Aimless In Space

Psychedelic space station stars and cities

Astronaut Don Petit took the pictures to make this composite. Basically, it’s a series of eighteen 30-second exposures added together so the motion of the ISS around the Earth makes the stars trail, the cities blur, and your mind expand, dude.

The brown and green glow over the horizon is the atmospheric aerosol layer; molecules that absorb sunlight during the day and release that energy at night. The red glow above that puzzles me; I’ve written about it before. It might be a reflection of lights from inside the space station, but I suspect it’s actually the aurora; it follows the curve of the Earth, and as you can see from the star trails the camera was pointed toward the poles — the direction you’re likely to see an aurora.

You can see faint star trails above the bright ones too, with a different center of curvature — those probably are from an internal reflection. Either that or the camera got moved, but that seems unlikely!

This picture is one of several posted to Flickr, including this one which looks like it’s from the last scene of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. But they’re all worth looking at, if only for their alien beauty.

After all, the photographer was literally high when he took them!

Image credit: NASA

Jupiter, acting all superior

What you’re seeing is from the NASA/ESA satellite Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. It stares at the Sun all the time, monitoring its activity. This image, from May 3, 2012 is from the LASCO C3, one of the cameras on board. It has a little metal paddle (called an occulter) to block the ferocious light of the Sun; that’s the black bar and circle. The white outline is the position of the Sun and its size in the image.

You can see an emerging coronal mass ejection on the left: that’s the bulb-shaped thingy. It’s actually an incredibly violent expulsion of a billion tons of subatomic particles hurled away at high speed due to the explosive discharge of the Sun’s magnetic field… but that’s not why I posted this picture.

You can also see streamers coming from the Sun; those are places where particles flow freely into space from the Sun. Basically, the magnetic field of the Sun trails into space in those locations, allowing the wind to escape. But that’s not why I’m showing you this picture, either.

Look on the left. See that weird dot with the horizontal line through it? That’s Jupiter!

Astronomers see ANOTHER star ripped apart by a black hole!

Happy 25th annniversary, Supernova 1987A!

Top 24 Deep Space Pictures of 2011

Top 14 Solar System Pictures of 2011

Uranus got double-tapped?

 One of the enduring mysteries of our solar system is why Uranus is tilted over on its side. If you measure the angle of a planet’s rotation axis (the location of its north pole) compared to the plane of its orbit, you find that all the planets in the solar system are tipped. Jupiter is only 3°, but Earth is at a healthy 23° angle; Mars is too. Venus is tipped so far over it’s essentially upside-down (we know this because it spins the wrong way).

Uranus, weirdly, is at 98°, like it’s rolling around the outer solar system on its side. The best guess is that it got hit hard by something planet-sized long ago, knocking it over (though there are other, more speculative, ideas). The problem with that is that its moons and rings all orbit around its equator, meaning their orbital planes are tipped as well. It’s hard to see how that might have happened, even if you assume the moons formed in that collision (as, apparently, our Moon formed in an ancient grazing impact with Earth by a Mars-sized body).

Well, a team of astronomers have come up with a new idea: maybe Uranus wasn’t hit by one big object. Maybe it was hit by two smaller ones.

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Image credit: Erich Karkoschka (University of Arizona) and NASA