Space

honeybee__12

Kepler-78b is similar to Earth and is referred as “lava world”.

honeybee__12

Photo taken from a F-16 as the shuttle left Earth.




Can you tell I'm a big fan of the Shuttle?
I'm so sad that they no longer fly.

anchower1973

Anybody ever watch the series "How the Universe Works"? I absolutely love it.

cee134

Saturn's North Polar Hexagon



In full view, the amazing six-sided jet stream known as Saturn's north polar hexagon is shown in this colorful Cassini image. Extending to 70 degrees north latitude, the false-color video frame is map-projected, based on infrared, visible, and ultraviolet image data recorded by the Saturn-orbiting spacecraft in late 2012. First found in the outbound Voyager flyby images from the 1980s, the bizarre, long-lived feature tied to the planet's rotation is about 30,000 kilometers across.

At its center lies the ringed gas giant's hurricane-like north polar storm. A new long term study of Cassini data has found a remarkable higher-altitude vortex, exactly matching the outlines of the north polar hexagon, that formed as summer approached the planet's northern hemisphere. It appears to reach hundreds of kilometers above these deeper cloud tops, into Saturn's stratosphere.

honeybee__12

June, 2018
Mars Rover Curiosity snaps a selfie as a giant sandstorm moves across the planet.

honeybee__12

Taken my Nasa's weather satellite
GOES-16.

honeybee__12

While astronomers around the world had their eyes fixed last year on ‘Oumuamua, a lump of rock from another planetary system that whizzed through ours, little did they know that another interstellar interloper was quietly living among us. And this one appears to have been here for billions of years.

Astronomers first spotted the object, an asteroid called 2015 BZ509 that is orbiting close to Jupiter, in 2014. They knew it was unusual because it was traveling around the solar system in the opposite direction as almost everything else. (Its motion is shown in the animations above, with 2015 BZ509 circled.) 
Astronomers have found other objects in “retrograde” orbits, perhaps knocked off course by passing too close to a giant planet, but 2015 BZ509’s orbit was the weirdest of all because it is also elongated and out of alignment with the planets and other bodies.

honeybee__12

This stunning false-color picture shows off the many sides of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. It is made up of images taken by three of NASA's Great Observatories, using three different wavebands of light. Infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope are colored red; visible data from the Hubble Space Telescope are yellow; and X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory are green and blue.

Located 10,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Cassiopeia, Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a once massive star that died in a violent supernova explosion 325 years ago. It consists of a dead star, called a neutron star, and a surrounding shell of material that was blasted off as the star died. The neutron star can be seen in the Chandra data as a sharp turquoise dot in the center of the shimmering shell.

honeybee__12

Mission Specialist Bruce McCandless II, is seen further away from the confines and safety of his ship than any previous astronaut has ever been.
This space first was made possible by the Manned Manuevering Unit or MMU, a nitrogen jet propelled backpack. After a series of test maneuvers inside and above Challenger’s payload bay, McCandless went “free-flying” to a distance of 320 feet away from the Orbiter.
This stunning orbital panorama view shows McCandless out there amongst the black and blue of Earth and space.

I find this photo a bit terrifying.

cee134

Bright Spots On Ceres



Bright surface features on the dwarf planet Ceres known as faculae were first discovered by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in 2015. This mosaic of one such feature, Cerealia Facula, combines images obtained from altitudes as low as 22 miles (35 km) above Ceres' surface. The mosaic is overlain on a topography model based on images obtained during Dawn's low altitude mapping orbit (240 miles or 385 km altitude). No vertical exaggeration was applied. The center of Cerealia Facula is located at 19.7 degrees north latitude and 239.6 degrees south longitude.

During its mission of over a decade, the Dawn spacecraft has studied the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, celestial bodies believed to have formed early in the history of the solar system. The mission's goal is to characterize the early solar system and the processes that dominated its formation.

cee134

Hurricane Florence Viewed from the Space Station



Astronaut Ricky Arnold, from aboard the International Space Station, shared this image of Hurricane Florence on Sept. 10, taken as the orbiting laboratory flew over the massive storm.

cee134

You have to take a long hike to see the Troll's Tongue -- ten hours over rocky terrain. And in this case, it took three trips to capture the landform below a clear night sky. Trolltunga itself is a picturesque rock protrusion extending about 700 meters over mountainous cliffs near Lake Ringedalsvatnet in Norway.

