Over the next few days, the International Space Station is making a series of excellent early evening passes over the western United States. I missed the one Friday night due to clouds, but Saturday (9/11) was perfectly clear.

With my off-the-shelf digital camera set to ISO 400, f/3.5, and using a 15 second exposure, I got a couple of very cool shots. Here it is rising in the northwest over my back yard:

[Click to embiggen. You really should go see the biggest versions of these shots to appreciate them.]

The bright star in the center is the orange giant Arcturus, a star much like the Sun but already in its death throes. The Sun will look like Arcturus in about 6 billion more years… and bear in mind that while it was only about half as bright as the space station when I took that shot, Arcturus was about a trillion times farther away.

Boy howdy.

Here is another one I took a few seconds later, when the ISS was passing just to the south and east of the constellation of Corona Borealis:
(more…)

Corey Powell is the editor-in-chief of Discover Magazine, and is a very smart, funny, and handsome guy — and I’m not just saying that because he’s currently editing a print piece I’ve written for the magazine and I don’t want him to cut a single word of my fabulous prose.

But he is a pretty good writer (for an editor), and for the 30th anniversary of the magazine he’s written a piece called 30 Ways the World Could End. It’s pretty good, and has some fun ideas in it. And since I’m a lowly writer and he’s a lofty editor, I would never dream of mentioning that really his article is about how humanity might end and not the whole world. That would be foolish of me.

Still — and I oughta know — this is a fun topic to think about. And who knows? Maybe we’ll wind up saving the world by thinking about how things might eventually not go our way.

Sometimes being stuck on Earth is a bummer. We miss a lot of stuff! Like, f’rinstance, this view of the Moon which is literally impossible to get from the surface of the Earth:

It looks like the Moon, doesn’t it? But it also looks different. That’s because this mosaic of 3700+ images shows the Moon as if you were seeing it from above its east side — like you were hovering above it and following it as it orbits the Earth!

The images were taken with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Wide Angle Camera, which can snap between roughly 50-100 km (30 – 60 miles) of lunar landscape in one image. As LRO circles the Moon, the camera builds up a map of the entire surface, but only one narrow strip at a time. Astronomers can then use those images to create a mosaic of the Moon as seen from any angle… but it’s not easy.
(more…)

[Update: the video has been removed the by the owner. I'm not sure why, so I dropped him an email about it. Stay tuned!]

This is pretty cool: back in July 2007, an amateur astronomer made a video of the International Space Station as it passed directly in front of the Sun:

Cool!

There’s a lot to note here:

1) Most obvious is the speed of the ISS. It orbits the Earth a mere 350 or so kilometers (220 miles) up; I like to say that if you live in DC and see it pass overhead, it’s about the same distance from you as New York City. So it’s actually pretty close to the Earth’s surface, and screaming around at 8 km/sec (5 miles/sec). That’s a good clip! From the point of view of someone watching from the ground, it only takes a couple of minutes for the station to go clear across the sky, horizon to horizon.

Also, the Sun is pretty small in the sky; you can easily cover it with your outstretched thumb. So the great speed of the ISS coupled with the small apparent size of the Sun means the entire pass will take less than a second!
(more…)

What does a hurricane look like from orbit? This:

[Click for Corioliciousness.]

Pretty cool. Hurricane Earl was photographed by an astronaut aboard the space station on August 30. Earl is a massive hurricane barraging the east coast of the US. But from this oblique angle the storm bands blur together, giving the massive storm a smooth, almost serene look. Underneath it, I imagine, the situation looks much different.

Funny how, from space, so many things lose their immediacy, their violent nature, and become beautiful.

Image credit: NASA image courtesy NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

In 2007, a young woman with no prior experience in astronomy made a discovery that led to dozens of astronomers using billions of dollars of equipment to figure out the solution to the mystery. The young woman, named Hanny, and the object — whimsically named the Voorwerp — wound up becoming a fantastic demonstration of how citizen science works, and how it can lead to a greater understanding of the Universe.

My friend Pamela Gay, an astronomer and educator, spearheaded an effort to get this story out to the folks who need it most: kids! She and her team created a comic book based on Hanny’s story, called "Hanny and the Mystery of the Voorwerp" – you can learn more about it at that link. The comic book (a panel is shown above) will be premiered at Dragon*Con this weekend, but you can pre-order a copy for $5. If you’re an educator, or are looking to get your kids interested in science, you should check it out.

It’s a cute story, but also an important one. You don’t need a big fancy degree or even years of experience to make a big discovery. Sometimes what you need is a bright, curious mind, and the desire to explore.

This image is stunning. And not just because, well, it’s all explodey and stuff:

[Click to explodenate.]

The three panels show a 1986 test of a Tomahawk cruise missile. The missile traveled 640 km (400 mile) low over the terrain to detonate above the target, a decommissioned fighter plane. It’s pretty clear the test was a success.

But what caught my eye immediately was the middle panel. Let me zoom it for you:

[Click to hugely embiggen!]

[Note: added noon PDT Friday: There's a lot of discussion in the comments below on both the veracity of this test and my interpretation. I've been on travel the past couple of days, finishing up some Bad Universe stuff, so I haven't been able to look into this. So I admit I might be wrong, but won't know one way or another until I can sit and look into this. Stay Tuned.]

Now look carefully there. When the missile exploded, the expanding debris cloud from the vaporized weapon was probably moving faster than the speed of sound. Even so, in this second picture you can see none of it had touched the plane yet when the shot was snapped.

Yet look at the plane: it’s on fire. How can that be?
(more…)