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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)
The semi-annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society was held in Austin recently, and many space images were shared. Dr. Phil Plait was not at the meeting, so the other astronomers sent him pictures, which he put into a gallery at Bad Astronomy. Each has a link to more information about the picture. The image shown here is a high-energy gamma-ray map from NASA’s Fermi telescope. Shiny! Link
(Image credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration)
Between 1968 and 1971, researchers Edwin L. Murphy and Doris H. Calloway published three, count ‘em, three studies on flatulence. The 1969 paper was about astronauts and their farts, specifically a study to determine the level of flatulence produced by difference astronaut space diets. Picturing how the study went brings into focus the many indignities astronauts face for their shot at space travel.
Their paper formed part of a loose trilogy of flatulence-related papers that the pair worked on, which kicked off with 1968′s “The Use of Expired Air to Measure Intestinal Gas Formation” and concluded with 1971′s “Reduction of Intestinal Gas-Forming Properties of Legumes by Traditional and Experimental Food Processing Methods.” Truly, if you needed to know something about farting in the late 1960s or early 1970s, you went to Calloway and Murphy. I would kill to be able to put something like that on a business card.
Link -via the Presurfer
What’s more awesome than move special effects? The real thing! This footage of Earthrise over the moon was taken from the Apollo X mission in 1969. All it needed was the proper soundtrack. -via Boing Boing
Apollo 8 wasn’t just a NASA mission; it was the biggest, coolest, most mind-blowing Christmas special of all time.
The men of Apollo 8 -Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders- had their work cut out for them. They were slated to become the first humans ever to leave the Earth’s orbit, enter lunar orbit, and see the far side of the Moon. But as their launch date approached in December 1968, NASA added an even more terrifying task to the crew’s to-do list: public speaking. The agency wanted the astronauts to host a live broadcast from the spacecraft on Christmas Eve. Worse still, the men were given only one cryptic instruction: “Say something appropriate.”
The astronauts were in a tough spot. When millions of people of different faiths and backgrounds are listening, what exactly constitutes appropriate? To make matters trickier, 1968 had been a grim year for Americans -the Vietnam War was raging, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had both been assassinated. How could the astronauts simultaneously orbit the Moon, introduce millions to outer space on TV, and buoy the American spirit?
The men were stumped. They began enlisting the help of media experts, who were mostly just as clueless as they were. The answer finally came from the wife of Joe Laitin, a former reporter who’d worked as a public affairs officer under five presidents. She made an elegant, simple suggestion: Why not just read from the book of Genesis?
The astronauts jumped at the idea. They reasoned that genesis had a broad enough appeal across religions to add a hint of spirituality without ostracizing non-Christians. Borman, the mission’s commander, had the first ten verses typed onto fireproof paper and tucked the sheet into his flight plan. The astronauts had their script.
The broadcast began with the crew showing some of the first images of Earth ever seen from space. Lovell remarked, “The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there in Earth.”
Viewers were captivated. But as airtime dwindled, Anders revealed that the crew had a special message for all the people of the planet. He started with the familiar “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth…”
He read the first four verses; Lovell read four more. Borman recited the last two and ended the show, saying, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with a good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -all of you on the good Earth.”
In the end, the crew’s effort paid off. Half a billion people tuned in, making it the largest TV event in history at the time, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive; even Walter Cronkite admitted that he had tears in his eyes. Of course, not everyone on Earth was thrilled; one atheist activist sued NASA for interjecting religion into a government project, but the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. Enough nitpicking! The Christmas Eve special won an Emmy, and Time made the crew the magazine’s “Men of the Year” for 1968. The broadcast was truly out of this world.
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The article above, written by Ethan Trex, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
Last week, Phil Plait posted his year-end gallery of the best pictures taken from space. Now you can see his picks for the best pictures of deep space, really deep, like these galaxies that are 300 million light years away.
Because they’re big, sometimes galaxies get close together. Too close. Close enough that their gravity can affect each other, drawing out long arms of gas and stars, distorting each other into weird and beautiful shapes. It happens a lot.
Such is Arp 273, seen here in a Hubble image taken to celebrate the observatory’s 20th anniversary in space. These two big galaxies passed each other in the recent past (like, a few million years ago). Both were probably normal enough before the encounter, but are now twisted and asymmetric.
