ouruniversevisualized-blog

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This artist's conception shows an edge-on view of the Milky Way galaxy. Newly discovered gamma-ray jets (pink) extend for 27,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane, and are tilted at an angle of 15 degrees. Previously known gamma-ray bubbles are shown in purple. The bubbles and jets suggest that our galactic center was much more active in the past than it is today. credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

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During the annular solar eclipse of May 20/21, 2012, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pointed its cameras at Earth to capture the shadow of the moon as it raced across the Pacific Ocean. Due to the rapid orbit of LRO around the moon, only four images were obtained. In these two images, Japan and the Aleutian Islands are experiencing maximum eclipse, respectively. credit: ASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

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The Yarlung Zangpo Grand Canyon (or Tsangpo Gorge) in Tibet is the deepest canyon in the world, and longer than the Grand Canyon. As the river passes between the peaks of Namcha Barwa (7,782 m) and Gyala Peri (7,234 m) it reaches a maximum depth of 6,009 m. In 2002, seven kayakers were the first westerners to navigate the entire gorge. The image was acquired February 25, 2004, and is located near 29.7 degrees north latitude, 95 degrees east longitude. With its 14 spectral bands from the visible to the thermal infrared wavelength region and its high spatial resolution of 15 to 90 meters (about 50 to 300 feet), ASTER images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet. ASTER is one of five Earth-observing instruments launched Dec. 18, 1999, on Terra. The instrument was built by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. A joint U.S./Japan science team is responsible for validation and calibration of the instrument and data products. credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

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Beautiful and haunting compilation of raw images acquired by the Cassini spacecraft over the past eight years in its orbital tour of the Saturn system set in motion to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." credit: Nahum Chazarra

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This image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, or also known as M101, combines data in the infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-rays from four of NASA's space-based telescopes. This multi-spectral view shows that both young and old stars are evenly distributed along M101's tightly-wound spiral arms. Such composite images allow astronomers to see how features in one part of the spectrum match up with those seen in other parts. It is like seeing with a regular camera, an ultraviolet camera, night-vision goggles and X-ray vision, all at the same time. The Pinwheel Galaxy is in the constellation of Ursa Major (also known as the Big Dipper). It is about 70% larger than our own Milky Way Galaxy, with a diameter of about 170,000 light years, and sits at a distance of 21 million light years from Earth. This means that the light we're seeing in this image left the Pinwheel Galaxy about 21 million years ago - many millions of years before humans ever walked the Earth. The hottest and most energetic areas in this composite image are shown in purple, where the Chandra X-ray Observatory observed the X-ray emission from exploded stars, million-degree gas, and material colliding around black holes. The red colors in the image show infrared light, as seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope. These areas show the heat emitted by dusty lanes in the galaxy, where stars are forming. The yellow component is visible light, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Most of this light comes from stars, and they trace the same spiral structure as the dust lanes seen in the infrared. The blue areas are ultraviolet light, given out by hot, young stars that formed about 1 million years ago, captured by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX). credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; IR & UV: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI

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Reprocessed image of Copernicus crater taken by the Lunar Orbiter 2 spacecraft on 1966 November 24. This oblique view looking across the crater was taken from an altitude of 27.1 miles was called the "Picture of the Century" because for the first time, humans could see the moon as a real world with mountains and boulders from a perspective similar to what an astronaut might see. Spacecraft imaging technology was primitive at the time — real photographs were taken and developed onboard, scanned and then "faxed" back to Earth. The returned images usually contained horizontal lines as an artifact of the scanning process. Over the last several years, the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has been painstakingly restoring images returned from the five Lunar Orbiter mission probes that mapped the moon in high detail in preparation for the Apollo missions just a few years later. Full restored image of Copernicus (683.2 MB TIFF)

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Annular eclipse of 20 May 2012 as seen from just north of Gail, Texas. credit: Jacob Thumberger

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This is one of a series of photos taken by Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station, at the time located over the Western Pacific, showing a shadow of the moon created by the May 20 solar eclipse, as the shadow spreads across cloud cover on Earth. Pettit used a 28-mm lens on a digital still camera to record the image at 23:35:36 GMT. One of the space station's solar array panels appears at the top of the frame. credit: NASA / Don Pettit

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On May 20, 2012, sky watchers from eastern Eurasia to western North America saw a fiery ring around the Moon as it passed between the Sun and the Earth. Known as an annular eclipse, the event blocked sunlight across a swath of Earth up to 300 kilometers (185 miles) wide, and the effects were most dramatic across the northern Pacific Ocean. As people on the ground looked up at the sky and saw a ring, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) looked down and saw the Moon’s shadow racing eastward over Earth’s surface. The MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of the shadow on the Pacific Ocean at roughly 11:30 a.m. local time on May 21 (23:30 Universal Time on May 20). Where the Moon passed in front of the Sun, Earth’s surface appeared black (left half of image). Around the margins of the shadow, our planet’s surface appeared yellowish brown. The shadow cast by an eclipse consists of two parts, the completely shadowed umbra and the partially shadowed penumbra. The annular eclipse started in southern China at 22:06 UTC on May 20. It then passed over the southern coast of Japan, and swept over the Pacific Ocean south of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The eclipse finished over Oregon and California around 01:30 UTC on May 21, having crossed the international date line. The eclipse reached its maximum duration of 5 minutes 46 seconds over the Pacific Ocean. During this eclipse, the Moon’s apparent diameter was 94 percent of the Sun’s, showing viewers on the ground a bright ring of light. Whether they could see the full eclipse or just a partial eclipse, millions of people turned out to see the show and many posted their photos online. credit: NASA / MODIS

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There are landforms called "gullies," consisting of an alcove, channel, and apron, on many large sand dunes on Mars. Remarkably, we have learned that the gullies form primarily or entirely during seasons when there is carbon dioxide frost on the ground. To understand this better we image key locations multiple times throughout the Martian year. This image, at 49.5 S latitude, was acquired very near the winter solstice, when shadows are very long in the middle afternoon when MRO passes overhead. Dark sand inside shadows is a challenging scene to image while flying overhead at 3.4 km/sec, but the HiRISE camera has the sensitivity needed to acquire useful images even at the most challenging time of the year.

