Shrouded in a thick atmosphere, Saturn’s largest moon Titan really is hard to see. Small particles suspended in the upper atmosphere cause an almost impenetrable haze, strongly scattering light at visible wavelengths and hiding Titan’s surface features from prying eyes. But Titan’s surface is better imaged at infrared wavelengths where scattering is weaker and atmospheric […]
Guinness World Records officially designated NASA’s Crawler Transporter 2 as the heaviest self-powered vehicle, weighing approximately 6.65 million pounds—equivalent to about 15 Statues of Liberty or 1,000 pickup trucks. via NASA https://ift.tt/FHnXQ7d
The delightful Dark Doodad Nebula drifts through southern skies, a tantalizing target for binoculars toward the small constellation Musca, The Fly. The dusty cosmic cloud is seen against rich starfields just south of the Coalsack Nebula and the Southern Cross. Stretching for about 3 degrees across the center of this telephoto field of view, the […]
NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, left, Jessica Watkins, center, and Bob Hines, right, take in the view from the interactive recreation of the International Space Station’s cupola in the One World Connected gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on March 28, 2023. via NASA https://ift.tt/QJG6dnM
Which star created this bubble? It wasn’t the bright star on the bubble’s right. And it also wasn’t a giant space dolphin. It was the star in the blue nebula’s center, a famously energetic Wolf-Rayet star. Wolf-Rayet stars in general have over 20 times the mass of our Sun and expel fast particle winds that […]
Yes, but can your green flash do this? A green flash at sunset is a rare event that many Sun watchers pride themselves on having seen. Once thought to be a myth, a green flash is now understood to occur when the Earth’s atmosphere acts like both a prism and a lens. Different atmospheric layers create […]
The last rays of an orbital sunset illuminate the Earth’s atmosphere in this Feb. 17, 2023, photograph from the International Space Station as it orbited 269 miles above the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Argentina. via NASA https://ift.tt/78TcAzR
Reports of powerful solar flares started a seven-hour quest north to capture modern monuments against an aurora-filled sky. The peaks of iconic Arctic Henge in Raufarhöfn in northern Iceland were already aligned with the stars: some are lined up toward the exact north from one side and toward exact south from the other. The featured […]
On March 23 early evening skygazers could watch Venus and a young crescent moon, both near the western horizon. On that date Earth’s brilliant evening star, faint lunar night side and slender sunlit crescent were captured in this telephoto skyscape posing alongside a church tower from Danta di Cadore, Dolomiti, Italy. Of course the subtle […]
A technician works on part of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s core stage for Artemis II in this March 11, 2023, image. via NASA https://ift.tt/HTaG9kL