Cerro Paranal, in the high, dry, Atacama desert in Chile, is where some of the best astronomy in the world is done. It’s graced with incredibly dark and steady skies, and a view of the southern hemisphere skies that, frankly, makes me jealous.

So it’s hard to argue with the title of this short time lapse video, An Astronomer’s Paradise:

This was taken by photographer Babak Tafreshi, who alerted me that he had put it online. Watch it to 1:30 in if only to watch Orion rise — upside down, to my northern hemisphere bias! — with colors and texture that are simply stunning.

Isn’t that awesome? And then a few seconds later, he shows a still image of the great Carina Nebula with the four domes of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer silhouetted against the sky. You can get a better look at that at The World At Night website, which has amazing shots of the sky.

I hope someday to make a trip to this part of the world. To see this for myself…

Credit: Babak Tafreshi

This is cute and all, but I was debating whether to run it on the blog or not when I got to the 1:05 mark or so, and decided to go ahead. Why? Watch:

Did you get the joke?

It’s a Chandra X-ray Observatory image in the background if that helps. Note the cat.

Also, the next shot shown of a cat batting at Io was also pretty funny.

They did miss a sure bet, though: Cat’s Eye, and the Cat’s Paw nebula. Neither of which, I’ll note, is in Leo.

This is so cool: NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft (now named Ebb and Flow) have cameras on board to take images of the lunar surface, and an animation has been put together of Ebb’s view of the Moon’s far side!

Pretty neat. I love the wide-angle view; the individual images were taken while Ebb was still over a thousand kilometers from the Moon. The huge circular feature you can see on the right 30 seconds into the video is Orientale Basin, an impact so huge it must’ve lit up the solar system a few billion years ago. That basin is nearly 1000 km (600 miles) across! See the LRO image below for a clearer view, and click it for more info.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what will be done with these cameras. As Principal Investigator Maria Zuber explains in the video, they were installed specifically for educational purposes, and kids all over America will get a chance to examine the data. I love this idea, since it means these children will be invested in the project itself, and remember it for their whole lives. It’s a fantastic idea.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

There is just something wonderful when Hubble points to nearby spiral galaxies. Sprawling and detailed, we get both great resolution on smaller features as well as a jaw-dropping overview of a grand spiral… like, say, NGC 1073:

Yeah, I know. [Click to galactinate -- I had to shrink it to fit here, and it lost a lot of the coolness when I did -- or grab the 3900 x 3000 pixel version.]

NGC 1073 is a decent-sized spiral galaxy about 60 million light years away. It’s actually part of a small, tight group of galaxies many of which are far more famous (like NGC 1068). But 1073 is important because of a simple property: it looks like us.

While it’s not a perfect match, NGC 1073 does bear an interesting resemblance to our Milky Way galaxy (UGC 12158 looks more like our galaxy, but is far bigger, for example). Both have large, rectangular bars going across their centers. Bars are a bit odd, since you’d expect the arms just to wind all the way down to the center. But the gravity of a galaxy isn’t like the gravity of a solar system, with a big heavy star sitting in the center. Galaxies have their mass spread out over a long distance, so what gas and dust clouds and stars feel in the way of gravity is different, and bars are a natural outcome of that. However, they’re still not perfectly understood. Bars may form when galaxies collide, and they might be an indication of a galaxy reaching middle age. Perhaps there are other factors as well.

Studying galaxies like NGC 1073 will help us understand how bars form, and why we have one too. Remember, we’re stuck inside our galaxy and can’t see it from the outside (that picture above is an illustration based on detailed observations). It really helps our understanding of the Milky Way to observe galaxies like ours.

An important thing too is that the two galaxies are different in some ways: NGC 1073 has more open arms, for example, compared to our more tightly wound arms. Those differences are telling us something as well. What is it that makes one galaxy hold its arms closer in, and another to fling them out? Why does this galaxy have two arms, and that one three? If you can look at two galaxies that are alike except in one way, it’s easier to isolate the cause. So studying NGC 1073 is a great way to study ourselves.

It always makes me think of Nietzsche, who wrote on the nature of man, "And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

But on the nature of the Universe, it changes: "And when you gaze long into an abyss, your gaze falls back on yourself."

[Note: Every week I hold a live video chat on Google+ where I answer questions from readers. I call it Q&BA, and when I get a question that stands alone, I'll make it its own video. ]

Every now and again, I hear this urban legend that pound for pound, the human body is actually hotter (or has more energy) than the Sun. I got this question in a recent Q&BA video chat session, so I tackled it. The answer is pretty interesting, and depends on how you ask the question!

I actually wrote about this legend on the blog a while back, and I show all the math. I really like this question, since it has a straightforward answer that makes it seem wrong, but then if you look at it more carefully the answer is a little trickier. And even in the video and that other post, it’s not really a complete answer; if you read the comments on the post you’ll see people arguing over it.

That’s really the best kind of question: the ones that keep on going! There’s always more stuff to figure out.

Visit the Q&BA Archive to see more videos like this one!

In 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will zip past Pluto, giving us our first close-up view of this tiny world.

The team behind the space probe have a nice idea to help raise awareness of it: make a new US Post Office stamp commemorating it. My friend Dan Durda, both an accomplished astronomer and artist, created this lovely design of the stamp:

[Click to enhadesenate. Note: the word "Forever" means the stamp is always good for first class postage, and is crossed out here to prevent forgery.]

It shows the spacecraft going by Pluto and its (relatively) freakishly large moon Charon. I like how he didn’t go for photorealism, but instead used an oil paint-like feel for it. The stamp is meant as a followup — I might even say send-up — of a US stamp issued in 1990 about Pluto that has the label "Not Yet Explored".

I like this stamp! I’d love to see it made official, too. Alan Stern, the head guy for the mission, created a petition to help that along. It takes more than just a nice stamp design to get the PO’s notice; it has to have public support as well. I signed the petition, and if you want to, please do.

I’ll note that I expect this to raise the specter of whether Pluto is a planet or not. I have some thoughts on that, and I’ll be posting again soon on that topic.

Thanks to astronaut Ron Garan on Google+, I was alerted to some amazing footage of the Moon setting as seen by astronauts on board the International Space Station. I uploaded it to YouTube and added some comments to show you something really cool…

[Set it to high-def and make it full screen!]

Astonishing, isn’t it? As the Moon sets, you’re seeing it through thicker and thicker air. The air acts like a lens, bending the light upward. The part of the Moon nearer the Earth’s limb gets bent up more, so the Moon looks like it’s getting flattened. Watch it again; the top of the Moon doesn’t appear to be affected much. It looks more like the bottom slows down and the top pushes into it. You can read about this effect in more detail in an earlier blog post.

Weirdly, as I watched the video, it looked very much like the whole Moon was shrinking as it set, as if it were receding rapidly. When I saw that I knew intuitively that couldn’t be real; the ISS is only moving a few thousand kilometers over the time this whole video was taken (about ten minutes), not nearly enough to see that big a change in the size of the Moon. It’s 400,000 kilometers away, after all! So I measured the size of the Moon on the screen, and incredibly the width doesn’t change. Do you see it appear to shrink too? It’s an illusion!

Funny how our brain interprets such things. As if seeing a gigantic rock moving through the sky while perched on board a football-field sized satellite moving at 30,000 km/hr isn’t weird enough!

Credit: Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth".