Wikipedia picture of the day on July 5, 2020: Ten Million Mark “Notgeld” banknote from Trier, Germany (1923), designed by Fritz Quant, view of Trier after a copperplate print by Matthäus Merian (1646). https://ift.tt/3gqknlr
A sensitive video camera on a summit of the Vosges mountains in France captured these surprising fireworks above a distant horizon on June 26. Generated over intense thunderstorms, this one about 260 kilometers away, the brief and mysterious flashes have come to be known as red sprites. The transient luminous events are caused by electrical […]
Wikipedia picture of the day on July 4, 2020: Common blue damselflies (Enallagma cyathigerum) mating in Whitecross Green Wood, Buckinghamshire. The composite shows how the female swings her abdomen to initiate pairing. https://ift.tt/2Ax0zOe
Stars are forming in Lynds Dark Nebula (LDN) 1251. About 1,000 light-years away and drifting above the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, the dusty molecular cloud is part of a complex of dark nebulae mapped toward the Cepheus flare region. Across the spectrum, astronomical explorations of the obscuring interstellar clouds reveal energetic shocks and […]
Wikipedia picture of the day on July 3, 2020: Cathedral-Basilica of Mary, Queen of the World, Montreal, Canada. The construction of the cathedral, ordered by Ignace Bourget, began in 1875 in order to replace the former Saint-Jacques Cathedral which had burned in 1852. The building is a scale model of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome […]
The Old Astronomer’s Milky Way arcs through this peaceful northern sky. Against faint, diffuse starlight you can follow dark rifts of interstellar dust clouds stretching from the galaxy’s core. They lead toward bright star Antares at the right, almost due south above the horizon. The brightest beacon in the twilight is Jupiter, though. From the […]
Wikipedia picture of the day on July 2, 2020: Cusheon Lake is the third largest lake of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. This picture was taken from a pier on a public beach by Cusheon Lake Road in the early morning, about 2 hours after the sunrise https://ift.tt/38jTNHT
Hitching a ride on the Mars Pathfinder mission, the Sojourner rover arrived on Mars on July 4, 1997. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-6Zr
On June 26, 2020, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Chris Cassidy conducted the first of two spacewalks to swap batteries and upgrade power systems on the International Space Station. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-6Zp
Has your world ever turned upside-down? It would happen every day if you stay fixed to the stars. Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show the stars and sky moving above a steady Earth. Here, however, the camera has been forced to rotate so that the stars remain fixed, and the Earth rotates around […]