See the other 23 images at Bad Astronomy. Link
(Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team)
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Dr. Phil Plait selects his favorite space pictures every year, but this year he had a lot to sift through. The top 16 pictures taken from the viewpoint of space include volcanoes, hurricanes, earth formations, the moon, eclipses, and spacecraft, including the final space shuttle missions. Astronaut Ron Garan took this photograph of the moon from the International Space Station. See the rest at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
On July 14, 2015, the spacecraft New Horizons will come within 7,767 miles of (former planet) Pluto. The probe has been traveling for six years already, covering a million kilometers every day, and broke a record on Friday by becoming the closet spacecraft to Pluto ever. The previous record was 1.58 billion kilometers, when Voyager I came its closest to Pluto in 1986.
“We’ve come a long way across the solar system,” says Glen Fountain, New Horizons project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “When we launched [on Jan. 19, 2006] it seemed like our 10-year journey would take forever, but those years have been passing us quickly. We’re almost six years in flight, and it’s just about three years until our encounter begins.”
From New Horizons’ current distance to Pluto – about as far as Earth is from Saturn – Pluto remains just a faint point of light. But by the time New Horizons sails through the Pluto system in mid-2015, the planet and its moons will be so close that the spacecraft’s cameras will spot features as small as a football field.
Get ready for your closeups, Pluto! Link
Michael König edited a sequence of photographs taken from the International Space Station (ISS) between August and October into a time-lapse video of an orbit over the earth. The altitude is approximately 350 kilometers. The music is “Do Dekor” by Jan Jelinek. -Thanks özi!
The International Space Station (ISS) occasionally has to boost itself into a higher altitude to counteract the effects of microgravity drag. Recently, the ISS boosted itself about two miles up, and video cameras caught what happened inside to Commander Mike Fossum and Flight Engineers Satoshi Furukawa and Sergei Volkov. The physics of the process are explained at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link -Thanks, Phil!
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Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Clocks & Timers.
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What does astronomy have to do with Halloween? You’d be surprised!
Halloween is coming, and while people are out trick or treating or enjoying a costume party, the Universe will continue to go about its business.
The business of DEATH, that is. Black holes will continue to tear apart stars and gorge themselves on the tasty, gooey insides; galaxies will erupt with high-energy radiation, blasting out killer rays for hundreds of thousands of light years; giant clouds of gas will collapse, form stars, and promptly have their interiors eaten out from within.
Bad Astronomy Blog has a gallery of creepy astronomy pictures that appear to have sprung from our nightmares, but are actually things that exist in our universe. The picture here is of the flaming skull of Perseus: actually Perseus A, a huge galaxy that blasts out x-rays. Link -Thanks, Phil!
Comments Off Three astronauts touch down after being cryogenically frozen for years during their space flight. This is a choose-your-own-adventure type video, where you select what happens next. Of course, if you are like me, the premise will immediately remind you of a certain Charleton Heston film from the early ’70s. -via the Presurfer
Seven farms across the country are sporting NASA-themed corn mazes this year, as part of NASA’s Space Farm 7 project. It’s an educational project, as these farms host fall festivals open to the public, and a celebration of NASA’s achievements over the past 50 years. You can even vote on your favorite maze, and be entered to win lunch with an astronaut. The maze shown is at Dewberry Farm in Brookshire, Texas. See them all at Universe Today. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: The MAIZE Inc.)
If your kiddos are getting tired of boring old regular playdough colors, then try adding some sparkles to the black dough and they can suddenly play with space playdough. If you want to make your own, Fairy Dust Teaching has a great recipe.
This photograph of a meteor burning up in our atmosphere was taken by astronaut Ron Garan from the International Space Station. Dr. Phil Plait brings us the picture and a little math to explain how many more meteors you could see from the ISS than from the planet’s surface, which leads to the question of meteors hitting the ISS. What are the odds? Find out at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
Four months ago, the SETI Institute announced the end of its search for extraterrestrial signals from space due to lack of funds (previously). But thanks to an infusion of funds from fans, including actress Jodie Foster.
The SETI Institute has been around for decades: It stepped in to help keep the search for alien radio signals active after NASA cut off funding for the quest in 1993. It’s not the only organization doing SETI, but it’s the leader in the field. The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, was launched with $50 million in contributions from software billionaire Paul Allen and others — and if the array ever takes in 350 linked antennas, as it’s designed to do, it would rank among the world’s premier radio-telescope facilities.
But in light of the financial challenges, that’s a huge “if” right now. In fact, until last week it wasn’t certain if or when the ATA would come back online.
After the antenna array was mothballed, the institute and its fans in Silicon Valley set up a Web-based campaign for donations, known as SETIstars. The campaign kicked off in June, and about 45 days later, on Aug. 3, contributions hit the $200,000 mark. That was how much money the SETI Institute said would be needed to bring the antenna array back into operation. (Since then more than $4,000 in additional contributions have come in.)