The overhang is made of billion-year-old Precambrian bedrock that was carved out by glaciers during an ice-age about 10,000 years ago. The featured picture is a composite of two exposures, a 15-second image of the foreground Earth followed 40 minutes later by an 87-second exposure of the background sky. Thousands of discernable stars dot the backdrop starscape in addition to billions of unresolved stars in the nearly vertical band of our Milky Way Galaxy.

honeybee__12

Astrophotographer Rolando Ligustri captured this view of Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner on Aug. 14, 2018.

Bullet_with_Butterfly_Wings

@anchower1973 wrote: »

Anybody ever watch the series "How the Universe Works"? I absolutely love it.

Yes! My netflix and youtube search history is filled with words like... outer space physics, quantum spacetime, known universe, distant galaxies etc...etc
You should check out Cosmos: A space time odyssey, if you have not already.

cee134

Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka



Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, are the bright bluish stars from east to west (lower right to upper left) along the diagonal in this cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie from 800 to 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion's well-studied interstellar clouds.

In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have some surprisingly familiar shapes, including the dark Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula near Alnitak at the lower right. The famous Orion Nebula itself is off the right edge of this colorful starfield. This well-framed, 2-panel telescopic mosaic spans about 4 degrees on the sky.

cee134

Hurricane Florence



"Ever stared down the gaping eye of a category 4 hurricane? It's chilling, even from space," says European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, who is currently living and working aboard the International Space Station as a member of the Expedition 56 crew.

A high-definition video camera outside the space station captured stark and sobering views of Hurricane Florence, a Category 4 storm. The video was taken on Tuesday as Florence churned across the Atlantic in a west-northwesterly direction with winds of 130 miles per hour. The National Hurricane Center forecasts additional strengthening for Florence before it reaches the coastline of North Carolina and South Carolina early Friday, Sept. 14.

cee134

Comet, Clusters and Nebulae



Bright enough for binocular viewing Comet 21P / Giacobini-Zinner stands out, even in this deep telephoto mosaic of the star cluster and nebula rich constellation Auriga the Charioteer. On the night of September 9 its greenish coma and diffuse tail contrast with the colorful stars and reddish emission nebulae in the almost 10 degree field of view along the Milky Way. The comet was near its perihelion and closest approach to Earth, about 200 light-seconds away.

Riding across the distant background just above the comet's tail are well-known Auriga star clusters M38 (left of center) and M36 (toward the right) about 4,000 light-years away. At the top left, emission region IC 405 is only 1,500 light-years distant, more dramatically known as the Flaming Star Nebula. To its right lies IC 410, 12,000 light-years away and famous for its star-forming cosmic tadpoles. A child of our Solar System Giacobini-Zinner is a periodic comet orbiting the Sun once every 6.5 years, and the parent body of October's Draconids meteor shower.

honeybee__12

Rogue Planet
Hard evidence for the population of planetary nomads has proved elusive—floating cold and lightless in the void, these dark worlds cannot be directly observed by any conceivable telescope.
Very rarely, however, one might pass in front of a far-distant background star, creating a detectable blip of light as the planet’s gravitational field acts as a magnifying lens.
The duration and strength of such a “gravitational microlensing” event could reveal not only a rogue planet’s existence but also its mass, as bigger worlds tend to create longer, stronger amplifications of a background star’s light.
A typical free-floating Jupiter-mass planet, for instance, is estimated to create an amplification lasting one to several days. A smaller, Earth-sized object might only amplify a star for a few hours.
It takes intensive calculations and a complicated series of assumptions to extract a rogue planet’s basic details from the deceptively simple brightening of faraway stars.
But experts broadly agree that it can be done—so a handful of telescopic surveys around the world now monitor hundreds of millions of suns night after night to seek these objects, gradually taking a bulk census of the Milky Way’s loneliest worlds from the telltale twinkles of chance cosmic alignments.

honeybee__12

The Black Widow Pulsar
Pulsar J1311-3430 is a dangerous partner to have.
It weighs as much as two suns but is only as wide as Washington, DC — and it's getting bigger by feeding off its mate, a normal star. The two pirouette around each other every 93 minutes in a deadly, close dance.
The pulsar’s beam strips layers away from the star, which the pulsar then slurps up. That extra material gives the pulsar more energy, making it spin even faster, but leaving its partner depleted. So depleted that someday, nothing will be left and the pulsar will dance with only itself.

honeybee__12

This planet’s blue hue might call to mind peaceful oceans and pleasant summer days. But don’t be fooled. It’s a huge gas giant orbiting close to its star, which would makes it a hellish place to live, for a few reasons:
a) No oceans exist ever, b) the temperature rockets as high as 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, and c) the apparent azure sky actually comes from a deadly weather pattern: rain made of molten glass.