NASA Captures the Sun's Most Striking Photo Yet

via gizmodo.com

You are looking at the Sun's Evil Eye. Or the Death Star ready to shoot its planet-destructing laser. Or Jean Grey turning into the Phoenix. Actually, I really don't care about what the hell is going on here—it just looks amazing.

And the fact is that, even while this M4.7-class solar flare ended before any coronal mass ejection happened, it doesn't make it look less scary. According to NASA, "this image is shown in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength that is typically colorized in teal and that provided the most detailed picture of this particular flare."

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Supermoon Pictures: Best Shots of Year's Biggest Full Moon

via news.nationalgeographic.com

Due to the moon's egg-shaped orbit, our natural satellite is at perigee—its closest approach to Earth—about once a month. The term "supermoon" was coined in 1979 to describe a full moon that coincides with perigee. (Apogee, when the moon is farthest from us, also occurs on a roughly monthly schedule.)

At its closest on Saturday, the moon was 221,801 miles (356,955 kilometers) from our planet—and just minutes away from of the official full moon phase, at 11:35 p.m. ET.

"As a consequence, this translates into it appearing as much as 16 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than other full moons of 2012—not a huge amount, but definitely noticeable," said Geza Gyuk, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

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35 Awe-Inspiring Space Photography

via designknock.com

Our universe has a lot of beautiful and extraordinary places like space, some photographers tried to discover the hidden places of the space throughout some technology, photographers have discover some plants, moon, sun, galaxies , stars and more other objects through astrophotography because astrophotography is a special type of photography. In this post, I am sharing with you an awe-inspiriting collection of Space Photography or Astrophotography, below you can see the amazing collection of space photography or astrophotography.

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A Lego Tribute To The End Of The Space Shuttle Era

via themarysue.com

Well this is just plain pretty. It’s a Lego-made space shuttle launch! YouTube user vinciverse writes, “The launch took place from central Germany and reached a max altitude of 35000m. A 1600g meteo balloon filled with helium was used alongside a GoPro Hero, Spot GPS and of course Lego Space Shuttle model 3367.” (The song is “Welcome Home” by Radical Face) No word on how, when or if it ever came back to Earth but I like to think it just kept going…

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Month in Space: February 2012 - Slideshows and Picture Stories

via msnbc.msn.com

Earth hangs in the background of this picture showing Armadillo Aerospace's ballute - a re-entry system that's a cross between a balloon and a parachute. The photo was taken by a camera mounted on Armadillo's STIG-A III test rocket, which was launched from New Mexico's Spaceport America on Jan. 28. The rocket rose to a height of about 50 miles (80 kilometers) during the test flight.

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Breathtaking NASA Photos

via speckyboy.com

Unless you can afford a ticket to space ($200,000 with Virgin Galactic), the only way we will ever be able to clearly view our planet in its entirety or any distant galaxies is through the photographs released by NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space Agency). So, here are a few of my favorite pictures taken by NASA from its various space programs. You will find them breathtaking.

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Distant Planet An Exotic Water-world

A new class of planet has emerged from the buzzing masses of celestial spinners, a type unlike the rocky, gassy and icy worlds shuffling around the solar system.

The poster-planet for this new order is GJ 1214b, first discovered in 2009 and now shown to be a steamy, water-rich sphere. But it’s not a water-world in the sense of splashing oceans and Kevin Costner: Scientists suspect that the planet’s interior is filled with some exotic, high-pressure form of solid H2O unlike anything seen on Earth.

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Canadian teens send Lego-Astronaut 15 miles into space!?

via news.cnet.com

Why build a Gingrichian lunar colony, which would cost billions, when you can send a man nearly into space for only $400?

That's what Canadians Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad did with an albeit plastic man from Lego and a modified weather balloon.

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Top 24 Deep Space Pictures of 2011

via blogs.discovermagazine.com

As promised, here's Part 3 of my Top Astronomy Pictures of 2011: Deep Space Objects. Remember in Parts 1 and 2 when I said that putting together these lists was hard? I was stupid. Because those times weren't hard at all compared to this! Out of about a hundred objects I had to cull them over and over again, until I was left with what's here... and it was excruciating. Which gorgeous spiral doesn't make the list? How can I cut that nebula?

