The Russian Space Agency has released a time-lapse animation developed using photos captured by their Electro-L satellite. Electro-L is positioned 25000 miles above the Earth and creates a 121 megapixel image every 30 minutes with sampling visible and infrared light wavelengths. Vegetation appears orange in the infrared.

Too bad we don’t see the entire planet from this geostationary satellite. It’s impressive.



";" alt=""> Earth’s Northern Hemisphere as seen by Electro-L (Russian Space Agency)

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Vesta is a massive asteroid now considered a “proto-planet”. The jumbled space rock didn’t receive enough mass from early collisions in the asteroid belt to become a full planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Animators took photographic images from NASA's Dawn mission now visiting Vesta to produce a virtual movie. The raw images were digitally harmonized to create a clear impression of the asteroid’s  mooth plains, valleys, and a huge mountain over 3 miles high. The resulting animation is impressive:





";" alt=""> Proto-planet Vesta (credit: JPL)

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The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered a slew of extra-solar planets or exo-planets since it began focusing its powerful lens on the stars three years ago. Some of the new planets are super-weird, potentially made of solid diamond, while others may be more Earth-like in habitability around their parent stars. Now there is an application has been developed so that anyone can follow the Kepler discoveries.



Kepler Exo-planet

(credit: NASA-Ames)

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Art & Science are thought to be opposite pursuits but often they can mimic each other.

Here’s a good example where a robot and an astronaut at work caught in a famous pose in space. The photograph from the International Space Station recalls a famous panel from the Vatican's Sistine Chapel  showing the hand of God reaching out to give life to Adam. 



Man & Machine

(credit: NASA)

Michelangelo...

If you ever looked the moon and wondered how it formed, here’s the video of its earliest days. Lot’s of bombardments and lava lakes!



";" alt=""> How the Moon Formed (credit: Goddard Space Center)



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An interactive animation,  The Scale of the Universe, by Cary Huang is not to be missed. Huang uses very clever illustrations to scale things from atoms to galaxies. Use your cursor to move up or down in the diversity of sizes to the objects.

If you’d prefer just watching then this short video should suffice.

";" alt=""> The Scale of the Universe

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The massive solar storms on the Sun recently provided an excellent opportunity for theGoddard Space Center to produce spectacular photographic creations that any art gallery patron would appreciate.

Here is a short video of recent solar eruptions captured by NASA’s Solar and Heliosheric Observatory ( SOHO ). Captured in infrared by the orbiter, it demonstrates the power of solar flares.

Storms on the Sun’s surface are directly responsible for the increase in spectacular auroras that have been experienced lately in the night sky from the northern to the southern hemispheres on Earth.





Sun’s Explosive Whiplash in Infrared





(credit: NASA)

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This month, NASA researchers launched a rocket into an aurora in northern Alaska in an attempt to understand these amazing atmospheric displays better. According to the lead scientist from Cornell: "We're investigating ‘space weather’ that is caused by charged particles from the sun interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field.”

Whatever it is called, a fish-eye image taken during the launch is certainly impressive.

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The Europeans treasure their summer vacations at the beach. Thousands make an annual pilgrimage to the south of France, Italy, Greece, and Croatia.

Now, researchers with the European Space Agency ( ESA ) have announced discovering a large beach that once existed on Mars. It dried up nearly 4 billion years ago. Using radar data from an ESA instrument known as MARSIS, the researchers detected sedimentary materials in the northern plains on Mars in a region that has been identified as a potential shorelines for an ancient Martian ocean.

Still, the ESA findings provide the best evidence that liquid water once existed on Mars and played a role in its geological and environmental history.



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Kepler is at it again.

The clever space telescope has now discovered 11 entirely new planetary systems circling alien suns. The total of confirmed planets now stands at 26 and counting.

According to NASA, the Kepler findings nearly double the number of identified worlds found outside our solar system. The alien worlds range from 1.5 times the size Earth to larger than Jupiter. All of the newly  discovered planets circle very close to their parent stars making it highly unlikely that any have habitable environments. Additional research should determine if rocky worlds like Earth circle somewhere around these new identified suns.

The Kepler engineers are also getting rather artistic in depicting the digital data gathered from these 11 new solar systems.



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The eruptions from the Sun’s surface plasma produce visual displays when the energized particles hit the Earth's upper atmosphere. This short video sequence, captured in northern Norway, resulted from a January 19th solar flare. These auroras are particularly amazing.





