Hinode Views the 2012 Venus Transit
On June 5, 2012, Hinode space telescope captured this stunning view of the transit of Venus — the last instance of this rare phenomenon until 2117. Hinode is a joint JAXA/NASA mission to study the connections of the sun’s surface magnetism, primarily in and around sunspots.
I had been too overwhelmed by work on Tuesday to even blog about the once-in-a-lifetime event, much less go outside to try and see for myself, but thank you modern technology, I get to enjoy all the details at my leisure. :D
ISS long exposure photography
These images are part of a series photographed by NASA astronaut and Expedition 31 flight engineer Don Pettit using a mounted camera on the International Space Station. He used a special long exposure technique to create star trails as well as city light trails. Lightning storms are also featured prominently in the images.
ISS long exposure photography
These images are part of a series photographed by NASA astronaut and Expedition 31 flight engineer Don Pettit using a mounted camera on the International Space Station. He used a special long exposure technique to create star trails as well as city light trails. Lightning storms are also featured prominently in the images.
Holy star-trails, Spaceman! O.O
Photography In Space - How It’s Done
Alan Poindexter had the honor of commanding the shuttle Discovery on her final mission, STS-131. NASA takes space photography very seriously, and trains their astronauts to capture informative and inspiring images while in orbit.
If you’ve ever wondered about some the techniques and technology behind capturing those great shuttle and ISS photos, check out Captain Poindexter’s great behind-the-lens post. Little-known fact: If you become an astronaut you apparently get access to prototype Nikon cameras … so study that science, you budding photographers!
When done right, this space photography can be truly inspiring. If you really want to dig in to some astronaut photography, you can’t miss the Crew Earth Observations collection. Truly epic photos and videos (including this eye-popping distorted moonset from the ISS).
(via Luminous-Landscape.com, images copyright NASA)
Hey, now you get to do your own star porn! Well … if you had the right vantage point. :D
Outer Space. The View From Cassini and Voyager
Jaw ————> Floor.
If Rocky Balboa was an aspiring astronomer, this is what he would watch every morning to get pumped up instead of running up that damned staircase.
Sander van den Berg has assembled a plethora of real images, converted to black and white video, from the Cassini and Voyager missions to create this simple, awe-inspiring and sometimes haunting tour through near outer space.
I know I’ve been heavy on the space stuff lately, but with videos like these sending my brain flying out the back of my head how can I not post it?!?!? :)
(by Sander van den Berg)
Wow. Just … wow.
I’ve been using the “pure awesome” tag a lot lately, but … there really is that much pure awesome lately! And this … I have no words for this. How perfect and pure and beautiful and lonely it is out there, and what mankind has managed to accomplish in order to bring these images back … just amazing.
Epic Time-Lapse Escape: The Stars From Orbit
We’ve seen plenty of GIFs and time-lapses of stars and #starporn, but none precisely like this. It seems like Earth is often the star, instead of the stars themselves.
Nice to see that change. Full screen, HD, enjoy :)
I could’ve done without the lounge music, but there’s some amazingly fresh perspectives here.
Immigration form filled out by Apollo 11 astronauts upon their return from Moon.
“Do you have anything to declare?”
“Why yes, yes I do. From up there, you all look like ants.”
O man, so cool! :D
Super-fun drawing tool creates and colors your very own nebula art. Now your #spaceporn can be personalized! Go play, show me what you can come up with.
Aw man, this is pretty nifty. :D I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing in it, but I’ll definitely be playing with it a bit more in the future.
This stunning 360 degree panorama of the night sky was stitched together from 37,000 images by a first-time astrophotographer.
I was gonna blog about that awesome record-setting, super-sized panoramic sky photo going around ourdashboards today, but I had this nagging sense of deja vu. And sure enough, I found it in my archives from 10 months ago.
But seriously, go enjoy it again. It’s so fantastic and informative. The guy quit his job, traveled 60,000 miles and he had never done anything like this before.
AMAZING! The equipment, the results, the story behind it - everything.
Make sure you go to the interactive, zoomable map (linked from the article page) and tell it to draw in all the constellations. Very cool!
Venus-Moon occultation with Jupiter above. Taken on December 30, 2010.
O man the SHINE. Lovely! \o/
La Silla Star Trails North and South
Fix your camera to a tripod and you can record graceful trails traced by the stars as planet Earth rotates on its axis. If the tripod is set up at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, high in the Atacama desert of Chile, your star trails would look something like this.
Spanning about 4 hours on the night of January 24, the image is actually a composite of 250 consecutive 1-minute exposures, looking toward the north. The North Celestial Pole, at the center of the star trail arcs, is just below the horizon in this southern hemisphere perspective.
In the foreground, the polished 15-meter diameter dish antenna of the Swedish-ESO Submillimeter Telescope (now decommissioned) shows star trails toward the south by reflection. Sweeping around the South Celestial Pole, the distorted arcs of those stars appear underneath the southern horizon in the focusing dish’s inverted view.
Right of the dish is the dome of the observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope, home to the planet hunting HARPS spectrograph.
There are a bajillion star-trails photographs out there, but I love the reflected star-trails in the dish!
Solar eclipse over the USA
On Sunday, May 20th, the sun is going to turn into a ring of fire. It’s an annular solar eclipse—the first one in the USA in almost 18 years.
An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly in front of the sun, but the lunar disk is not quite wide enough to cover the entire star. At maximum, the Moon forms a “black hole” in the center of the sun.
The “path of annularity” is a strip about 300 km wide and thousands of km long. It stretches from China and Japan, across the Pacific Ocean, to the middle of North America. In the United States, the afternoon sun will become a luminous ring in places such as Medford, Oregon; Chico, California; Reno, Nevada; St. George, Utah; Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Lubbock, Texas.
Outside of this relatively narrow zone, the eclipse will be partial. Observers almost everywhere west of the Mississippi will see a crescent-shaped sun as the Moon passes by off-center.
One of the unique things about this eclipse for watchers in the USA is that the Sun will still be in deep partial eclipse at sunset, making for some great photographic opportunities. In western Texas around Lubbock, the sun actually sets during the annular phase.
For the US photographers! I know what I’ll be looking forward to come May 20! :D
The Earth by night and the Orion constellation
Another astonishing shot from ESA astronaut, Andre Kuipers, onboard the International Space Station. The Orion constellation can be seen rising in the centre of this image, above the Earth at night.
I grew up in suburbia, which meant that most stars are drowned out, but I have always, ALWAYS been able to locate Orion’s Belt - even more consistently than the Big Dipper. This is a perspective on a constellation that I have been able to look up and find for over two decades that I had never thought to see!
The Milky Way and Storms over Africa
This video was taken by the crew of Expedition 30 on board the International Space Station. The sequence of shots was taken December 29, 2011 from 20:55:05 to 21:14:09 GMT, on a pass from over central Africa, near southeast Niger, to the South Indian Ocean, southeast of Madagascar.
The complete pass is over southern Africa to the ocean, focusing on the lightning flashes from local storms and the Milky Way rising over the horizon. The Milky Way can be spotted as a hazy band of white light at the beginning of the video. The pass continues southeast toward the Mozambique Channel and Madagascar.
The Lovejoy Comet can be seen very faintly near the Milky Way. The pass ends as the sun is rising over the dark ocean.
A new version that includes the Milky Way! \o/
