sklogw:

Hybrid Solar Eclipse

Credit & Copyright: Left: Fred Espenak - Right: Stephan Heinsius

deadpresidents:

The signatures of President Obama, Vice President Biden, and other U.S. officials on a plaque.  On Mars.

[Via NASA]

explorationimages:

Cassini: Saturn casts a shadow on its rings, 9/18/2012.

W00075490.jpg was taken on September 18, 2012 and received on Earth September 20, 2012. The camera was pointing toward SATURN-RINGS at approximately 1,381,147 miles (2,222,740 kilometers) away, and the image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

thisisntanthony:

RBSP Night Launch

ikenbot:

Ancient Orbs

This sparkling picture taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the centre of globular cluster M 4. The power of Hubble has resolved the cluster into a multitude of glowing orbs, each a colossal nuclear furnace.

M 4 is relatively close to us, lying 7200 light-years distant, making it a prime object for study. It contains several tens of thousand stars and is noteworthy in being home to many white dwarfs — the cores of ancient, dying stars whose outer layers have drifted away into space.

astroperlas:

Espectacular filamento y CME en el Sol vistos por el SDO (NASA).

Vía.

the-star-stuff:

The storm clouds of Saturn are bigger than our entire planet

This striking image from the Cassini orbiter shows Saturn’s northern hemisphere engulfed in a massive storm that has raged for well over a year. This storm was bigger than Earth when it began, and it’s since gotten even more massive.

This storm is an apparent example of the Great White Spot, a recurring super-storm that periodically engulfs much of the planet’s northern hemisphere. This particular storm has raged since late 2010, and it underwent a second massive eruption in April 2011. It’s been given the catchy name of the Northern Electrostatic Interference, because the storm has caused a significant spike in the amount of radio and plasma interference. Cassini has also detected a huge temperature drop in the center of the storm system.

You might wonder why this is called the Great White Spot when the clouds are clearly orange. In this case, it’s the image that’s wrong — or, at least, in false color, as it’s actually an infrared image. (That blue line is actually the rings of Saturn viewed from the side.) The orange colors indicate clouds that are deep within Saturn’s atmosphere, while the lighter colors represent those closer to the edge of the planet’s massive cloud system. This storm is thought to be associated with the dawn of spring on Saturn. Of course, that could take awhile, considering a year on Saturn is nearly three Earth decades long.

Via NASA.

project-argus:

A pair of Saturn’s moons appear insignificant compared to the immensity of the planet in this Cassini spacecraft view along the terminator where day transitions to night. The larger moon Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) is also on the left, just a bit closer to the center of the image. Epimetheus (70 miles, or 113 kilometers across) appears as a tiny black speck on the far left of the image, left of Enceladus, just below the thin line of the rings. The rings cast wide shadows on the southern hemisphere of the planet. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 4, 2011 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 746,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Saturn and roughly 600,000 miles (1 million kilometers) from Enceladus and Epimetheus. Image scale is about 47 miles (75 kilometers) per pixel on Saturn, 37 miles (60 kilometers) per pixel on Enceladus and 41 miles (66 kilometers) per pixel Epimetheus. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. Source.

47 miles (75 kilometers) per pixel on Saturn

the-star-stuff:

Gravitational lensing twists distant galaxy into an Einstein Ring

Believe it or not, that blue horseshoe-shaped structure around that bright star is an entire galaxy, although it doesn’t really look anything like that. Its incredible twisted shape is a mirage created by a strange phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

Light isn’t immune to the force of gravity, and if it comes into contact with a large enough object - such as the combined mass of a large galaxy - it can become radically distorted. That’s what has happened here. The light coming from the galaxy in this image had to pass through another, much closer galaxy on its way to Earth. That light was twisted out of its original position, and the end result is that we see something radically different from the original image.

This is known as gravitational lensing, but the effect on display here is particularly unusual. Most of the time, lensing will simply redirect the light from the original source so that we see a pair of mirror images. But if the alignment of the gravitational lens is absolutely perfect, it will twist the light into a horseshoe shape like the one we see here.

This was all predicted in considerable detail seventy years ago by Albert Einstein - making this roughly the 30th most impressive thing he ever did that is still completely beyond most people’s comprehension. Today, structures like this are called Einstein Rings in his honor. They also serve an important function in modern astrophysics, as the extent of lensing can help us determine the total mass - and thus the amount of dark matter - in the foreground galaxy that created the lens effect in the first place.

Via NASA.