ISS over the Middle East
The Middle East is featured in this image taken from the International Space Station by an Expedition 30 crew member at 12:16 GMT on May 12, 2012. Part of Syria is visible to the right at the Mediterranean Sea.
Inside the Dragon
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station take a look inside the Dragon spacecraft docked to Harmony module. The hatch was opened last Saturday beginning four days of operations to unload more than 1,000 pounds of cargo from Dragon and reload it with experiments and cargo for a return trip to Earth. It is scheduled for splashdown several hundred miles west of California on May 31.
The Southern Milky Way Above ALMA
ESO Photo Ambassador Babak Tafreshi snapped this remarkable image of the antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), set against the splendour of the Milky Way. The richness of the sky in this picture attests to the unsurpassed conditions for astronomy on the 5000-metre-high Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama region.
This view shows the constellations of Carina and Vela. The dark, wispy dust clouds of the Milky Way streak from middle top left to middle bottom right. The bright orange star in the upper left is Suhail in Vela, while the similarly orange star in the upper middle is Avior, in Carina.
Of the three bright blue stars that form an “L” near these stars, the left two belong to Vela, and the right one to Carina. And exactly in the centre of the image below these stars gleams the pink glow of the Carina Nebula.
Splitting Titan
Light and dark halves of Titan are visible in this Cassini image taken with a spectral filter sensitive to absorption of certain wavelengths of light by methane in the moon’s atmosphere, illustrating the seasonal changes in the northern and southern hemispheres. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 31, 2012 from a distance of approximately 210,000 km from Titan.
The Swan and the Butterfly
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 7026, a planetary nebula. Located just beyond the tip of the tail of the constellation of Cygnus, this butterfly-shaped cloud of glowing gas and dust is the wreckage of a star similar to the Sun.
Fluorescent lights on Earth get their bright colours from the gases they are filled with. Neon signs, famously, produce a bright red colour, while ultraviolet lights (black lights) typically contain mercury. The same goes for nebulae: their vivid colours are produced by the mix of gases present in them.
This image of NGC 7026 shows starlight in green, light from glowing nitrogen gas in red, and light from oxygen in blue (in reality, this appears green, but the colour in this image has been shifted to increase the contrast). As well as visible light, NGC 7026 emits X-ray radiation, which is a result of the extremely high temperatures of the gas in NGC 7026.
Astronaut Snaps Stunning Meteor Pictures from Space
On the night of April 21, the 2012 Lyrid meteor shower peaked in the skies over Earth. While NASA allsky cameras were looking up at the night skies, astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station trained his video camera on Earth below. This image was taken on April 22, 2012.
CREDIT: NASA/JSC/D. PettitThe Lyrid meteor shower of April put on an eye-catching sky show as seen from Earth, but the view from space was truly spectacular.
Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station, pointed his camera downward during the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower, in the early morning hours of April 22. From about 240 miles (386 kilometers) up, he captured stunning footage of meteors streaking through our planet’s dark skies.
A Partial Eclipse Over Manila Bay
Credit & Copyright: Armando Lee (Astron. League Philippines), F. Naelga Jr., 100 Hours of Astronomy (IYA2009)Explanation: What’s happened to the setting Sun? An eclipse! In early 2009, the Moon eclipsed part of the Sun as visible from parts of Africa, Australia, and Asia. In particular the above image, taken from the Mall of Asia seawall, caught a partially eclipsed Sun setting over Manila Bay in the Philippines. Piers are visible in silhouette in the foreground. Eclipse chasers and well placed sky enthusiasts captured many other interesting and artistic images of the year’s only annular solar eclipse, including movies, eclipse shadow arrays, and rings of fire. Today parts of the Sun again will become briefly blocked by the Moon, again visible to some as a partial eclipse of a setting Sun. A small swath of Earth, however, will be exposed to the unusual ring of fire effect when the Moon is completely surrounded by the glowing light of the slightly larger Sun.
