Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings – very cold, dry and distant, yet real.
Martian landscapes November 9, 2009
A world-changing map November 6, 2009
A little history, a little word play, and a little cartography, plus seeing where Copernicus got some of his crazy ideas. What better way to get your morning started?
Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today… and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun.
Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought – and indeed in the larger history of ideas.
Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.
But that was just the beginning. Waldseemuller and Ringman in fact had written the Introduction to Cosmography merely as a companion volume to their magnum opus: a giant and revolutionary new map of the world. It’s known today as the Waldseemuller map of 1507.
Hubble spots jewel box star cluster October 29, 2009
From Wired Science:
This stunning image of the Kappis Crucis Cluster, nicknamed the “Jewel Box,” was one of the last gifts from a retiring camera on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Just before NASA brought the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 back to Earth in mid-2009, it snapped this photo of the core of the NGC 4755 star cluster, the first comprehensive image of an open galactic cluster taken in multiple wavelengths. Using seven different filters, Hubble captured the Jewel Box cluster in far ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The different colors of the stars — from pale blue to bright ruby red — result from their differing intensities at various ultraviolet wavelengths.
Just bright enough to be seen from Earth with the naked eye, the Jewel Box was given its name by English astronomer John Herschel in the 1830’s, who thought the sparkling blue and red stars resembled expensive jewelry. Like most open star clusters, the Jewel Box is made up of an array of sister stars, all formed from the same cloud of gas and dust with similar ages and chemical make-up. Located about 6,400 light-years away, near the Southern Cross in the constellation of Crux, the Jewel Box contains roughly 100 stars.
Besides Hubble, two other telescopes have also recently captured new images of the Jewel Box. A wide-field photo taken by the 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla observatory in Chile shows the multi-colored cluster surrounded by thousands of neighboring stars. A close-up from ESO’s Very Large Telescope captures the stars in detail and ranks as one of the best images of the Jewel Box ever taken from the ground. Both images can be seen in the composite photo below.
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Image 1: NASA/ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz/Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain. Image 2: ESO, NASA/ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2 and Jesús Maíz Apellániz/Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain.
LCROSS Twitters “Hitchhiker” October 13, 2009
OMG So Cute! From The Guardian:
In one of its less-reported actions last week, Nasa’s LCROSS lunar mission last week gave Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the extra-planetary exposure it has always deserved. A Twitter feed from the satellite sent crashing onto the moon’s surface on Friday channelled the voice of an improbably created sperm whale that discovers itself hurtling towards a different outer-space collision in Adams’s much-loved story.
Published 30 years ago, the classic novel features two missiles, aimed at Zaphod Beeblebrox’s spaceship the Heart of Gold, turned into a whale and a bowl of petunias by the vessel’s Improbability Drive (at an Improbability Factor of 8,767,128 against). The whale spends the last few minutes of its life pondering its existence – “Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?” – before it crashes into the surface of the planet Magrathea.
As Nasa’s LCROSS spacecraft travelled towards the moon at more than 9,000 kilometres per hour on Friday afternoon, it tweeted in the whale’s words: “And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round … it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! … That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me?”
Then it crashed into the moon, unfortunately failing to produce the 10km plume of dust and rock which could have been scanned for evidence of frozen water. Nasa made no mention of Adams’s bowl of petunias, which thought only “Oh no, not again” as it tumbled towards Magrathea.
Twilight Zone turns 50 October 7, 2009
Copyright CBS, Inc.
You are now entering the Twilight Zone of cinema and science!
On October 2, 1959, the first episode aired of what would turn out to be a seminal work of science-fiction television. For the first time the famous four-note musical motif played, and for the first time Rod Serling told viewers that they were “entering a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” Yes, it may be hard to believe, but October marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of The Twilight Zone.
The first episode, titled “Where Is Everybody?” and starring Earl Holliman, was written by Serling and very much set the tone for the series: Holliman plays a man, dressed in an Air Force jumpsuit, who wanders about a town that seems to have no other people in it, though has evidence of very recent habitation (food on the stove, burning cigarettes in ashtrays, etc.). It turns out (SPOILER ALERT) that he is imagining the whole thing, and that he’s actually been put in isolation to see if he can stay sane for a trip to the moon.
