20 Years of Hubble April 24, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, pics, space . Add a comment
Source: Hubblesite.org. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
Today we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hurrah! Although it’s clearly impossible, as I haven’t aged more than, oh, 10 years since then.
The folks at NASA and ESA have released a set of gorgeous new images and videos of the Carina Nebula, a region of active star formation in our Galaxy.
The European Hubble team have also taken the occasion to launch a rather nice looking new website, check it out here.
The same team are organising a competition to find the most artistic, funniest, weirdest, largest and smallest manifestations of Hubble and its images in popular culture – that’s a fun idea. Anyone can join the Flickr group and submit images, and the category winners get some cool prizes. Read more here.
Google joined in the celebration with a lovely doodle for the day:
Beautiful Sun April 22, 2010
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy, pics . Add a commentFirst results from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory are in! In dynamic fashion, NASA have released a bunch of movies on YouTube of the satellite’s first observations, as well as great images. Enjoy.
Beautiful sun with the coronal mass ejection of 8 April 2010.
Prominence
Schiphol: Closed for business April 19, 2010
Posted by sarah in: pics, random . Add a commentClick formega-high-res version on Dumpert… It might be the last day of chemtrail-less skies, let’s enjoy the view.
Volcano Fever April 15, 2010
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The eruption of Eyjafjallajoekull on 21 March (RAGNAR AXELSSON/AFP/Getty Images)
Air travel in Northern Europe is currently being disrupted by the ash cloud spewed out by Icelandic volcano (ok, deep breath:) Eyjafjallajoekull, which started erupting in late March. This is a bit of a pain for anyone with travel plans and a major pain for those actually living near the volcano, but as for once that doesn’t include me, I’m going to delight in the amazing pictures being posted from Iceland of this awesome spectacle. Volcanoes are fantastically photogenic. Never to disappoint, the Big Picture at the Boston Globe posted a great series of images today.
Here’s a few more of my favourites from Flickr:
Pretty solar storms April 7, 2010
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I don’t usually envy people who live in places like Iceland or Northern Canada – cold, dark and desolate places. But I am insanely jealous of them for one reason: the Aurora Borealis. Aurorae light up their skies, when charged particles streaming out from the Sun slam into the Earth’s magnetic field, get accelerated along the field lines towards the poles, creating these luminescent showers of light as they interact with the atoms in the upper atmosphere.