Among the contributors are Jodie Foster, the actress who played a SETI researcher in the movie “Contact”; science-fiction writer Larry Niven, creator of the “Ringworld” series of novels; and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who flew around the moon in 1968. “It is absolutely irresponsible of the human race not to be searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence,” Anders wrote in a note accompanying his contribution.
Donations are still needed, as well as volunteers to crunch the data. Link -via Engadget
Could the building blocks of life been first delivered to Earth from outer space? That is what some research may be suggesting.
“People have been finding nucleobases in meteorites for about 50 years now, and have been trying to figure out if they are of biological origin or not,” study co-author Jim Cleaves, a chemist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told SPACE.com.
To help confirm if any nucleobases seen in meteorites were of extraterrestrial origin, scientists used the latest scientific analysis techniques on samples from a dozen meteorites — 11 organic-rich meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites and one ureilite, a very rare type of meteorite with a different chemical composition. This was the first time all but two of these meteorites had been analyzed for nucleobases.
The analytical techniques probed the mass and other features of the molecules to identify the presence of extraterrestrial nucleobases and see that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area.
Two of the carbonaceous chondrites contained a diverse array of nucleobases and structurally similar compounds known as nucleobase analogs. Intriguingly, three of these nucleobase analogs are very rare in Earth biology, and were not found in soil and ice samples from the areas near where the meteorites were collected at the parts-per-billion limits of their detection techniques.
“Finding nucleobase compounds not typically found in Earth’s biochemistry strongly supports an extraterrestrial origin,” Cleaves said
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It’s amazing that we are still finding objects in the solar system that are circling the sun. While not a full blown planet, these new objects fall under what is considered a “Dwarf Planet” the status that was bestowed upon Pluto a few years ago.
Using the Warsaw Telescope at Chile’s Las Campanas Observatory, researchers found 14 possible objects in space that could be interesting for further study. Of those objects, 11 turned out to just be oversized chunks of debris, but three of them are big enough to meet the definition of a dwarf planet.
According to the International Astronomical Union, two criteria must be met in order to be a dwarf planet. It must have enough mass that its gravity forces it into a spherical shape, and it must orbit the sun. This second criteria is what eliminates several large moons that, while bigger than a dwarf planet, do not orbit the sun.
The new discoveries are barely big enough to be classified as dwarf planets. They are most likely only around 250 miles wide, which is much smaller than Pluto. The fact that these planets are made of ice is likely what helps them pull themselves into a spherical shape.
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The Soviet Union launched fruit flies into space in 1947. I did not know that until today. Since then, we’ve sent many living species up into space for exploration and experimental purposes, and eight of those were mammals. Can you name them all in two minutes? You don’t have to know their personal names, just what kind of mammal they were, in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I only missed one. Link
You have heard of space chimps, now it’s time for space CHIPS. Could the future of space exploration be to create tiny micro-machine sized space craft? Some researchers feel this will be the more economical form of space flight.
Miniaturization will inevitably mean limitation—less power, fewer instruments, and reduced ability to store and broadcast data. But dust-mote-size spacecraft could do things that no current space probe can do: coast without a parachute onto the plains of Mars or float for weeks in the soupy atmosphere of Titan. They could be mass-produced and launched by the thousands to form vast space-based networks of sensors. And if the probes could be made thin and lightweight enough, alternative forms of propulsion could eventually send them to distant worlds, without the need for rocket fuel.
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Astronomers have discovered a new source of meteor showers, very likely from a comet, that may be coming to an Earth near you. While explaining why we shouldn’t panic at the news, Dr. Phil Plait gives us a great analogy for understanding meteor showers.
If the path of the comet intersects the orbit of the Earth, we plow through that material at the same time every year. Think of it this way: imagine a racetrack, and you are driving around it. Now also imagine a long line of gnats flying across the racetrack. You would drive through that line of bugs at the same point on the racetrack every time, right? OK, replace you with the Earth, the racetrack with the Earth’s orbit, and the bugs with debris shed off a comet. Since the Earth returns to the same point in its orbit every year, if there is cometary debris there, we’ll smack into it at roughly the same calendar day every year.
This loose stuff from the comet burns up in our atmosphere, and we get a meteor shower.
Find out more about the specific new information from the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance, or CAMS. at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
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What kind of aliens would evolve out of a light years wide mass of water vapor? That question could be posed knowing that 12 billion years in the past more water then exists on all of earth was floating out there in space.