Norway Auroras (credit: Helge Mortensen)





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Exposing a piece of film over a long period of time, from a specific location, compresses the exposure, and creates a solargraph. The photographic technique requires a pinhole camera to capture the diffuse and thin light onto photo-sensitive paper or film.

Pinhole photography is an early light capturing approach now being used to create modern art photos. The images look like they might have been discovered in an old trunk filled 19th Century daguerreotypes of  soldiers or cold winter forests. A pinhole camera is required to make a solargraph. A photo can be produced using almost any container that allows a spot of light inside to slowly expose the film. The exposure time depends on the size of the pinhole.

A beautiful and unconventional solstice solargraph was recorded with a pinehole camera made from a soda pop can lined with photo-sensitive paper. The photograph required a 6-month long time period to properly capture the image of the suns passage across the sky. The camera was positioned at a stationary location, near the radio telescope of the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, where the simple camera continuously recorded the Sun's path each day from June 21st until December 21st, the dual summer and winter solstices. The ancient, foggy, appearance of the image was caused by cloud cover while the clear lines recorded the suns tracks through the sky over the 6-month period.

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I, for one, have never heard of a Sun Tunnel but the concept of Land Art I get. These monumental installations, often created in remote locations, are designed to expand the definition of landscape and art and both are inextricably combined. This definition well applies to the Sun Tunnels created by the artist, Nancy Holt.



Sun Tunnels (design: Nancy Holt)

In Holt is associated with the...

JPL/Caltech, the Smithsonian, and NASA decided to provide a comparison of alien planets. It’s a very cool illustration of several weird exoplanets recently discovered.



Alien Worlds

(credit: JPL/NASA)

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NASA’s Kepler space telescope continues to produce amazing results and it was only launched into orbit three years ago. NASA managers have announced the first planet circling its star within the habitable zone 600 light-years distant from the Earth. It isn’t known if the planet is rocky, gaseous, or mostly liquid, but it is the first of more than a thousand exoplanets discovered by Kepler that exists directly within the so-called Goldilocks Zone where surface temperatures would allow liquid water.



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I you happened to be travelling towards the super-sized planet, CoRoT-2b, you would see a alien world of auroras. This planet located nearly 900 light-years away is slammed by solar storms 100,000 times stronger than any experienced on Earth. NASA researchers speculate that auroras would be seen everywhere on CoRoT-2b on a daily basis. However, you might not survive more than a few minutes before being fried by the intense radiation that is stripping away the planet’s atmosphere.

A NASA animation provides a good idea of the massive lightshows:





CoRoT-2b auroras   (credit: NASA)



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Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn, possesses one of the Cassini orbiter’s biggest discoveries. This ice-ball sprouts massive geysers from its southern polar regions along cracks called tiger stripes. The indicate liquid water exists somewhere below the ice. Now Cassini has beamed back radar scans to a portion of the moon’s surface that provide more surface detail.



Enceladus scanned by radar (credit: NASA/JPL/CalTech)



Perhaps on the next Enceladus radar fly-by a water spout will be captured jetting upwards from a fissure.

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Comparison of ice images from Iceland, Antarctica, and the icy moon of Jupiter, Europa, show strong similarities. They may indicate liquid water is closer to the surface than originally thought.

Europa has excited everyone since the Galileo spacecraft went into orbit around Jupiter and discovered the potential for a vast salty ocean under the moon’s ice cover. Now researchers from at the University of Texas at Austin, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and elsewhere have announced a model to explain ice features on Europa called chaos terrain. Until now the puzzling icescapes were produced by some unknown geological or mechanical process. Nature has just published the results of researchers who may have discovered a body of liquid water-- the volume of the Great Lakes --locked inside the icy shell...

The Hubble Space Telescope received much needed optical repairs in 2009 that extended the instruments operational life for another decade. One of the first images that was captured after the scientific upgrade was of the Butterfly Nebula 4,000 light years away in the constellation, Scorpius.

 



The Butterfly Nebula by Hubble

(credit: NASA/JPL)



The Hubble photograph is beautiful by any definition. 

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The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (Hi-Rise) continues returning remarkable imagery from the red planet. JPL/NASA have just released a photograph that captures sand dunes that appear like giant Martian millipedes:





(photo credit: JPL/NASA)

I wonder what other “bugs” might be lurking among the dunes? WHB



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