Contributor Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Seen as a seagull and a duck, these nebulae are not the only cosmic clouds to evoke images of flight. But both are winging their way across this broad celestial landscape, spanning almost 7 degrees across planet Earth's night sky toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major). The expansive Seagull (top center) is itself composed of two major cataloged emission nebulas. Brighter NGC 2327 forms the head with the more diffuse IC 2177 as the wings and body. Impressively, the Seagull's wingspan would correspond to about 250 light-years at the nebula's estimated distance of 3,800 light-years. At the lower right, the Duck appears much more compact and would span only about 50 light-years given its 15,000 light-year distance estimate. Blown by energetic winds from an extremely massive, hot star near its center, the Duck nebula is cataloged as NGC 2359. Of course, the Duck's thick body and winged appendages also lend it the slightly more dramatic popular moniker, Thor's Helmet. Portal Universe: Random APOD Generator

Photo by Nicolas Martino, Adrien Soto, Louis Leroux & Yann Sainty

Elephant (Loxodonta africana) in Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga, South Africa.

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

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What's happened to the sky? Last Monday, the photogenic launch plume from a SpaceX rocket launch created quite a spectacle over parts of southern California and Arizona. Looking at times like a giant space fish, the impressive rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California, was so bright because it was backlit by the setting Sun. The Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered to low Earth orbit 23 Starlink communications satellites. The plume from the first stage is seen on the right, while the soaring upper stage rocket is seen at the apex of the plume toward the left. Venus appears at the top of the frame, while a bright streetlight shines on the far right. The featured image was captured toward the west after sunset from near Phoenix, Arizona.

Photo by Martin LaMontagne

Water reflection of sunset with gray and orange clouds over the Xe Don River, and three boats moored to the bank in Pakse, Laos.

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

Immanuel Kant - born Emanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics . He is called by many, the "father of modern philosophy. His best known work is the Critique of Pure Reason, is often cited as the most significant writings of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy More

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Here comes Jupiter. NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its highly elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. The featured video is from perijove 11 in early 2018, the eleventh time Juno passed near Jupiter since it arrived in mid-2016. This time-lapse, color-enhanced movie covers about four hours and morphs between 36 JunoCam images. The video begins with Jupiter rising as Juno approaches from the north. As Juno reaches its closest view -- from about 3,500 kilometers over Jupiter's cloud tops -- the spacecraft captures the great planet in tremendous detail. Juno passes light zones and dark belts of clouds that circle the planet, as well as numerous swirling circular storms, many of which are larger than hurricanes on Earth. After the perijove, Jupiter recedes into the distance, then displaying the unusual clouds that appear over Jupiter's south. To get desired science data, Juno swoops so close to Jupiter that its instruments are exposed to very high levels of radiation.

Graeme Allwright in concert at the 2012 Festival de Cornouaille. He died on this day in 2020.

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

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Three suns seem to hug the horizon in this otherworldly winterscape. But the evocative scene was captured during a February 3rd snowmobile exploration of the mountainous region around Abisko National Park, northern Sweden, planet Earth. The two bright spots on either side of Earth's Sun are parhelia (singular parhelion), also known as mock suns or sun dogs. The parhelia are caused by hexagonal ice crystals suspended in the hazy atmosphere that reflect and refract sunlight. Commonly seen in winter and at high latitudes, the bright parhelia lie along the visible 22 degree ice halo of the Sun.

Photo by planet Earth