Take a look at the most terrifying thing you have ever seen. This is called the Witch Head Nebula, and it is 100% real.
Now, most astronomical objects don’t look anything at all like their names, unless you have been staring through a telescope for 16 straight hours, or are on some powerful narcotics. But this? Look at this. This is totally a witch’s head. This is evil, incarnate.
I want to visit every congressman who wants to cut NASA funding and show them this photo. “Listen. You shouldn’t support NASA because of science, or research, or The Children. You need to support space research because somewhere, somehow, in outer space, this thing is waiting for us. We must kill it before it kills us. Shoot it with lasers, nuke it from orbit, something. Because rest assured: The Witch Head knows where we live. It knows that we know about it. And it will destroy us all.”
Astronomer John Bolton plots the positions of a new star which was discovered via radio telescope, December 1951.
ALMA Opens Its Eyes
The most powerful millimeter/submillimeter-wavelength telescope in the world opens for business and reveals its first image.
Humanity’s most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), has officially opened for astronomers. The first released image, from a telescope still under construction, reveals a view of the Universe that cannot be seen at all by visible-light and infrared telescopes. Thousands of scientists from around the world competed to be the first few researchers to explore some of the darkest, coldest, farthest, and most hidden secrets of the Cosmos with this new astronomical tool.
“We are living in a historic moment for science and particularly for astronomy, and perhaps also for the evolution of humanity, because we start to use the greatest observatory under construction at the moment,” said Thijs de Graauw, ALMA Director.
Cassini Presents Saturn Moon Quintet
With the artistry of a magazine cover shoot, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this portrait of five of Saturn’s moons poised along the planet’s rings.
From left to right are Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and finally Rhea, bisected by the right side of the frame. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Rhea and 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Enceladus.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011. Image scale is about 4 miles (7 kilometers) per pixel on Rhea and 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel on Enceladus.
Today 402 years ago (August 25, 1609) Galileo Galilei introduce his telescope to the Venetian Lawmakers. While Galileo did not invent the telescope, his was the first to be used for astronomy. In fact, less than 5 months after he introduced the telescope, he discovered three moons traveling around Jupiter and just a few days later he discovered the fourth one.
His observations of the satellites of Jupiter created a revolution in astronomy that reverberates to this day: a planet with smaller planets orbiting it did not conform to the principles of Aristotelian Cosmology, which held that all heavenly bodies should circle the Earth, and many astronomers and philosophers initially refused to believe that Galileo could have discovered such a thing.
Fast forward to February 11, 2010; NASA Solar Dynamics was launched into Space - the most sophisticated solar observatory ever built. We have come long ways and today we should remember and thank Galileo for looking to the stars!Source: NASA SDO.
Here’s to Galileo.
Today’s APOD: A Pileus Iridescent Cloud Over Ethiopia. Yes, but how many dark clouds have a multicolored lining? Pictured, behind this darker cloud, is a pileus iridescent cloud, a group of water droplets that have a uniformly similar size and so together diffract different colors of sunlight by different amounts. The above image was taken just after the picturesque sight was noticed by chance by a photographer in Ethiopia. A more detailed picture of the same cloud shows not only many colors, but unusual dark and wavy bands whose origins are thought related to wave disturbances in the cloud.
Image Credit & Copyright: Esther Havens (Light the World)
This is incredible.
“Frequently on the lunar surface I said to myself, ‘This is the Moon, that is the Earth. I’m really here, I’m really here.’” This quote from Alan Bean, Apollo 12, is from an interview he did soon after he returned from the Moon. (via InterplanetSarah)
White Sands, Black Mountains, Red Sunset, Milky Way
Photo and caption by James Lee
A single 30 second exposure. My LED headlamp lit the white sand dune. Residual sunlight from a sun already set lit the horizon and clouds while the stars and Milky Way galaxy revealed themselves up above.Lovely.
