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Because I’m a nerd… My watercolours and the chemical formulas for their pigments

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Jupiter and its four main Galilean moons

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"Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children.” - Carl Sagan

February marked five years of operation for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and to celebrate the SDO team released some mind-blowing footage. The observatory acquired 200 million+ images over the years that show an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the Sun grow and erupt. I borrowed a few seconds of the footage to create this Vine but there is a lot more to see. Watch all the footage on NASA Goddard’s YouTube channel.

Music credit: Boards of Canada- “White Cyclosa”

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Beam me up, jelly! While it looks like a tiny spaceship taking off, this comb jelly’s rainbow lights are produced by diffraction, much like sunlight glancing off a CD. More active than most jellies, Beroe forskalii often folds over itself, earning it the common name of “oven mitt jelly.” Check out these otherworldly jellies in our Open Sea gallery 

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Saturn’s hexagon is a persisting six sided cloud pattern around the north pole of the planet. It is created by a band of upper-atmospheric winds, and the sides of it are about 13,800 km (8,600 mi) long, which is longer than the Earth’s diameter. There’s a hurricane swirling within the hexagon.

(Images by the Cassini spacecraft)

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X-rays of a Hammerhead Shark (Source)

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Spectacular rendering of the solar system to scale

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Ode to Apollo 11 and the joy of discovery

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This astronaut’s view of Earth.

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09 February 2015

Making and Mending

This striking picture shows the delicate blood vessels and lining of a mouse’s heart as the animal grows in the womb. It’s a complex process requiring cells to organise themselves into arteries, veins and finer tubes called capillaries that supply blood and energy to the heart itself, as well as the four muscular chambers forming the pump that pushes blood round the body. Researchers have discovered that some animals, including mice and zebrafish, have the potential to repair their own hearts if they get damaged or diseased, using similar processes that happen when the heart first grows. By understanding how this happens, and seeing if the same repair mechanisms can be triggered in humans, we might be able to repair our broken hearts one day.

Written by Kat Arney

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Image by Sarah Ivins

University College London Copyright held by original author Runner Up in the British Heart Foundation’s Reflections of Research Image Competition

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M77 Canadian-French-Hawaii Telescope/Hubble Space Telescope by Andre vd Hoeven on Flickr.

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Neri Oxman’s Bacteria-Infested Spacesuits Are Grown, Not Designed

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Hubble Space Telescope image of supernova 1994D in galaxy NGC 4526.

Credit: NASA/ESA, The Hubble Key Project Team and The High-Z Supernova Search Team

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Apollo 11 first stage separation take the 31 seconds out of your life and watch this through

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NASA’s Most Shocking Image

This image is a 1.5… *BILLION* pixel photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy.

To view the image in all its glory go here.

NASA is the coolest thing that’s ever happened.

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The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus, and makes up the visible portion of the Cygnus Loop, a large but faint supernova remnant, which exploded 5,000-8,000 years ago. 

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, ESO