Happy Earth Day!
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Via Gizmodo. See also, somewhat relatedly, this Flickr post.
Category Archives: Astronomy & Stargazing
Earth, (solar) wind, and fire
Of all the volcano-related photos I’ve seen recently — including the beautiful gallery of Eyjafjallajökull pics on the Boston Globe‘s always-awesome photoblog, The Big Picture — this one is my favorite. It was taken by Arnþór Ævarsson of Hveragerði, Iceland, on April 5, and it shows the volcano in the foreground… and the aurora borealis in the background. The volcano… Read more »
Basketball Break
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I probably won’t stick with this — I certainly won’t if UCSB or Houston pull, or come close to pulling, the upsets — but, for now, I think I’m going to take a break from tweeting the games and just watch/relax. And, in the spirit of Andrew Sullivan’s “Mental Health Breaks,” I offer the following “Basketball Break,” courtesy of Roger… Read more »
Blue Marble redux
NASA has released a pair of spectacular full-globe images of the Earth, updated versions of the famous “Blue Marble” shot from Apollo 17. These are “the most detailed true-color images of the entire Earth to date.” Awesome. (In the literal meaning of the word.) Eastern Hemisphere after the jump.
ISS, Shuttle & Moon
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Loyette, Loyacita and I saw the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station fly over Denver this evening. They were not quite 16 hours removed from undocking, and were still very close together in the sky, as this photo shows: That’s the Moon at top right. The ISS is the bottom left streak of light, fading as it moves… Read more »
Look east around dawn tomorrow…
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…and you’ll see this: (Hat tip: SpaceWeather.com.) Bonus, here in Denver at least: an International Space Station flyover (albeit in a different part of the sky). To see if the ISS is visible from your location tomorrow morning, at the same time as Venus, the slender crescent Moon, Saturn and Mercury (and also Mars, overhead), check out the Simple Satellite… Read more »
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb the Moon
In a little less than 18 hours, NASA will bomb the Moon. Well, technically, they’ll crash two spaceships into the Moon. Ostensibly, the purpose of this exercise is to create a “plume” of debris, then analyze the debris from afar to see if it contains water. If that doesn’t work, though, I’m pretty sure Dick Cheney will torture the debris… Read more »
More ISS flyover photos
Space Shuttle Discovery’s scheduled landing was scrubbed Thursday afternoon, so in the evening, I was able to see the Shuttle and the International Space Station together in the sky for the third consecutive night. Well, sort of. This time, they were far enough apart that I didn’t actually see them both simultaneously (the Shuttle had “set” behind a nearby house… Read more »
STS-128 on Wednesday night from MA
Here’s my photo of station and shuttle from Massachusetts on Wednesday evening: It was really nice seeing Brendan’s video from the shuttle overflight on Tuesday evening. I watched the pair fly over Boston two orbits earlier, and his video definitely captured the sense of what it was like to see them go past that evening. The weather forecast for landing… Read more »
Spaceships over my backyard
Here’s my video of the Space Shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station flying over the Rocky Mountains Tuesday night, as seen from my backyard in Denver, accelerated to 5x speed with no sound: Below is the same video at normal speed, with sound. You can hear us — meaning me, Becky, Kristy and Myk — talking about seeing the… Read more »