NASA’s 19-Gigapixel Filmstrip of the Earth
via jtotheizzoe:
With the newest generation of Landsat satellites up and snappin’, in orbit over 400 miles above us, NASA continues a mission over a generation in the making: Observing a beautiful and changing planet from above.
This video features 56 photos stitched together in a continuous 19-gigapixel image that stretches from Russia to South Africa. Dig in to the interactive “Long Swath” at NASA’s Earth Observatory. This image covers almost 1.7 million square kilometers, but it would take over 300 of them to paint a picture of all of Earth’s surface.
Bonus: Combine this with Google’s Earth Engine to gain a perspective on our planet once reseved for time-traveling astronauts.
(via The Atlantic)
It’s Okay To Be Smart - Space Sounds
via jtotheizzoe:
There is no sound in space.
In the near-vacuum of space, there is nothing to transmit the physical waves that we need to perceive sound. But that doesn’t mean we can’t MAKE sound from space.
This week, I channeled some inner Sagan, got a bit artsy, and I’m happy to feature several brilliant folks using scientific data to create “space sonification” projects. From the longest palindrome ever created to a chorus made from Earth’s magnetic field, these pieces truly lie at the intersection of art and science. More than just art, they allow us to perceive patterns in complex data in a completely new way. Some of them are actually used as part of space research projects!
Perhaps it answers the question: If the universe had a voice, what song would it sing?
For those of you who follow the blog in addition to the YouTube channel, you’ll get some special treats this week when I feature even more space sonification examples that we couldn’t fit into this episode!
FULL Versions of the pieces featured in this week’s video:
Robert Alexander - Transit of Venus
Daniel Starr-Tambor - “Mandala” (this piece is the longest palndrome ever created, at 62 viginitillion notes!!)
ChemMatters: How NASA keeps tabs on air pollution from space
What flies around the world 14 times a day and can detect global air pollution levels from space? It’s NASA’s Aura satellite, whose mission is to understand the changing chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere. This remarkable satellite can measure air quality across the entire planet in just 24 hours.
Find out more about Aura, how smog is formed, the future of Earth’s ozone hole and much more in our latest episode of ChemMatters.
Produced by the American Chemical Society
with support from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
via Bytesize Science.
Finding Exoplanets with Microlensing; WFIRST Mission
In addition to the transit and radial velocity methods for finding exoplanets, there is a relatively new technique being used by wide field telescopes: microlensing.
Today Alberto Conti and I talked with Dr. Scott Gaudi from The Ohio State University about how microlensing is used to find extra solar planets. He is also a member of the WFIRST Science Team and he and Jason Kalirai give us an introduction to that mission.
Duration: 55:39
via Tony Darnell.
Hot Young Stars Huddle In A Colorful Cosmic Pre-School
A small, tight cloud about 5000 light years from Earth called NGC 6559 is home to glowing red hydrogen, scattered blue gas from recently born stars and dark dusty regions.
Credit: ESO , Original Music by Mark Peterson, Loch Ness Productions
via Video From Space.
Explosion on the Moon!
via jtotheizzoe:
Pock-marked with craters and splotched with long-cold beds of dark lava, our moon holds thousands of footprints from its violent past. But we don’t really think of it having a violent present.
Well, it still gets its fair share of action. On March 17, 2013, NASA astronomers captured video of a meteorite striking the moon. It made an explosion bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, like a temporary star drawn on the lunar surface. It turns out that these collisions are not that rare.
Most of the moon’s many meteor marks date from a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. That, combined with a magma-riffic adolescence gave the moon the special look we know today. Of course, none of that is as violent as the moon’s birth.
Anyway, make sure to watch that video above and see the meteor strike live. You’ll never look at the moon the same way again.
Astronomy Cast Ep. 298: Space Stations, Part 3 International Space Station
Join Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay for your weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos. This week is the third installment of the “space station” series and is all about the International Space Station.
Duration: 01:07:35
via Astrosphere Vids.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: How the Moon May Have Formed
How was the Moon formed, and why doesn’t it have more iron or heavy metals? Neil deGrasse Tyson explains to Eugene Mirman how a collision with a Mars-sized object during the formation of the Earth may have led to the creation of the Moon. Enjoy this “Behind the Scenes video” from StarTalk Radio.
via Star Talk Radio.
