be sure to rollover ‘notes’ to see photo captions!
Megan and I headed up to the Observatory on a chilly Saturday night to see the Super Perigee Moon – a full moon that appears to be 14% larger than normal due to it occuring when the moon is at the point in its orbit when it is closest to Earth. It was breathtaking, and my only regret was that I didn’t have a faster lens or a rock to brace my camera upon.
No CGI, no 3D models. A proposal for an IMAX film using only images taken by satellites:
More at Outside In.
via io9
It’s been announced!
Eric forwarded me this from reddit:
Answers a lot of questions, handy infographics.
by CGP Gray
Related: the Union Flag – three flags in one!
via Best Week Ever
click to embiggen
An annular eclipse occurs when the moon, slightly more distant from Earth than on average, moves directly between Earth and the sun, thus appearing slightly smaller to observers’ eyes; the effect is a bright ring, or annulus of sunlight, around the silhouette of the moon.
Time-lapse video and more info over at NASA.gov.
via io9
click for more info
How did this algal bloom suddenly appear in the lake?
The effect of the torrential rain over the over the vast area of recently burnt alpine forest was to wash ash and soil rich in nitrogen and other nutrients into the Gippsland Lakes. Counter intuitively, the rain and floods also increased salinity in the Lakes as the higher water level facilitated greater mixing with seawater at Lakes Entrance.
[...]
…what you’re seeing here is a second generation of algae (Noctiluca Scintillans) which grew by eating the first generation of algae (Synechococcus), which itself bloomed by feeding on the runoff from the floods, which had been filled with nutrients from wildfires. Basically, this event was two years and two disasters in the making – and it was also completely harmless. The glowing algae are not toxic, and did not wind up choking off other life forms in the lakes.
via io9.com
Reid Gower:
I got frustrated with NASA and made this video. NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously. None of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd, which is now more important than ever. In fact, NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them.
In all of their brilliance, NASA seems to have forgotten to share their hopes and dreams in a way the public can relate to, leaving one of humanities grandest projects with terrible PR and massive funding cuts. I have a lot of ideas for a NASA marketing campaign, but I doubt they’d pay me even minimum wage to work for them. I literally have an MSWord document entitled NASAideas.doc full of ideas waiting to share. I thought maybe, just maybe someone might be able to work their magic for me on that. But the primary point of this post is to vent my frustration with NASA. Sure, they’ve fallen victim to budget cuts but I honestly think cutting media will seal NASA’s own fate. Unless they can find a way to relate to the general public, support for their projects will always be minimal, and their funding will follow suit. A social media department would easily pay for itself in government grants because it could rekindle the public interest in the space program.
via eric
NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.
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“This planet is unequivocally rocky, with a surface you could stand on,” commented team member Dimitar Sasselov, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and a Kepler co-investigator.
Read more at NASA.
