CWL

Up Close and Personal With Titan’s Haze

This is an approximate true color image of Titan’s haze layers, taken by Cassini’s Imaging Science Subsystem during Cassini’s 91st encounter with Titan on April 5, 2013.

Image: NASA / JPL / SSI / composite by Val Klavans

Titan’s upper haze layers appear blue, while its main atmospheric haze appear orange in this view. The difference in color is most likely due to particle size rather than composition. The blue haze probably consists of smaller particles than the orange haze.

Earth at Twilight

No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth.

Image Credit: ISS Expedition 2 Crew, Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, NASA

[Original image here]

Instead, the shadow line or terminator is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight. With the Sun illuminating the scene from the right, the cloud tops reflect gently reddened sunlight filtered through the dusty troposphere, the lowest layer of the planet’s nurturing atmosphere.

A clear high altitude layer, visible along the dayside’s upper edge, scatters blue sunlight and fades into the blackness of space. This picture actually is a single digital photograph taken in June of 2001 from the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of 211 nautical miles.

electricspacekoolaid:

Further Up Yonder: A Message To All Humankind

NASA: Earth at Night

“No way I’d want you to be left behind” — AC

Superman’s Home Planet Krypton ‘Found’

A prominent astrophysicist has pinned down a real location for Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton.

Krypton is found 27.1 light-years from Earth, in the southern constellation Corvus (The Crow), says Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City. The planet orbits the red dwarf star LHS 2520, which is cooler and smaller than our sun.

Tyson performed the celestial sleuthing at the request of DC Comics, which wanted to run a story about Superman’s search for his home planet.

The new book — Action Comics Superman #14, titled “Star Light, Star Bright” — comes out Wednesday (Nov. 7). Tyson appears within its pages, aiding the Man of Steel on his quest.

“As a native of Metropolis, I was delighted to help Superman, who has done so much for my city over all these years,” Tyson said in a statement. “And it’s clear that if he weren’t a superhero he would have made quite an astrophysicist.”

You’ll have to read “Star Light, Star Bright” to find out just how Superman and Tyson pinpoint Krypton. For amateur astronomers who want to spot the real star LHS 2520 in the night sky, here are its coordinates:

Right Ascension: 12 hours 10 minutes 5.77 seconds

Declination: -15 degrees 4 minutes 17.9 seconds

Proper Motion: 0.76 arcseconds per year, along 172.94 degrees from due north

Superman was born on Krytpon but was launched toward Earth as an infant by his father, Jor-El, just before the planet’s destruction. After touching down in Kansas, Superman was raised as Clark Kent by a farmer and his wife.

Now Superman will apparently know exactly where he came from.

“This is a major milestone in the Superman mythos that gives our super hero a place in the universe,” DC Entertainment co-publisher Dan DiDio said in a statement. “Having Neil deGrasse Tyson in the book was one thing, but by applying real-world science to this story he has forever changed Superman’s place in history. Now fans will be able to look up at the night’s sky and say, ‘That’s where Superman was born.’”

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Air traffic above Australia, Late Afternoon-Western Seaboard, Evening-Eastern Seaboard

Chasing clouds on Venus

Clouds regularly punctuate Earth’s blue sky, but on Venus the clouds never part, for the planet is wrapped entirely in a 20 km-thick veil of carbon dioxide and sulphuric dioxide haze.

This view shows the cloud tops of Venus as seen in ultraviolet light by the Venus Express spacecraft on 8 December 2011, from a distance of about 30 000 km.

Much of the image is occupied by the planet’s southern hemisphere, with the south pole at the bottom of the frame and the equator close to the top. The visible top cloud layer seen in the image is about 70 km above the planet’s surface.

the-universes-beautiful-mistakes:

This figure shows an actual image of a sunset on Earth compared to artistic representations for the best candidates of potential habitable worlds so far. The image corrects for the size, colors, and brightness of the star and sky as seen from an Earth-like world located in the orbits of these worlds. The size of and colors of the star of Kepler-22 b look similar to Earth because it orbits a Sun-like star. The sunsets of Gliese 667Cc and 581d look much redder because they orbit a red dwarf star, with the sky of Gliese 581d much darker due to its greater distance. The star of HD 85512b is the brightest of all cases although the star of Gliese 667Cc is the biggest. CREDIT: PHL @ UPR Arecibo.

the-star-stuff:

Spica, Mars and Saturn

A beautiful conjunction between three celestial bodies with different colors.
Spica is striking blue, Mars is reddish/orange and Satrun a pale yellow. 

By Luis Argerich

Possible Alien Planet Smaller Than Earth May Be Lava World

Illustration: An artist’s illustration of the alien planet UCF 1.01, a potential exoplanet 33 light-years from Earth that may be covered in lava. Credit: University of Central Florida

Scientists have discovered what appears to be an alien planet just two-thirds the size of Earth, a heat-blasted world perhaps covered in molten lava, a new study reports.

Astronomers discovered the newfound alien planet, known as UCF-1.01, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The diminutive world is just 33 light-years away, making it a near neighbor of Earth in the cosmic scheme of things.

“We have found strong evidence for a very small, very hot and very near planet with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope,” study lead author Kevin Stevenson, of the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, said in a statement. “Identifying nearby small planets such as UCF-1.01 may one day lead to their characterization using future instruments.”

Mercury And The Sun

Steaming Hot Planet in Infrared

Little Planet Lovejoy

by Alex Cherney

Once a bright apparition in the southern hemisphere dawn Comet Lovejoy is fading, but its long tail still stretches across skies near the south celestial pole. Captured on the morning of December 30th, the comet appears near edge of this little planet as well.

Of course, the little planet is actually planet Earth and the image was created from a 12 frame mosaic used to construct a spherical panorama. The type of stereographic projection used to map the image pixels is centered directly below the camera and is known as the little planet projection.

Stars surrounding this little planet were above the photographer’s cloudy horizon near the Bay of Islands on the Great Ocean Road in southern Victoria, Australia. Running alongside the Milky Way the comet can be identified, with other celestial highlights. Very bright stars Canopus and Sirius are right of the little planet.