The latest from Hubble: October 2, 2009
Pretty amazing! The images were taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument before it suffered a power failure in 2007. The images were recovered when astronauts restored the unit in May of this year on the last Hubble Servicing Mission. Both are deep enough to show distant background galaxies.
High-res version of the top photo (40 MB): NGC 4522
High-res version of the bottom photo (29 MB): NGC 4402
These photos are actually amazing for two reasons:
1. Hubble has once again wowed us with the beauty of nature, and without even trying to has created images the likes of which we’ve only seen in science fiction. The assumption often made, including by this website, is that art has to be manmade. And technically this is; it is an electronic image created by humans for non-altruistic/not-directly-related-to-survival purposes. BUT, sometimes it’s also amazing to just sit back and look at nature, including galaxies far far away, and just be amazed at the gloriousness of the world(s) around us.
2. These photos show the process of “ram pressure stripping,” or basically what happens when galaxies travel at 6.2 million miles per hour (astronomers estimate): their edges start flying off into the nether regions of the Universe.
Wired and Bad Astronomy discussed this phenomenon a little bit.
Free Museum Day tomorrow September 25, 2009
September 26th is Annual Museum Day, and lots of museums and parks are offering free admission in celebration. Read on for more:
On Sept. 26, as part of the fifth annual Museum Day program, Smithsonian magazine has convinced more than 1,200 other museums, zoos, and arts and cultural attractions across the country to also welcome visitors for free.
In California, you’ll can use your Museum Day admission card to visit the classic cars displayed at the California Automobile Museum in Sacramento (regular adult admission: $8), in New York City you can use your pass at the South Street Seaport Museum (regular adult admission: $10), and in Dallas, your pass will get you into the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (regular admission: $13.50), which explores the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy.
To see the full list of all the participating museums so you can plan your day, visit the Smithsonian’s Museum Day 2009 Web site and poke around. Be ready to be a bit overwhelmed.
Biggest, coldest, slowest waterslide ever! September 22, 2009
Photographs of glaciers taken from space: beautiful, artistic, and kind of scary. From Wired: “Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past.”
This image taken in 2005 of Bear Glacier highlights the beautiful color of many glacial lakes. The hue is caused by the silt that is finely ground away from the valley walls by the glacier and deposited in the lake. The particles in this “glacial flour” can be very reflective, turning the water into a distinctive greenish blue. The lake, eight miles up from the terminus of the glacier, was held in place by the glacier, but in 2008 it broke through and drained into Resurrection Bay in Kenai Fjords National Park.
Read more about the destruction and destructive power of glaciers.
Starlight, star bright September 16, 2009
I remember as a kid sitting outside on summer nights, looking up into the dark night sky and watching the Milky Way pass over me like a river of stars. When I saw it even more clearly high on a mountain top in the Andes of South America six years ago, I completely understood why they thought the Milky Way was just a continuation of the rivers on land.
I wonder if these French photographers felt the same way watching the stars as kids. On Wired, “you can see the entire Milky Way at once in this panorama painstakingly stitched together by French photographers.”
Working in the dark, dry highlands of Chile with a Nikon D3 digital camera (50 mm lens open at f5.6), Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier patched together 1,200 photos of the night sky into the composite that you see above.
Read more on Wired.
Stratophotography September 15, 2009
No, the title does not reflect any case of dyslexia on my part. I decided rather than focus on Astrophotography (which I tend to do), today I’m featuring Stratophotography. And, on Wired they’re featuring a DIY success story for taking your own strato-photos. From Wired:
For $148 in off-the-shelf parts, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology students have taken pictures from the edge of space.
Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh’s DIY dirigible launched on September 2 from Sturbridge, Massachusetts and rose 18 miles before popping. It was recovered, photographs intact, upon landing in a nearby construction site.
Team Icarus ready for launch
According to the team’s website, there is a third space-photographer: Eric Newton. The team ”will be posting a step-by-step illustrated guide on how to do a launch for $150 shortly. Also, we will be posting a Youtube video of the time-lapse photographs,” any day now (no date on their news bulletin, so not sure if “today” actually means “today” if you catch my drift).
They also give credit to some other launches that have come before.
Just a feel-good, space story for all you avid DIYers or space lovers.
