Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day: A six month long exposure of the sun's path across the sky taken with a pinhole camera that was made from an aluminum beer can! Grace and Peace
Category: Astronomy
Catastrophic space storms
Livescience.com: Perfect Space Storm Could be Catastrophic on Earth, Study Concludes Solar activity has just passed the low point in its 11-year cycle, and is expected to peak again around 2012. It is believed that about every 100 years or so, there is a particularly intense solar storm, which could disrupt power supplies on Earth …
Hubble Advent Calendar
It doesn't point to Christ as directly as Advent ought to, but this is still a really cool internet Advent Calendar: Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2008. HT: Internet Monk (The creation does point to Christ; the text of the Advent calendar doesn't) Grace and Peace
Mars climate change recorded in rocks
Patterns in sedimentary layers on Mars could be the result of cyclical climate change caused by regular variations in the tilt of the planet's axis: Climate on Earth is controlled by similar cyclical changes in the Earth's orbit and axial tilt, which leads to alternating glacial and interglacial periods. LiveScience article: Mars Wobbles Created Climate …
Glaciers on Mars, part 2
Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day: Radar Indicates Buried Glaciers on Mars. Explanation: What created this unusual terrain on Mars? The floors of several mid-latitude craters in Hellas Basin on Mars appear unusually grooved, flat, and shallow. New radar images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter bolster an exciting hypothesis: huge glaciers of buried ice. Evidence …
Meteor videos
Videos of a bolide (fireball) which appeared over Alberta and Saskatchewan last night. HT: Scyldings in the Mead-Hall Grace and Peace
Glaciers on Mars?
Scientists have identified features that could be glaciers at mid-latitudes on Mars. If this interpretation is correct, then these could contain a significant amount of water ice at a considerable distance from the poles. LiveScience: Buried Glaciers Found on Mars There is a cirque-like feature in the foreground (the bowl-shaped feature facing the camera at …
Crescent Earth
The first images of the Earth taken from the moon wasn't the one taken by Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968; they were taken by unmanned lunar orbiters which were scouting out potential landing sites for the upcoming Apollo missions. This image was taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966, and has been recently reprocessed by …
Another extrasolar planet image
Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is another image of planets orbiting another star, this time taken with infrared radiation: These three planets are orbiting the star HR 8799. NASA has an ambitious plan to search for Earth-sized, or even Earth-like planets. The hope is to be able to directly image Earth-sized planets (the above …
First image of a planet around another star
From today's Astronomy Picture of the Day: The description from APOD: Explanation: Fomalhaut (sounds like "foam-a-lot") is a bright, young, star, a short 25 light-years from planet Earth in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. In this sharp composite from the Hubble Space Telescope, Fomalhaut's surrounding ring of dusty debris is imaged in detail, …
Continue reading First image of a planet around another star
Saturn, rings, and moons
From today's Astronomy Picture of the Day: Saturn, its rings edge-on, and four moons: Grace and Peace
Enceladus close up
A dramatic image of Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn, taken by the Cassini probe last week: The description from Astronomy Picture of the Day, October 14, 2008: Explanation: What creates the unusual tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus? No one is sure. To help find out, scientists programmed the robotic Cassini spacecraft to dive …
Constipated astronauts?
LiveScience.com: Space Station Toilet Breaks Again.
Rays on Mercury
The NASA MESSENGER probe flew by Mercury for the second time on October 6th. It flew by Mercury earlier this year, will fly by one more time in 2009, and will enter orbit around the planet in 2011. Here's an image taken yesterday: Some parts of Mercury's surface revealed in this have never been photographed …
Solar prominence
Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day: a solar prominence. Watch the movie here. Explanation: On September 29, this magnificent eruptive solar prominence lifted away from the Sun's surface, unfurling into space over the course of several hours. Suspended in twisted magnetic fields, the hot plasma structure is many times the size of planet Earth and …
And the newest official dwarf planet is…
Now there are eight planets, and five dwarf planets. Pluto, Ceres, Eris, and Makemake have been joined by Haumea (how-MAY-ah, like "how may ah help you?"). From LiveScience: Dwarf Planet Named for Hawaiian Goddess. Some day soon, the number of dwarf planets could number in the dozens. May I suggest names that are easier to …
Rare Earth?
Many Christians, including myself, find the arguments expressed in the 2003 book Rare Earth to be a powerful statement of the uniqueness of the Earth in the universe. The thesis of the book, written by two respected University of Washington scientists (Ward, a geologist, and Brownlee, an astronomer) is that the conditions present on the …
X-ray of a cat’s eye
Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day: a combined visible light/x-ray image of the Cat's Eye Nebula. This is a planetary nebula (which has nothing to do with planets). A sun-like star (in the center) is in its dying phase, and is expelling large amounts of extremely hot gas. The purple areas in the center are …
Mercury
Here's another great image from Astronomy Picture of the Day. Mercury is a rather drab planet, without a whole lot of color variation. By using computers to enhance this image taken by the Messenger probe as it flew by Mercury in January, features of various compositions stand out much more clearly. The colors are no …
1006 Supernova Remnant
This was the Astronomy Picture of the Day for July 4th. Here's the description from APOD: A new star, likely the brightest supernova in recorded human history, lit up planet Earth's sky in the year 1006 AD. The expanding debris cloud from the stellar explosion, found in the southerly constellation of Lupus, still puts on …
GeoChristian 