Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

If you could stand on Titan -- what would you see? The featured color view from Titan gazes across an unfamiliar and distant landscape on Saturn's largest moon. The scene was recorded by ESA's Huygens probe in 2005 after a 2.5-hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane. Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level, rocks strewn about the scene could well be composed of water and hydrocarbons frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of negative 179 degrees C. The large light-toned rock below and left of center is only about 15 centimeters across and lies 85 centimeters away. The saucer-shaped spacecraft is believed to have penetrated about 15 centimeters into a place on Titan's surface that had the consistency of wet sand or clay. Huygen's batteries enabled the probe to take and transmit data for more than 90 minutes after landing. Titan's bizarre chemical environment may bear similarities to planet Earth's before life evolved.

Vineyard worker at Guadalupe Valley, Baja California, Mexico, where 95% of Mexican wines are produced.

Tomas Castelazo, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This is not a screen from a video game. Nestled below the tree-line, the small mountain church does look like it might be hiding from Moon though. In the well-composed telephoto snapshot, taken on November 23, the church walls are partly reflecting light from terrestrial flood lights. Of course, the Moon is reflecting light from the Sun. At any given time the Sun illuminates fully half of the Moon's surface, also known as the lunar dayside, but on that night only a sliver of its sunlit surface was visible. About three days after New Moon, the Moon was in a waxing crescent phase. The single exposure was captured shortly after sunset in skies near Danta di Cadore, northern Italy, planet Earth.

Photo by Giorgia Hofer

The Sabha Mandap of the Sun Temple, Modhera, India.

Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a about 25 light-years across, a cosmic bubble blown by winds from its central, massive star. This deep telescopic image includes narrowband image data, to isolate light from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms produce the blue-green hue that seems to enshroud the nebula's detailed folds and filaments. Visible within the nebula, NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years. In fact, the Crescent Nebula's complex structures are likely the result of this strong wind interacting with material ejected in an earlier phase. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life, this star should ultimately go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion. Found in the nebula rich constellation Cygnus, NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years away.

Photo by Greg Bass

Port and lighthouse overnight storm with lightning in Port-la-Nouvelle in the Aude department in southern France.

Maxime Raynal from France, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is a dominant member of a small galaxy group a mere 60 million light-years away toward the aquatically intimidating constellation Cetus. Seen edge-on, the island universe spans over 100,000 light-years, a little larger than our own Milky Way galaxy. The colorful, spiky stars decorating this cosmic portrait of NGC 1055 are in the foreground, well within the Milky Way. But telltale pinkish star forming regions and young blue star clusters are scattered through winding dust lanes along the distant galaxy's thin disk. With a smattering of even more distant background galaxies, the deep image also reveals a boxy halo that extends far above and below the central bulge and disk of NGC 1055. The halo itself is laced with faint, narrow structures, and could represent the mixed and spread out debris from a satellite galaxy disrupted by the larger spiral some 10 billion years ago.

Photo by John Hayes

A shattered ceiling light fixture on a bamboo floor mat. The lamp was a semi flush mounted light fixture with a shallow glass dome of clear glass coated with white glass on the inside. In the fixture are LED light bulbs with E27 Edison screw. The hook in the ceiling suddenly came lose one day and the lamp crashed to the floor in an apartment in Brastad, Lysekil Municipality, Sweden. Photographed in natural light from the window. Focus stacked from 10 photos.

W.carter, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.