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Photo shared by Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American

Drought is shrinking one of the country’s largest reservoirs, revealing a hidden Eden. Read more

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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

These three panels feature the Solar System's ruling gas giant Jupiter on August 15 as seen from Cebu City, Phillipines, planet Earth. On that date the well-timed telescopic views detail some remarkable performances, transits and mutual events, by Jupiter's Galilean moons. In the top panel, Io is just disappearing into Jupiter's shadow at the far right, but the three other large Jovian moons appear against the planet's banded disk. Brighter Europa and darker Ganymede are at the far left, also casting their two shadows on the gas giant's cloud tops. Callisto is below and right near the planet's edge, the three moons in a triple transit across the face of Jupiter. Moving to the middle panel, shadows of Europa and Ganymede are still visible near center but Ganymede has occulted or passed in front of Europa. The bottom panel captures a rare view of Jovian moons in eclipse while transiting Jupiter, Ganymede's shadow falling on Europa itself. From planet Earth's perspective, similar mutual events, when Galilean moons occult and eclipse each other, can be seen every six years or so when Jupiter is near its own equinox.

Photo by Christopher Go

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Frames from a camera that spent three moonless nights under the stars create this composite night skyscape. They were recorded during August 11-13 while planet Earth was sweeping through the dusty trail of comet Swift-Tuttle. One long exposure, untracked for the foreground, and the many star tracking captures of Perseid shower meteors were taken from the village of Magyaregres, Hungary. Each aligned against the background stars, the meteor trails all point back to the annual shower's radiant in the constellation Perseus heroically standing above this rural horizon. Of course the comet dust particles are traveling along trajectories parallel to each other. The radiant effect is due only to perspective, as the parallel tracks appear to converge in the distance against the starry sky. Notable APOD Image Submissions: Perseid Meteor Shower 2021

Photo by Balint Lengyel

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Plowing through Earth's atmosphere at 60 kilometers per second, this bright perseid meteor streaks along a starry Milky Way. Captured in dark Portugal skies on August 12, it moves right to left through the frame. Its colorful trail starts near Deneb (alpha Cygni) and ends near Altair (alpha Aquilae), stars of the northern summer triangle. In fact this perseid meteor very briefly outshines both, two of the brightest stars in planet Earth's night. The trail's initial greenish glow is typical of the bright perseid shower meteors. The grains of cosmic sand, swept up dust from periodic comet Swift-Tuttle, are moving fast enough to excite the characteristic green emission of atomic oxygen at altitudes of 100 kilometers or so before vaporizing in an incandescent flash. Notable APOD Image Submissions: Perseid Meteor Shower 2021

Photo by Miguel Claro

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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The Ring Nebula (M57), is more complicated than it appears through a small telescope. The easily visible central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkably deep exposure - a collaborative effort combining data from three different large telescopes - explores the looping filaments of glowing gas extending much farther from the nebula's central star. This composite image includes red light emitted by hydrogen as well as visible and infrared light. The Ring Nebula is an elongated planetary nebula, a type of nebula created when a Sun-like star evolves to throw off its outer atmosphere to become a white dwarf star. The Ring Nebula is about 2,500 light-years away toward the musical constellation Lyra. Amateur Astronomers: Please take the Night Sky Network's Survey

Photo by Robert Gendler

Photo shared by Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

cept for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) is probably the most famous celestial circle. Its classic appearance is understood to be due to our own perspective, though. The recent mapping of the expanding nebula's 3-D structure, based in part on this clear Hubble image,indicates that the nebula is a relatively dense, donut-like ring wrapped around the middle of a (American) football-shaped cloud of glowing gas. The view from planet Earth looks down the long axis of the football, face-on to the ring. Of course, in this well-studied example of a planetary nebula, the glowing material does not come from planets. Instead, the gaseous shroud represents outer layers expelled from the dying, once sun-like star, now a tiny pinprick of light seen at the nebula's center. Intense ultraviolet light from the hot central star ionizes atoms in the gas. The Ring Nebula is about one light-year across and 2,500 light-years away. Share the Sky: NASA Open API for APOD

 Over 100 years ago, long before color-sensitive film was invented, the Russian photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky created high quality photos took by taking 3 individual black and white photos, each with a filter (red, blue and green)  in full color. 
This self-portrait on the Karolitskhali River, ca. 1910, shows Prokudin-Gorskii in suit and hat, seated on a rock beside the Karolitskhali River, in the Caucasus Mountains near the seaport of Batumi on the eastern coast of the Black Sea.

Sergei Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1863–1944) Was a chemist and photographer of the Russian Empire. He is best known for his pioneering work in color photography and his effort to document early 20th-century Russia.Around 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances that had been made in color photography to document the Russian Empire. His ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire. He set out to do this around 1909 through 1915 with a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy. The result was a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian Revolution.
While some of his negatives were lost, the majority ended up in the U.S. Library of Congress after his death. Starting in 2000, the negatives were digitized and the color triples for each subject digitally combined to produce hundreds of high-quality color images of Russia and its neighbors from over a century ago.

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