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Enormous Galactic Halo Seen Around Colliding Galaxies
The Chandra X-ray Telescope has spied a gas cloud with the mass of ~10 billion Suns and spans ~300,00O light years. The system called NGC 6240 is the scene of two milky way-sized galaxies merging.
Credit: NASA/CXC/J. DePasquale
via Video From Space.
The Sun is getting feisty
via jtotheizzoe:
The star at the heart of our solar system has released three X-class solar flares (the most powerful class of flares) and their associated waves of charged particles in the past 24 hours. Luckily for us, they have been pointed away from Earth, as seen in the upper left of the video above from NASA.
NASA’s SDO and SOHO satellites captured the explosive magnetic arcs and bursts of plasma in stunning form in the video, which is full-screen worthy. By viewing the sun through different wavelength filters (the colored angstrom filters you see above) we can zoom in on activity happening at different temperatures and involving different ionized elements from hydrogen to iron.
This happens as the sun ramps up for its predicted 11-year solar maximum later in 2013. Wear your sun(plasma)block!
Don’t you wish there was sound in space so you could hear these things? Sigh.
Learning Space - Space Apps
This week we talk with Jonathan Roberts about the Space App Hackathon and his winning entry from the New York region. We go on to explore Hackathons in general and his wonderfully geeky side job.
Space App Challenge: http://spaceappschallenge.org/
SpaceCal App: http://spacecalnyc.com/
Intro video for SpaceCalNYC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ACQqKDbQMQ
(Voting for the international challenge starts this week!)
NYC Big Apps: http://nycbigapps.com/
“Brian Cox Builds a Cloud Chamber” (via Guido Bibra): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWxfliNAI3U
Lands of Ice and Fire: http://www.amazon.com/The-Lands-Fire-Game-Thrones/dp/0345538544Jon’s bio:
“I’m a postdoc physicist at NYU, researching the origin of cosmic rays. I used to make predictions for how we would find dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider when I was a postdoc over in Warsaw. I’ve been doing more and more data visualisation recently after getting frustrated with how hard it is to get a feeling for lots of science data.
I went along to the NASA space apps challenge and was amazed by the number of people willing to put their time in to create tools to open up access to science results. I spent 36 hours coding with people I’d only just met, had a great time, and created a functioning tool that’s useful for scientists and the public. I was pretty amazed.
We created a site that aggregates data on what telescopes are looking at, and when they’re looking. The site plots the observations on the sky so you can see not only where the telescope is looking, but click to find out more, and explore historical images of the target - whether it’s a distant galaxy or a supernova remnant in our own Milky Way. You can filter by date, or by target, and you can export the data as plain text - making it useful for scientists as well as the public. And there’s a twitter account that will tweet to you when telescopes turn to look at new targets, so you can get tweets from space!
Oh, and I also draw maps professionally…”
Duration: 51:34
via Nicole Gugliucci.
Exoplanet Diversity and Habitability
Lots of great discussion today! This week there was a special exoplanet edition of Science magazine and Dr. Sara Seager had an article published in it.
Dr. Seager presents a new, expanded definition of planetary habitable zones.
Here is a link to her paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6132/577.abstract?sid=f1b791f3-9a70-4d2d-912e-09f40efa1deb
Duration: 01:01:06
via Tony Darnell.
Saturn Hurricane Movie
This movie, made from images obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, shows the clouds of a hurricane-like storm, which circulate around the north pole of Saturn out to 88.5 degrees north latitude.
via JPL news.
Mysterious Hurricane at Saturn’s North Pole
Narrated video about a hurricane-like storm seen at Saturn’s north pole by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
via JPL news.
Weekly Space Hangout - 10 May 2013
Join our crew of space journalists and aficionados as we round up this week’s space news. We’ll have rocket launches, images of a solar eclipse, weird astrophysics and more! Hosted by Fraser Cain, produced by Nicole Gugliucci, and joined this week by David Dickinson, Nancy Atkinson, and Pamela Gay.
Duration: 44:44
via Nicole Gugliucci.
NASA’s Solar Fleet: Capturing the Awesome
via jtotheizzoe:
Here’s a fantastic video showing a May 1, 2013 solar eruption from four different NASA solar observation spacecraft. You can appreciate the different perspectives and filters that are offered by SDO, SOHO and the STEREO twins, and why the big picture is always more informative than any alone.
(More at Bad Astronomy)
