You’ve seen time-lapse videos of the night sky here before, but this one is particularly beautiful, awe-inspiring, and soothing. It’s even more impressive in full-screen mode. Randy Halverson shot the scenes in South Dakota, Utah, Colorado, and Wisconsin. You have to get way out beyond the light pollution to see the stars this way! The music was specially composed for the project by Bear McCreary, who does the music for the TV shows The Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, and more. You can learn more about the video at Halverson’s website. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

See also: Bad Astronomy’s post about the astronomical events in the video. Link

I don’t know about you guys, but I love nighttime photography. While I may not have the skills to do it myself, photographers who are interested in improving their night shots will probably love the video tips over at Shutter Salt. For the rest of us though, the incredible images are enough to enjoy.

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by Ursula Majors

A constellation is a group of stars that form a particular pattern. The celestial sphere is traditionally divided into 88 such constellations. Most are arranged to resemble characters from Ancient Greek mythology, and all have Latin names. Examples include Aries, Cygnus, Pisces and Virgo.

Figure 1. The constellation Cassiopeia transformed into Handgun.

These archaic descriptors and their associated myths are usually lost on today’s youth. Adolescents have difficulty relating to outdated objects such as harps, herdsmen and flying horses, as they are enamored with modern-day conveniences such as cars, computers and coffee shops. It should come as no surprise that fewer and fewer young people show any interest in astronomy.

Figure 2. The constellation Gemini transformed into Cell Phone.

I have devised a comprehensive restructuring of constellation naming conventions as a means of attracting more students. Along with radical design changes, it also forsakes Latin names in favor of modern English.

For example, consider Cassiopeia, which depicts the mythological queen sitting in a chair. I believe that this constellation would be much more palatable to today’s youth if it were reoriented and renamed Handgun, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 3. The constellation Taurus transformed into Electric Guitar.

Figure 4. The constellation Leo transformed into Motorcycle.

Likewise, Gemini, which portrays twin brothers Castor and Pollux, would be better served if it were transformed into Cell Phone, as shown in Figure 2.

Two additional examples are Taurus refurbished as Electric Guitar (Figure 3) and Leo modernized to become Motorcycle (Figure 4). These are but a few of the possibilities. If my constellation reformation is embraced by the scientific community, I will supply others.

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The article above is republished with permission from the January-February 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Did you know Leonardo DiCaprio collects action figures or that Johnny Depp likes to play with Barbies? Also awesome -Ben Stiller is a Trekkie. If you want a little more insight into some of today’s most popular stars, this BuzzFeed article is a great place to start.

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A beautiful time-lapse video of the night sky over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, from Daniel Dragon Films. The Outer Banks is a wonderful place that I’ve visited for vacation dozens of times. Learn more about the stars you see here at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link

One thing we should always remember is that the the earth is spinning around while the stars stay relatively constant in the sky. YouTube member bulletpeople took a beautiful existing time-lapse video of the stars and edited it to show the stars as static in the sky, which highlights the rotation of the earth. -via reddit

Where do stars go to have fun? Why, they go downtown in the Milky Way, of course. Take a look at this beautiful image taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope:

In this Spitzer image, the myriad of stars crowding the center of our galaxy creates the blue haze that brightens towards the center of the image. The green features are from carbon-rich dust molecules, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are illuminated by the surrounding starlight as they swirl around the galaxy’s core. The yellow-red patches are the thermal glow from warm dust. The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and dust are associated with bustling hubs of young stars. These materials, mixed with gas, are required for making new stars.

The brightest white feature at the center of the image is the central star cluster in our galaxy. At a distance of 26,000 light years away from Earth, it is so distant that, to Spitzer’s view, most of the light from the thousands of individual stars is blurred into a single glowing blotch. Astronomers have determined that these stars are orbiting a massive black hole that lies at the very center of the galaxy.

The region pictured here is immense, with a horizontal span of 2,400 light-years (5.3 degrees) and a vertical span of 1,360 light-years (3 degrees). Though most of the objects seen in this image are located near the galactic center, the features above and below the galactic plane tend to lie closer to Earth.

Embiggen here: Link

Yes, that’s the Pillars of Creation. Find more of Jim’s artwork on Craftzine: Link

Pic: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

Today's image from Astronomy Picture of the Day, by Rogelio Bernal Andreo of Deep Sky Colors is something you have to enjoy in its full splendor. Go on. We'll wait.