Using a pair of sub-millimeter wavelength telescopes, two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest reservoir of water ever found in the Universe. The water-containing cloud was found near quasar APM 08279+5255, some 12 billion light years from Earth; this means that the radiation seen today from this quasar was emitted when the universe was a scant 1.6 billion years old. Calculations have placed the mass of water vapor in the cloud at approximately 100,000 solar masses, or 140 trillion times the mass of all water on the planet Earth.
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Environmental Graffiti has a great collection of pictures of The Orion Nebula for your viewing pleasure. After viewing them all, I can’t help but think they should take over as the Rorschach Test of the new century. I see an astronaut with bird wings, what about you?
A beautiful time-lapse of NASA’s shuttle Discovery (STS131) and the space shuttle Atlantis. The screenshot is from the the third and last part of this 50 seconds long video clip:
The Sun rises behind space shuttle Atlantis in this time-lapse sequence from July 19, 2011, one of the last days of the historic final mission of the shuttle program.
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The following is reprinted from the book Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.
For nearly twenty years after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969, the Soviet Union categorically denied having a manned lunar program of its own. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that we began to learn just how close they came to beating the United States to the moon.
HEARING IS BELIEVING
Not too long after 9:00 PM on the evening of April 11, 1961, a United States government listening post off Alaska picked up the sound of human voices speaking in Russian. That wasn’t unusual; in the early 1960s, the Cold War was at its height, and the listening post had been set up for the purpose of intercepting Soviet communications.
But as the analysts studied the transmission, they realized that one of the voices was coming from space -low-Earth orbit to be exact- and the other voices were transmitting from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan, headquarters of the USSR’s space program. As the entire world would learn in a few hours, the 27-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had just become the first human being to fly in space. As was typical with the Soviet space program, the launch had been kept a secret. The signals from space were probably the first inkling the United States had that it had been beaten in the space race once again.
SECOND PLACE
Gagarin had blasted off at 9:07 AM Moscow time on the morning of April 12th (Moscow was 12 hours ahead of Alaska). He made just one orbit around the Earth before landing back on Soviet soil at 10:55 AM. That’s not much of a space flight by modern standards, but in 1961 it stunned the world. Just as it had when it launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in October 1957, the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it, not the United States, was leading the way into space. The United States wouldn’t be able to send an American astronaut, John Glenn, into orbit until February 1962.
JFK’s QUERY
No one felt the sting of second place more than president John F. Kennedy. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?” the president asked in a memo to his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. “Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?”
JFK dispatched Johnson to NASA to get an answer. Wernher von Braun, head of rocket development, suggested that America had a chance of beating the Soviets in a flight around the Moon, but that it had an even bigger chance at being the first country to land a man on the Moon’s surface. JFK weighed the options, and on May 25, 1961, made his famous speech committing the United States to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.
NO CONTEST?
On July 20, 1969, the United States won the race to the Moon when astronaut Neil A. Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on lunar soil. But had the Soviets contemplated trying to beat the United States to the Moon? For more than two decades after the Moon landing, the official answer was a definitive, categorical “Nyet!” The Soviets claimed they skipped the Moon race in favor of the more practical challenge of putting a space station into Earth’s orbit. And they succeeded- between 1971 and 1986, they launched seven different space stations into orbit.
The Soviets stuck to their we-didn’t-shoot-for-the-Moon story until August 18, 1989, when the government’s official newspaper, Izvestiya, admitted that the USSR had indeed tried to send a cosmonaut to the Moon, in what was one of the most closely guarded secret programs of the Cold War. They had actually come pretty close to succeeding: Were it not for one large technical challenge that proved insurmountable, the Soviet Union might well have won the race.
more …
The Sagan Series put together an inspiring video in honor of the final space shuttle flight, narrated by Carl Sagan. You can see the sources for all the video clips at the YouTube page. -via reddit
In honor of the final mission of the space shuttle program, I Can Has Cheezburger posted a cat’s retrospective of NASA history. You’ll find moar pictures and funny videos of kittehs and their dreams of space exploration. Link
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With the American Space Shuttle program winding up this year the European Space Agency is unveiling its plans for a reusable spacecraft. The agency is going to start building the unmanned Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle and should be ready for flight in 2013.
IXV is quite different from the NASA shuttle, using a lifting body design instead of wings, with some flaps and thrusters to provide control. Another change is that it lifts off for space on the nose of a small Vega rocket, and splashes down in the Pacific Ocean instead of landing on a runway. In that way it more closely resembles America’s initial forays into space, such as the splash-down orbiter designs of the Mercury Program.
