Putting I Between Art And Facts
Most inner moons in the solar system keep one face pointed toward their central planet, much like our own moon. This is called gravitational locking, or tidal locking. The gif above shows that certainly isn’t the case with the small moons of Pluto, which behave like spinning tops. Pluto is shown at center with, in order, from smaller to wider orbit: Charon (which you can see is actually tidally locked), Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra (which all spin).
During the recent total solar eclipse, a group of eclipse chasers chartered a flight to get a view of the event from 35,000 feet in the sky. The above gif was from the window of the plane flying through the shadow being cast by the moon on the clouds below. The image comes from this video taken by Stephan Heinsius.
Image credit: Isaac Gutiérrez Pascual
This incredible photo was taken by Isaac Gutiérrez Pascual in Spain way back early September of 2010. I features a large cumulonimbus cloud at sunset along with a crescent moon converged with venus. It’s images like this that have resulted in me bcoming a full fledged member of the Cloud Appreciation Society
via APOD
What would it be like to see a sunset on Mars? Not all that spectacular really. Interestingly, the colors of a Martian sunset are almost the opposite of a sunset here on earth with the sky being a reddish hue and the glow around the sun being blue.
Photo courtesy of NASA
It is crazy to think about the fact that, outside of Michael Collins, every human being, living or dead, was contained within the frame of this picture.
Image via NASA.
As always, click the image for wallpaper size.
Are you ready to space out? 100,000 Stars is an interactive 3D map of our Milky Way Galaxy created by the folks over at Google. It accurately plots 100,000 local stars pulling data from a range of sources, including NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Bright Star Catalog.
100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It shows the real location of over 100,000 nearby stars. Zooming in reveals 87 individually identified stars and our solar system. The galaxy view is an artist’s rendition.
Instructions: Pan using your mouse and zoom in/out using your touchpad or mouse wheel. Click a star’s name to learn more about it.
Warning: Scientific accuracy is not guaranteed. Please do not use this visualization for interstellar navigation.
Be sure to take the tour. This is a WebGL Google Chrome Experiment, so it’ll run best on Chrome or Safari and with a decent graphics card. Damn nature, you pretty.
