Magazine Posts

Hawksbill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), Ras Muhammad National Park, Egypt.

Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Closed flower of an Oenothera stricta 'Sulphurea' (Night bloomer) Focus stack of 54 photos.

Dominicus Johannes Bergsma, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This close-up from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera shows weathered craters and windblown deposits in southern Acidalia Planitia. A striking shade of blue in standard HiRISE image colors, to the human eye the area would probably look grey or a little reddish. But human eyes have not gazed across this terrain, unless you count the eyes of NASA astronauts in the sci-fi novel, "The Martian," by Andy Weir. The novel chronicles the adventures of Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded at the fictional Mars mission Ares 3 landing site, corresponding to the coordinates of this cropped HiRISE frame. For scale, Watney's 6-meter-diameter habitat at the site would be about 1/10th the diameter of the large crater. Of course, the Ares 3 landing coordinates are only about 800 kilometers north of the (real life) Carl Sagan Memorial Station, the 1997 Pathfinder landing site.

Ore bunker in the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse's large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. Assembled from 51 exposures recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope in the 20th and 21st centuries, with additional data from ground based telescopes, this mosaic spans about 40,000 light-years across the central region of M101 in one of the highest definition spiral galaxy portraits ever released from Hubble. The sharp image shows stunning features of the galaxy's face-on disk of stars and dust along with background galaxies, some visible right through M101 itself. Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 25 million light-years away.

Spanish-American biophysicist Eva Nogales in 2023. Today is her birthday.

Cmichel67, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This shadowy landscape of majestic mountains and icy plains stretches toward the horizon on a small, distant world. It was captured from a range of about 18,000 kilometers when New Horizons looked back toward Pluto, 15 minutes after the spacecraft's closest approach on July 14, 2015. The dramatic, low-angle, near-twilight scene follows rugged mountains formally known as Norgay Montes from foreground left, and Hillary Montes along the horizon, giving way to smooth Sputnik Planum at right. Layers of Pluto's tenuous atmosphere are also revealed in the backlit view. With a strangely familiar appearance, the frigid terrain likely includes ices of nitrogen and carbon monoxide with water-ice mountains rising up to 3,500 meters (11,000 feet). That's comparable in height to the majestic mountains of planet Earth. The Plutonian landscape is 380 kilometers (230 miles) across.

Green garden lizard (Calotes calotes). A juvenile has climbed a flowering bush, hoping to catch the female common jezebel butterfly (Delias eucharis) in the Sinharaja Forest, Viharahena, Sri Lanka.

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This pretty nebula lies some 1,500 light-years away, its shape and color in this telescopic view reminiscent of a robin's egg. The cosmic cloud spans about 3 light-years, nestled securely within the boundaries of the southern constellation of the Furnace (Fornax). Recognized as a planetary nebula, egg-shaped NGC 1360 doesn't represent a beginning, though. Instead, it corresponds to a brief and final phase in the evolution of an aging star. In fact, visible at the center of the nebula, the central star of NGC 1360 is known to be a binary star system likely consisting of two evolved white dwarf stars, less massive but much hotter than the Sun. Their intense and otherwise invisible ultraviolet radiation has stripped away electrons from the atoms in their mutually surrounding gaseous shroud. The blue-green hue inside of NGC 1360 seen here is the strong emission produced as electrons recombine with doubly ionized oxygen atoms. Celestial Surprise: What picture did APOD feature on your birthday? (post 1995)

Photo by Andrea Iorio, Vikas Chander & ShaRA Team

50th International Dixieland Festival Dresden: Allotria Jazz Band on the open-air stage 'Junge Garde', trombone. The 53rd festival is taking place this week.

Steffen Prößdorf, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What does our Milky Way Galaxy look like from the top? Because we are on the inside, humanity can’t get an actual picture. Recently, however, just such a map has been made using location data for over a billion stars from ESA’s Gaia mission. The resulting featured illustration shows that just like many other spiral galaxies, our Milky Way has distinct spiral arms. Our Sun and most of the bright stars we see at night are in just one arm: Orion. Gaia data bolsters previous indications that our Milky Way has more than two spiral arms. Our Galaxy's center sports a prominent bar. The colors of our Galaxy's thin disk derive mostly from dark dust, bright blue stars, and red emission nebula. Although data analysis is ongoing, Gaia was deactivated in March after a succession mission. Jigsaw Challenge: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) close up.

Tomascastelazo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.