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Animation of the 1882 December 6 transit of Venus using scans of the original photographic plate negatives -- 147 in all -- taken by astronomer David Peck Todd from Mount Hamilton. credit: University of California Observatories / Lick Observatory

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New research finds that the ideal time to study the cosmos was more than 13 billion years ago, just about 500 million years after the Big Bang - the era (shown in this artist's conception) when the first stars and galaxies began to form. Since information about the early universe is lost when the first galaxies are made, the best time to view cosmic perturbations is right when stars began to form. Modern observers can still access this nascent era from a distance by using surveys designed to detect 21-cm radio emission from hydrogen gas at those early times. credit: David A. Aguilar

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NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars. The rover used the panoramic camera (Pancam) between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. local Mars time to record images taken through different filters and combined into this mosaic view. Most of the component images were recorded during the 2,888th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's work on Mars (March 9, 2012). At that time, Opportunity was spending low-solar-energy weeks of the Martian winter at the Greeley Haven outcrop on the Cape York segment of Endeavour's western rim. In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location. Opportunity has been studying the western rim of Endeavour Crater since arriving there in August 2011. This crater spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, or about the same area as the city of Seattle. This is more than 20 times wider than Victoria Crater, the largest impact crater that Opportunity had previously examined. The interior basin of Endeavour is in the upper half of this view. The mosaic combines about a dozen images taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see, such as the dark sandy ripples and dunes on the crater's distant floor. credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State University

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Moonlit ice and snow formations called penitentes stand guard over the Chajnantor plateau in Chile. Found throughout the world in high-altitude regions, penitentes are believed to form under specific microscale combinations of temperature and humidity. The two fuzzy "clouds" in the sky at upper left are two of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The red smudge close to the horizon at the left edge of the image is the Carina Nebula. credit: ESO/B. Tafreshi

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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the spiral galaxy known as ESO 498-G5. One interesting feature of this galaxy is that its spiral arms wind all the way into the center, so that ESO 498-G5's core looks like a bit like a miniature spiral galaxy. This sort of structure is in contrast to the elliptical star-filled centers (or bulges) of many other spiral galaxies, which instead appear as glowing masses, as in the case of NGC 6384. Astronomers refer to the distinctive spiral-like bulge of galaxies such as ESO 498-G5 as disc-type bulges, or pseudo-bulges, while bright elliptical centres are called classical bulges. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, which does not have to contend with the distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere, have helped to reveal that these two different types of galactic centers exist. These observations have also shown that star formation is still going on in disc-type bulges and has ceased in classical bulges. This means that galaxies can be a bit like Russian matryoshka dolls: classical bulges look much like a miniature version of an elliptical galaxy, embedded in the centre of a spiral, while disc-type bulges look like a second, smaller spiral galaxy located at the heart of the first — a spiral within a spiral. The similarities between types of galaxy bulge and types of galaxy go beyond their appearance. Just like giant elliptical galaxies, the classical bulges consist of great swarms of stars moving about in random orbits. Conversely, the structure and movement of stars within disc-type bulges mirror the spiral arms arrayed in a galaxy's disc. These differences suggest different origins for the two types of bulges: while classical bulges are thought to develop through major events, such as mergers with other galaxies, disc-type bulges evolve gradually, developing their spiral pattern as stars and gas migrate to the galaxy’s center. ESO 498-G5 is located around 100 million light-years away in the constellation of Pyxis (The Compass). This image is made up of exposures in visible and infrared light taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The field of view is approximately 3.3 by 1.6 arcminutes. credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

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On the night of April 21, the 2012 Lyrid meteor shower peaked in the skies over Earth. While NASA all-sky cameras were looking up at the night skies, astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station trained his video camera on Earth below. Footage from that night is now revealing breathtaking images of Earth at night with meteors ablating -- or burning up -- in the atmosphere. This downlinked image shows a very probable Lyrid in a six-second exposure, taken on April 22, 2012 at 5:34:22 UT. The International Space Station position was over 88.5 W, 19.9 N at an altitude of 392 km. NASA astronomer Bill Cooke mapped the meteor to the star field -- seen in this annotated image -- and confirmed that the meteor originated from the Lyrid radiant. The image is rotated so that the north celestial pole (NCP) is roughly in the up direction. The lights of Florida are clearly visible to the right of the meteor. Cuba, the Florida Keys and the eastern Gulf Coast shoreline are also visible. Some brilliant flashes of lightning are also prevalent in the image. credit: NASA

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The Viking mission to Mars involved the launch of two orbiters in the late summer of 1975, each with its own golf cart-sized lander. Viking 1 reached Mars orbit in June 1976; a month later it snapped this series of images showing a large swath of the planet facing east near the planet's south pole. At top, the thin Martian atmosphere shows up as a haze over the blackness of outer space. Moving down the image, the large asteroid impact basin Argyre Planitia is seen covered by frost. If you look closely, the crater just above Argyre — named Galle — has a natural smiley face formation! Below that, there is double ringed crater named Lowell. NASA has made available all raw images for many of its past missions, which many talented amateurs have downloaded for use in their favorite image processing software and 3D modelers to tease out new data from old pictures, which Daniel Macháček of the Czech Republic has done here. credit: NASA / JPL / Daniel Macháček