APOD: Dreamy Mountainscape

On APOD today….

A gorgeous view of the crescent Moon and Venus over a snowy Alpine valley. This picture was taken in eastern Switzerland – just a few hours South from here in Heidelberg. The caption gives more details:

Sometimes a morning sky can be a combination of serene and surreal. Such a sky perhaps existed before sunrise this past Sunday as viewed from a snowy slope in eastern Switzerland. Quiet clouds blanket the above scene, lit from beneath by lights from the village of Trübbach. A snow covered mountain, Mittlerspitz, poses dramatically on the upper left, hovering over the small town of Balzers, Liechtenstein far below. Peaks from the Alps can be seen across the far right, just below the freshly rising Sun. Visible on the upper right are the crescent Moon and the bright planet Venus. Venus will remain in the morning sky all month, although it will likely not be found in such a photogenic setting.

Image credit: David Kaplan

Volcano Fever

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:

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APOD: Cold dust, Hot image

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is this stunning image of a section of the Galaxy as seen at far-infrared wavelengths. The high-resolution parts come from the recently launched Planck satellite, the rest from the older infrared satellite IRAS. The bright material shown in the image is very cold gas and dust, whose radiation peaks at these long infrared wavelengths.

Image: ESA, Planck HFI Consortium, IRAS

APOD: Supernova remnant E0102-72

Beautiful picture of a supernova remnant, featured on APOD a couple of days ago. It’s located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of our Galaxy’s closest neighbours, at a distance of around 190,000 lightyears.

The image is a composite of X-ray and optical observations.

Credit: X-ray – NASA / CXC / MIT / D.Dewey et al., NASA / CXC / SAO / J.DePasquale; Optical – NASA / STScI

APOD: Earth's changing distance to the Sun

Today, the 4th of July, the Earth’s elliptical orbit takes our planet to its farthest point from the Sun (‘aphelion‘). This composite image demonstrates nicely how this causes the Sun to appear just a tad smaller in the sky compared with the perihelion size, at the closest approach.

Image credit: E.L. Cervigon