HOME |
RSS | 
NASA has released a high-definition image of the Earth it calls Blue Marble 2012.
A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.
The original Blue Marble image was taken in 1972 by astronauts aboard Apollo 17. Until today, it was my desktop image. NASA has made the new image available for download in several sizes. Link to story. Link to image. -via Buzzfeed
(Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring)
This is not the first picture you’ve seen of the Helix Nebula, but it’s the best image so far. The Helix Nebula is a cloud of gas that was left when a star expired 700 light years away from us.
This image is in the near-infrared, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), a 4.1 meter telescope in Chile. Equipped with a whopping 67 megapixel camera it can take pictures of large areas of the sky. The Helix nebula fits that bill: it’s close enough to us that it’s nearly the size of the full Moon in the sky.
You are right, this would make an awesome desktop wallpaper! You can download the huge version if you like, and get more details about the Eye of Sauron Helix Nebula at Bad Astronomy. Link
(Image credit: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit)
This photograph of Saturn was taken by the Cassini spacecraft in December. The rings are completely horizontal, and appear as a razor-thin line in the middle. The shadows of those rings are evident on the planet. And that tiny little ball underneath the plane of the rings? That’s Tethys, a moon of Saturn that is over a thousand kilometers wide. Yes, Saturn is immense, but it takes good pictures. Link
Carme Chacón is the spanish minister of defense. This photo of her, probably part of a magazine spread, is a quiz at Photoshop Disasters. Out of almost 8,000 guesses, 46% of the responses say this is a perfectly normal photograph. What do you think? Link -via J-Walk Blog
Update: Mighty Optical Illusions explains this picture. Link -Thanks, algomeysa!
Do you ever find a bird image on your windows? Me, neither, but I don’t have any big picture windows. This eerie image of an owl was left when the bird crashed into Sally Arnold’s window in Kendal, Cumbria, UK.
Experts said the silhouette was left by the bird’s “powder down” – a substance protecting growing feathers.
Mrs Arnold said she could find no sign of the owl, so assumed it had flown off without serious injury.
Link -via J-Walk Blog
(Image credit: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)
Have you ever seen an airplane propeller that looked like this? It’s called the rolling shutter effect {wiki}. A cell phone camera records what it sees by scanning from one side of the frame to the other (or top to bottom), and strange things happen when the scene you are shooting moves faster than the image scanner. Another video illustrates how the slow scanning process of a cell phone camera creates this effect. -via reddit
Photo: Icebridge (NASA)
Antarctica is roughly 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) in size, and that’s with all of its ice. There is a land mass beneath, which looks like this. Twitter user Icebridge made this image to illustrate just how large our most unvisited continent actually is.
Conversely, “it is estimated that at any given time there are (only) 1,000 people ‘living’ in Antarctica, but this varies depending on the season.” (from Answerbag.)
Why would people get excited about this blury picture? The pentacene molecule pictured is commonly used in solar cells and has five benzene rings. There is only .14 namometers between rings, which is one million times smaller than a grain of sand!
Credit for this nifty picture goes to IBM Research Zurich who used an Atomic Force Microscope. This is the first time all of the atoms in a molecule have been imaged.
‘If you think about how a doctor uses an X-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules,’ said IBM researcher Gerhard Meyer.
The team from IBM Research Zurich said the results could have a huge impact of the field of nanotechnology, which seeks to understand and control some of the smallest objects known to mankind.
The AFM uses a sharp metal tip that acts like a tuning fork to measure the tiny forces between the tip and the molecule. This requires great precision as the tip moves within a nanometer of the sample.
‘Above the skeleton of the molecular backbone (of the pentacene) you get a different detuning than above the surface the molecule is lying on,’ Mr Gross said.
This detuning is then measured and converted into an image.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by OddNumber.
