Capture the Atlas has 25 winners in its Northern Lights Photographer of the Year competition. If that seems generous, the photo above, titled “The Hunt’s Reward” by Ben Maze is an image of the Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights, taken in Tasmania.

Captured in this image is a trifecta of astronomical phenomena that made for some of the best astrophotography conditions one can witness in Australia, namely, the setting Milky Way galactic core, zodiacal light, and of course, the elusive Aurora Australis. On top of this, a sparkling display of oceanic bioluminescence adorned the crashing waves, adding the cherry on top to what was already a breathtaking experience.

The photo below, “Turbulunce,” was captured by John Weatherby in Iceland.   

The forecast on this night was for a solar storm, and it did not disappoint. After the first sign of green in the sky, the group decided to book it out to the Sólheimasandur plane wreck. It was a group effort, but we managed to light the plane from the inside with two colored LED lights that a participant brought. Hearing the group’s screams in the dark from seeing a KP6 aurora for the very first time was something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

That's only two of the 25 fantastical images you can see and read about in the winner's gallery at Capture the Atlas. -via Kottke

As you clean the cobwebs from the corners, you can take comfort in the fact that the ISS has spiders, too. Those are experimental spiders, deliberately taken aboard to see how space conditions affect web-building. In fact, spiders have flown into space for more than ten years, but now it appears there is a breakthrough in our understanding of the way orb spiders build webs in microgravity. From the research paper: 

Under natural conditions, Trichonephila spiders build asymmetric webs with the hub near the upper edge of the web, and they always orient themselves downwards when sitting on the hub whilst waiting for prey. As these asymmetries are considered to be linked to gravity, we expected the spiders experiencing no gravity to build symmetric webs and to show a random orientation when sitting on the hub. We found that most, but not all, webs built in zero gravity were indeed quite symmetric. Closer analysis revealed that webs built when the lights were on were more asymmetric (with the hub near the lights) than webs built when the lights were off. In addition, spiders showed a random orientation when the lights were off but faced away from the lights when they were on. We conclude that in the absence of gravity, the direction of light can serve as an orientation guide for spiders during web building and when waiting for prey on the hub.

It appears that in the absence of sufficient gravity, the spiders saw the light source as a substitute for "up." Read a short version of the study's findings, plus a look at previous experiments with spiders in space at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Richard Fuller)

Among the Thousand Islands (actually more than 1,500) at the headwaters of the St. Lawrence River between Ontario and New York is a tiny island named Just Enough Room Island. It's a privately owned summer resort that has just enough room for the single house that was built on it. Atlas Obscura describes it:

[..] Just Room Enough Island was purchased in the 1950s by the Sizeland family who were looking to create a holiday get away. They built a house on the tiny speck of land placing the walls right up to the edges of the island, creating a home that was just big enough to fit, and giving the island its quirky name. A pair of bench chairs were placed in front of the home and there was also a tree growing on one side. And that is all the room the island had.

Photo: Omegatron

Picture-taking will always be a part of any event in any season, so it would be great if you know some tricks that will help you take better photos. And if you’re someone who plans on improving your photography skills this holiday season, then you might consider attending the Nikon School Online classes. Until December 31, Nikon is offering their classes at the best price: free!

… you can stream all 11 of their photography courses just by signing up with your email.

They’ve added a class on how to take better holiday photos to their original lineup of 10—which also features courses on the fundamentals of photography as well as others focused on creating video content, landscape photography, portraiture, macro photography, and even how to photograph children and pets. Each one is taught by industry professionals and offers practical tips, tools, and lessons that will have you taking better shots in no time.

“The holidays are for making memories, and Nikon is meant for capturing them,” says the company. “Come by for ideas, insider tips, and the technical advice to help you get your best holiday shots ever—the more the merrier!”

You can stream all Nikon School Online classes on the company's website.

Nice!

(Image Credit: PIRO4D/ Pixabay)

Professional people cooking food is really a fun thing to watch, and I know that I’m not the only one who enjoys watching these stuff.

Watch this professional chef from Shunraku Kaiten Sushi Restaurant in Hokkaido, Japan break the eggs, mix the ingredients, and then put the oil in the pan (and then drain it), as he cooks a Dashimaki Tamago (rolled omelette). You might be able to pick up a skill or two as you watch it.

