[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / Dave Lane] Sometimes land and sky are both busy and beautiful. The landscape pictured in the foreground encompasses Bryce Canyon in Utah, USA, famous for its many interesting rock structures eroded over millions of years. The skyscape above, photogenic in its own right, encompasses the arching central disk […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Data – Voyager 2, NASA Planetary Data System] Cruising through the outer solar system, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Neptune on August 25, 1989, the only spacecraft to visit the most distant gas giant. Based on the images recorded during its close encounter and in […]
The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems. “Even though today’s unmanned systems are ‘dumb’ in comparison to […]
Barred spiral galaxy Messier 91 (M91) lies in the constellation of constellation of Coma Berenices. The galaxy’s bar stands out quite noticeably. The galaxy represents the faintest object in Charles Messier’s catalog, and he discovered it in 1781. Notably, a rare error by Messier caused the galaxy to go “missing” for centuries, until amateur astronomer […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Dan Long (Apache Point Observatory) /Tom Murphy (UC San Diego) Explanation: This is not a scene from a sci-fi special effects movie. The green beam of light and red lunar disk are real enough, captured in the early morning hours of April 15. Of course, the reddened lunar disk […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA] Why is Saturn partly blue? The above picture of Saturn approximates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The above picture was taken in 2006 March by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Here Saturn’s […]
A cosmic mystery is uniting monks and scientists in Japan after a tree grown from a cherry stone that orbited the Earth for eight months bloomed years earlier than expected — and with very surprising flowers. The four-year-old sapling — grown from a cherry pit that spent time onboard the International Space Station (ISS) — […]
Mars, Earth, and the Sun [were to have aligned last night], a rare ‘opposition of the planets’ that only happens once every 778 days. But what makes this so remarkable is that it comes precisely a week before everyone on earth will see the first of FOUR dark red ‘blood moons’, an extraordinary event some […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Babak Tafreshi (TWAN), ESO Ultra HD Expedition As dawn broke on March 27, the center of the Milky Way Galaxy stood almost directly above the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory. In the dry, clear sky of Chile’s Atacama desert, our galaxy’s dusty central bulge is flanked by Paranal’s four […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), Hubble Legacy Archive, R. Gendler] The first identified compact galaxy group, Stephan’s Quintet is featured in this remarkable image constructed with data drawn from Hubble Legacy Archive and the Subaru Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea. The galaxies of the quintet are gathered near the […]