From APOD:

A Dark River of dust seems to run from our Galactic Center, then pool into a starfield containing photogenic sky wonders. Scrolling right will reveal many of these objects including (can you find?) the bright orange star Antares, a blue(-eyed) horsehead nebula, the white globular star cluster M4, the bright blue star system Rho Ophiuchi, the dark brown Pipe nebula, the red Lagoon nebula, the red and blue Trifid nebula, the red Cat's Paw Nebula, and the multicolored but still important center of our Galaxy. This wide view captures in exquisite detail about 50 degrees of the nighttime sky, 100 times the size of the full Moon, covering constellations from the Archer (Sagittarius) through the Snake Holder (Ophiuchus), to the Scorpion (Scorpius). The Dark River itself can be identified as the brown dust lane connected to Antares, and spans about 100 light years. Since the Dark River dust lane lies only about 500 light years away, it only appears as a bridge to the much more distant Galactic Center, that actually lies about 25,000 light years farther away.

Rogelio added these notes:

When I drove a total of 1,200 miles to capture my widefield image of the IFN I thought I had gone too far and told myself I should control myself a bit. So when I calculated the total driving time for this image to be over 1,800 miles (and that's not including the Rho Op area on the left of the image - otherwise, add 800 miles to the 1,800!) I realized I didn't talk to myself clearly enough! :-)

The mosaic above is made out of 52 frames. If we take out the 12 frames from the already mosaic I had done of the Rho Op area, that leaves the 40 frames I captured and processed this month of June alone. Each frame is 3x5 minutes of L and 3x3 minutes each RGB, all bin 2x2.

I captured the data in 9 different nights: 6 outside of the DARC Observatory, 2 during a camping weekend in Plettstone (Bear Valley), and one additional frame catured at the back of the Lick Observatory. All during a period of around 12 days. Um, yes... I do have a DAY job too!!

As I mentioned earlier, the total round trip driving time to these dark sites added up to 1,840 miles driven. Total exposure time for the 40 frames is around 40 hours (48 if we count the Rho Op area) with a time in the field exceeding over 70 hours. The original image, over 18,000 pixels wide, can be provided upon request. It's just too big in size I'd rather not to pay the bandwidth toll (yes I pay for my bandwidth).

Links: APOD | Deep Sky Colors

A NASA spacecraft called the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) took a picture of a previously unknown comet crashing into our sun:

This is the third comet to swing by the sun this year. Known as sun-grazing comets, the icy objects most likely come from the outer solar system, though it is unlikely that any survive their encounters with the sun. [...]

Astronomers estimate that there may be more than 1,600 comets in our solar system that swing through its heart to pass by the sun during their travels. As of 2000, the definitive count for sun-grazing comets passed the 1,000 mark.

Link via Geekologie | Official Website | Photo: NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope has got new glasses after astronauts refurbished it in May 2009, and now NASA has kindly released snapshots from the 19-year-old space telescope.

I’m particularly awestruck with this one of the Globular Star Cluster Omega Centauri:

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope snapped this panoramic view of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of a giant star cluster.

The image reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. Globular clusters, ancient swarms of stars united by gravity, are the homesteaders of our Milky Way galaxy. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. The cluster lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth. [...]

All of the stars in the image are cozy neighbors. The average distance between any two stars in the cluster’s crowded core is only about a third of a light-year, roughly 13 times closer than our Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. Although the stars are close together, WFC3′s sharpness can resolve each of them as individual stars. If anyone lived in this globular cluster, they would behold a star-saturated sky that is roughly 100 times brighter than Earth’s sky.

I wonder how many of those harbor alien life (seems like a waste if none of them do, don’t you think?) … Link

I don’t know about you, but each time I read this kind of news my head spins. Scientists have detected a gamma ray burst that dates back 13 billion years, 95 percent back to the beginning of time. That makes it the oldest thing ever seen. Astronomer Edo Berger was blown away by the information.

The star which exploded was 30 to 100 times larger than our own sun, and when it died, it gave off “about million times the amount of energy the sun will release in its entire lifetime,” Berger told CNN by phone from Harvard University, where he is an assistant professor of astronomy.

Its death throes produced so much energy that “momentarily, we can essentially see it anywhere in the universe,” Berger said.

The object, known as GRB 090423, is about 200 million years older than the previous record-holder for oldest object ever seen.

Berger isn’t just interested in the record books, though — the gamma ray burst extended the frontiers of human knowledge about the history of the universe.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by scbr.