Via Laughing Squid

(Image Credit: KaitenSushiTV/ YouTube)

Is it 7 AM? 11 AM? 3 PM? Look at the whole picture. The tire tracks on the snowy road. The school buses. The lamps on the street. The quiet ski resort.

If you can tell the time here on this picture correctly, then chances are you have the potential to be a spy.

Members of the Central Intelligence Agency must be meticulous in order to successfully analyse global intelligence, and now it's testing the public.

The agency asked people to "put your analytical skills to the test" by working out what time of the day it was in [this] wintery scene.

This picture was posted via the agency’s official Twitter account.

The correct answer over at Mirror.

(Image Credit: CIA/ Twitter)

A rare conjunction of planets will soon be visible from earth for the first time in almost 800 years. Jupiter and Saturn will appear to be in close conjunction from our vantage point, only about a tenth of a degree apart. This closest point will be on December 21, the winter solstice, as NBC reports.

It will be the first Jupiter-Saturn conjunction since 2000, but the first time the planets will have been so close since 1623. It will also be the first time such a close conjunction has been observable since 1226, according to EarthSky.

Still, according to NASA, "while the two gas giants may appear close, in reality they are hundreds of millions of miles apart."

The event has been dubbed the "Christmas star," because some astronomers have theorized the “Star of Bethlehem” could have been a rare conjunction involving both Jupiter and Saturn.

While the conjunction on the 21st will be brief, the planets will appear close together on days both before and afterward. Read more about the phenomenon and how to best observe it at Bad Astronomy.  -Thanks, WTM!

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Japan — Twitter user Nekomarusuisan was worried about his girlfriend, who was spending a really long time in the bath. To make sure that nothing’s wrong with her, he checked up on her, and he was surprised with what he found out. “When I went to check, she was busy enjoying paradise,” he said in his tweet. And when he said that his girlfriend was “enjoying paradise”, he meant this.

If we were the girlfriend, we probably wouldn’t have moved from that position either. A nice drink, a nice game, and two nice cats. What more could you possibly want?

Nekomarusuisan also has a YouTube channel for their cats, Chamunosuke and Marukichi.

I just hope the Nintendo Switch did not get wet.

(Image Credit: nekomarusuisan7/ Twitter)

Peru, Illinois — On December second, cops and firefighters as well as city residents joined forces for a mission. The mission: capture a runaway wallaroo, a marsupial between the size of a wallaby and a kangaroo.

This bloke — named Wally — got away from his owner in LaSalle County.

Over the course of two hours, Wally the wallaroo leapt through yards, streets, and roads, while the townspeople chased after it.

Fearing that the marsupial might get hit by a vehicle, Peru Police Chief Doug Bernabei shut down nearby roads.

Eventually, Wally made his way into a river, where he was rescued by two anglers who happened to be at the right place and at the right time.

“We were screaming and pointing. We were saying, ‘Get your net out, get your net out,’” Bernabei told the (Peoria) Journal Star. “They yelled, ‘It’s not a dog!’ We said ... ‘It’s not a dog, it’s a wallaroo.’”

They used a net to fish Wally from the frigid water and into their boat before taking him to shore.

“He was so cold we couldn’t register his temperature on the thermometer,” said veterinarian Allison Spayer. “We warmed him up. We dried him off.”

What a chase!

(Image Credit: Scott Anderson/NewsTribune via AP)

Okay, I don’t know how much time you have on your hands, but there’s no harm in asking about  the unknown, right? Well, scientists are looking for a hidden message from the ‘creator’ of the cosmos at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The CMB is space’s largest billboard, so to speak, as it is visible across all of space. Did physicists find something? Sadly, no: 

Michael Hippke, a self-described "gentleman scientist" affiliated with the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany, went looking for a sign from a creator in that background radiation. But, either way, he didn't find one.

Leaving aside all the hidden assumptions in the question — that there is a cosmic creator, that a cosmic creator wants people to know about them, that the cosmic creator has an insight into the minds of future intelligent creatures and can therefore predict the future — the CMB would be a good place to hide a message if you were a creator trying to target civilizations at our current level of development, said Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist who wasn't involved in Hippke's work published to the arXiv database on Nov. 29. (The paper has not been peer reviewed.) 

