All Things Smart & Fresh
In the heart of monstrous Tarantula Nebula lies huge bubbles of energetic gas, long filaments of dark dust, and unusually massive stars. In the center of this heart, is a knot of stars so dense that it was once thought to be a single star. This star cluster, labeled as R136 or NGC 2070, is visible just above the center of the featured image and home to a great number … Read More →
Posing near the western horizon, a brilliant evening star and slender young crescent shared reflections in a calm sea last Thursday after sunset. Recorded in this snapshot from the Atlantic beach at Santa Marinella near Rome, Italy, the lovely celestial conjunction of the two brightest beacons in the night sky could be enjoyed around the world. Seaside, light reflected by briefly horizontal surfaces of the gentle waves forms the shimmering … Read More →
An Orbital ATK rocket rolls out to launch Pad-0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on May 17, 2018, in advance of a May 21 launch from Wallops Island, VA. The Antares will launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. via NASA https://ift.tt/2k8bPor
NGC 1032 cleaves the quiet darkness of space in two in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. via NASA https://ift.tt/2KCXCuN
Astronaut Ricky Arnold took this selfie during the May 16, 2018, spacewalk. via NASA https://ift.tt/2L8kFyR
Captured last week after sunset on a Chilean autumn night, an exceptional airglow floods this allsky view from Las Campanas Observatory. The airglow was so intense it diminished parts of the Milky Way as it arced horizon to horizon above the high Atacama desert. Originating at an altitude similar to aurorae, the luminous airglow is due to chemiluminescence, the production of light through chemical excitation. Commonly recorded in color by … Read More →
This image of the southern Greenland town of Narsaq was taken during an Operation IceBridge flight on Apr. 26, 2018. via NASA https://ift.tt/2Itd8IW
This image is not blurry. It shows in clear detail that the largest satellite galaxy to our Milky Way, the Large Cloud of Magellan (LMC), rotates. First determined with Hubble, the rotation of the LMC is presented here with fine data from the Sun-orbiting Gaia satellite. Gaia measures the positions of stars so accurately that subsequent measurements can reveal slight proper motions of stars not previously detectable. The featured image … Read More →
Each and every day NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observes our Sun and relays observational data to scientists on Earth. via NASA https://ift.tt/2IkYsf2
Four hundred years ago today (May 15, 1618) Johannes Kepler discovered the simple mathematical rule governing the orbits of the solar system’s planets, now recognized as Kepler’s Third Law of planetary motion. At that time he was living in this tall house on The Hofgasse, a narrow street near the castle and main square of the city of Linz, Austria, planet Earth. The conclusive identification of this residence (Hofgasse 7) … Read More →