energetic X-rays as it consumes gas.

In this image, X-rays with energies of 4 to 6 kiloelectron volts are red, energies of 6 to 12 kiloelectron volts are green, and 12 to 25 kiloelectron volts are blue.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Virginia. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, California, and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.

NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with the ASI providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.

For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nustar and http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/

Don't Tell Aliens We Are Here, Says Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawkins has warned the scientists against attempts to call aliens and letting them know that we were here.

Scientists have been exploring ways of beaming messages from Earth to aliens in the hope of the ultimate callback are even considering Wikipedia to help them understand human life, but the renowned physicist has disapproved the move, saying that it could lead to catastrophe, the Daily Star reported.

Hawking said that "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans."

The idea, which is the brainchild of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California, involves powerful radio telescopes which will send the data to nearby stars and planets.

Seth Shostak of Seti, who was also the science advisor on the film 'Battleship' said that they were planning to pick star systems within 20 light years, of which there were several hundred, so they were near enough to answer in a reasonable time.

However, US scientist and Nasa consultant David Brin has warned that contact with aliens would "transform human destiny, and that the it should only be conducted if the entire world is onboard.

The violent youth of solar proxies

Stars similar to our Sun — “solar proxies” — enable scientists to look through a window in time to see the harsh conditions prevailing in the early or future Solar System, as well as in planetary systems around other stars. These studies could lead to profound insights into the origin of life on Earth and reveal how likely (or unlikely) the rise of life is elsewhere in the cosmos. This work has revealed that the Sun rotated more than ten times faster in its youth (over four billion years ago) than today generating a stronger magnetic field and stronger activity. This also meant that the young Sun emitted X-rays and ultraviolet radiation up to several hundred times stronger than the Sun does today.

Source and full zoom image -  http://www.iau.org/public/images/detail/iau0916a/

Credit: IAU/E. Guinan

Artist's Concept: Earth's Location in the Universe

Artist's Concept: Earth's Location in the Universe
Artist's Concept: a series of illustrations showing Earth's location in the universe.

Additional Versions

• Wikimedia Commons

Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin

For High Resolution Full Zoom Image (16.72 MB) - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/gallery/Earth%27s_Location_in_the_Universe.jpg