"There could be different media on which you'd encode the message," Loeb said. The CMB is a good option because we've been able to detect it since the first good microwave study of the sky in 1964, as opposed to, say, gravitational waves, which require more technical equipment and we only detected in February 2016. "It all depends on what level of intelligence you want to approach. It's almost like writing different sections of a newspaper for different audiences."

Image via Live Science

Move over, mysterious monoliths, there’s a new conspiracy in town. Time to bring back your tinfoil hats on, as an unclassified image that was reportedly circulated among U.S. intelligence agencies has leaked online. The unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the Pentagon’s term for unidentified flying objects, is silver and cube-shaped: 

The Debrief’s Tim McMillan, a contributor to Popular Mechanics, learned of the photo’s existence from a “defense official who has been verified as being in a position to have access to the UAPTF’s intelligence reports,” he writes. Three other government officials confirmed with McMillan that the photo, which was shared on a secure network used by the U.S. Intelligence Community, comes from a 2018 task force report.

A military pilot reportedly encountered the object while flying over the Atlantic Ocean on the East Coast of the U.S. in 2018 and captured it with their personal cell phone. It’s likely that a backseat weapons system operator on an F/A-18F Super Hornet took the photo of the object, which McMillan calls “inverted” and “bell-shaped,” and describes it having “ridges or other protrusions along its lateral edges, extending toward its base.”

It’s possible the object may be a GPS dropsonde, a sensor on a parachute that provides info on the vertical profile of a storm. But as McMillan points out (and confirms with an atmospheric researcher), the actual dropsonde doesn’t appear in the photo—just the potential square-cone parachute. And there would obviously have to be an aircraft above the object to drop it, and no such craft is visible in the image.

Image via Esquire 

Christmas becomes gloriously weird in the song "Apocalypse Christmas" by the RiffTones. Josh Flowers made a video for the song using clips from various B-movies featured on RiffTrax. From those movies, he managed to find an illustrative scene for every line about the very worst of Christmas. -via Metafilter

In the wee hours of Christmas 1964, more than 30 people experienced weird sounds and apparent mayhem on their rooftops in the village of Warminster, England, and at the nearby military base. You might be tempted to blame it on Santa Claus, but the phenomenon became known as the Warminster "Thing."   

Strange things continued to happen in Warminster, a town just over 15 miles from Stonehenge, in the new year. In February 1965, an entire flock of pigeons suddenly died. The following month, three families heard loud noises coming from above their houses, their roofs and windows shaking with the force. And in June, the Warminster residents began to see unidentified objects flying through the sky.

Residents who witnessed the UFOs gave wildly differing descriptions. News of the "Thing" drew notoriety to Warminster for years, but no plausible explanation has ever been found. Read about The Warminster "Thing" at Mental Floss. 

(Image credit: Pete Linforth from Pixabay)

There’s something symbolic about it, if you think about it. Artist and sculptor Daniel Popper created a permanent public installation at Society Las Olas, a residential building in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The installation is a huge figure ripping open its chest. The work also features a fern-adorned archway that viewers can walk through, as My Modern Met details: 

Works of this scale are not new for Popper, who has spent years sculpting monumental public installations. In 2019, his Modem Swamp work towered over the Modem Festival in Croatia. For that installation, Popper collaborated with others to illuminate the work with projection mapping.

While music festivals are not possible at present, Popper says that he has already been focused on permanent public art installations. He hinted that more permanent works like Thrive are forthcoming. When asked how he hopes audiences will interact with Thrive, he tells My Modern Met, “I hope they will continue to interact with it and enjoy it and that the message and feeling continues for many years to come. In many ways it's a symbol of hope and transformation which have been central to many people's worlds during 2020.”

Image via My Modern Met 

Google Trends has released the top search terms for 2020, and made this video to illustrate the overarching topics of what people searched for. It's a short but good look at the year, centered around the word "why," but then you see the actual lists of top searches in the US, and here are the top five that start with "why."

1 Why were chainsaws invented

2 Why is there a coin shortage

3 Why was George Floyd arrested

4 Why is Nevada taking so long

5 Why is TikTok getting banned

Welp. The chainsaw thing happened back in January, when a story went viral explaining that the chainsaw was invented to help with childbirth. The story's virality lasted all year, finally reaching TikTok late in the year. But the trend list has plenty of other stuff that makes more sense. The global list is more consistent, with really big news at the top of every topic.  -via The Mary Sue