Note: this post was first published on Feb. 22, 2011. I’m reposting it again today because 1. the video creator has since updated the soundtrack, and 2. it’s still awesome. One of the things that fascinates me so much about the Universe is the incredible vastness of scale, distance and size. On Earth we have…
Tag: APOD
The Colors of Titan and Saturn
The pumpkin-orange colors of Titan’s thick clouds appear in stark contrast in front of the limb of Saturn, which appears quite blue along its sunlit limb due to Rayleigh scattering, the same process that makes the sky look blue here on Earth. The image here is a color composite made from three separate raw images…
A Matter of Scale
One of the things that fascinates me so much about the Universe is the incredible vastness of scale, distance and size. On Earth we have virtually nothing to compare to the kinds of sizes seen in space. We look up at the stars and planets in the night sky but they are just bright points…
Haunting Beauty
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Congrats to Tor Even Mathisen for making the Astronomy Picture of the Day today with his beautiful time-lapse video of the aurora borealis illuminating the night sky over Tromsø, Norway! I first came across this video last week on Bad Astronomy, it’s a hauntingly beautiful presentation of the…
Fo Sizzle
A beautiful photo by Alan Friedman showing a solar prominence twisting high – as in, tens of thousands of miles high – above the surface of the Sun. This image was taken on June 2, 2010 through Friedman’s hydrogen alpha telescope. This allows us to see the complex texture of the Sun’s surface, called the…
Hello, Neighbor
On Friday, January 29, Mars was in opposition and appeared very bright in the eastern sky, near the Moon. The photograph above was shot and color-calibrated by photographer Alan Friedman from his location in Buffalo, New York. The bright north polar ice cap is clearly visible, as are some darker surface features and wispy clouds….
An Occult Event
This past Thursday, April 23, skywatchers were treated to a special event: the moon occulting (hiding) Venus. During the early morning hours (exact time depending on location) the crescent moon passed across Venus, obscuring it from Earth’s view. This image was taken by David Cortner, a photographer in North Carolina. It shows a large-scale…
Lights in the Dark 