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NASA probe at solar system's edge

via msnbc.msn.com

After more than 30 years of traveling through the cosmos, a far-flung NASA spacecraft has entered an uncharted region between our solar system and interstellar space, scientists announced Monday.

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10 images from NASA's Spitzer telescope: Unique viewpoint

via mnn.com

NASA calls Lyman Spitzer Jr., (1914-1997) one of the 20th century's greatest scientists. The longtime Princeton astrophysicist lobbied for a large space telescope as early as 1946, work that culminated in the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. After Spitzer's death in 1997, NASA continued to develop the Great Observatories Program, a group of four space-based telescopes each observing the universe in a different kind of light. Besides Hubble, the other telescopes include Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (CXO). The final telescope was launched in 2003, consisting of "a large telescope and three cryogenically cooled instruments capable of studying the universe at near-to-far infrared wavelengths." NASA named this new space-flyer the Spitzer Space Telescope in honor of the visionary scientist. (Text: Katherine Butler)

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Hubble Finds tiny galaxies bursting with stars

via photoblog.msnbc.msn.com

The 69 dwarf galaxies were spotted during a three-year sky scan known as the Cosmic Assembly Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey, or CANDELS. Their average mass is only about 1 percent the mass of our own Milky Way galaxy, but they're churning out stars at such a furious pace that the stars are on track to double in just 10 million years. It would take the Milky Way 10 billion years to achieve a similar doubling.

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Weird Spiral Star Discovered - 14 Billion Miles Wide

via dailygalaxy.com

Two spiral arms emerge from the gas-rich disk around SAO 206462, a young star in the constellation Lupus. This image, acquired by the Subaru Telescope and its HiCIAO instrument, is the first to show spiral arms in a circumstellar disk. The disk itself is some 14 billion miles across, or about twice the size of Pluto's orbit in our own solar system.

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China’s Space Station Moves Forward

via bloomberg.com

China successfully launched the Shenzhou-8 spacecraft earlier today, part of an effort to set up a permanent manned space station by 2020, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The unmanned spacecraft blasted off at 5:58 a.m. local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, Xinhua reported. It is set to dock with the Tiangong-1 or “Heavenly Palace” craft launched in September.

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Something Has Exploded In a Spectacular Fashion On Uranus

via gizmodo.com

Quit snickering! Something on Uranus has erupted and now scientists are all in a tizzy about what and why it might be.

The news is exciting for a number of reasons. The simplest being we know very little about Uranus, mostly due to its incredible distance form Earth and because it's, well, frankly one of the more "boring" planets out there.

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How The New Mars Rover's Power Supply Works (This Sucker's Nuclear!)

via gizmodo.com

There's a reason Curiosity's fancy new Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator isn't going to be installed until just days before its launch. It's radioactive, powered by a special form of plutonium dioxide that won't be rendered useless by the red planet's dust issues.

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Another Dead Satellite Is Blindly Plummeting to Earth

via gizmodo.com

So apparently dead satellites blithely falling from the sky is a thing now. After last week's UARS debacle, the now-defunct German Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT) is scheduled to crash to Earth in late October or early November.

The ROSAT was originally an X-Ray observatory developed by Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom and launched in 1990. Its design life was 18 months, but it functioned fully through 1994, and was only shut down for good in 1999. And now it's coming to kill us all.

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Gamers help discover two new planets

via digitaltrends.com

Using the game Planet Hunters, gamers have discovered two new planets in the Cygnus constellation.

In what is starting to look like the beginnings of a trend, casual gamers have helped scientists make significant discoveries through a specially designed game for the second time this month. Using a small portion of the massive amounts of data collected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, people playing the browser-based game Planet Hunters have helped to identify two new planets in the Cygnus Constellation.

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NASA Picture Of the Day - Asteroid Caught Marching Across Tadpole Nebula

via nasa.gov

This infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole Nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by. The asteroid, called 1719 Jens, left tracks across the image. A second asteroid was also observed cruising by.

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NASA makes famous sound bites available for use as ringtones

via digitaltrends.com

NASA has released a collection of famous sounds and commentaries that can be used as ringtones or as computer notification noises.

NASA has been going through its audio archives and come up with a selection of what it’s calling “historic and interesting sounds” that can be used as ringtones or computer notification noises.

Imagine that, every time your phone rings, you could have Neil Armstrong piping up with the immortal line: “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”

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