Tomorrow morning, July 21, at 5:56 a.m. EDT (09:56 GMT), the Space Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis is scheduled to set wheels down on Earth one last time. When it launched, though, pictures were taken as the rocket rolled that allowed Nathaniel Burton-Bradford to create a 3D red/cyan anaglyph:

[Click to enlaunchenate.]

I posted another 3D image he made of Atlantis, too, and he has one of the ISS he just made as well. If you don’t have red/cyan glasses, you can search for ‘em online. They’re pretty cheap, and I do sometimes link to pictures like this… like in Related Posts below. It’s totally worth a buck, just for that moment of "wow".

Credit: NASA, Nathanial Burton Bradford

On July 16, an astronaut on the International Space Station captured this eerie and cool picture of Atlantis and the ISS with the aurora australis in the background:

[Click to embiggen.]

You can see Atlantis on the right and one of the station’s solar panels on the left. In the middle is the Orbiter’s robot arm hanging down (as much as "down" makes any sense in space). That light near the top of the arm is not a star but an actual light, to help illuminate shadowed areas being worked on.

The aurora australis, or southern lights, are the counterpart to the aurora borealis (northern lights). The actual phenomenon is quite complicated, but in essence subatomic particles from the Sun are captured by the Earth’s magnetic field. They’re channeled down to the magnetic poles, which are very near the Earth’s physical poles. The particles slam into the atmosphere, stripping electrons off of air molecules. When the electrons recombine with the molecules, they give off light exciting the electrons in atoms high in the air, and when the electrons give up that energy the atoms glow. The color depends on the atom or molecule involved; oxygen emits strongly in the green, while nitrogen is preferentially red. In reality most substances emit at several different colors, but the strengths change; oxygen emits in the red as well but much more weakly than green. When you see red in an aurora, it’s usually mostly nitrogen you’re seeing.

That thin brownish arc is real too! That’s a layer of aerosol haze, particles suspended high in the atmosphere. When we look up from the ground we see right through it, but seen from nearly edge-on it becomes visible. You can spot it in a lot of photos of the Earth’s limb taken at night from space.

I’ll admit, when I first saw this picture it momentarily threw me. How could the clouds be so bright (like it’s daytime) and yet the aurora be visible? Then I remembered that the Moon was just past full on July 16, when this picture was taken. Even though this is a night scene, the Moon was bright enough to light up the clouds. The exposure time was several seconds (you can see the stars are slightly trailed as the Orbiter moves around the Earth), plenty of time for the Moon to illuminate the clouds. It also lit up the cowling over the Orbiter’s engines as well.

Today, Monday, July 17, the astronauts from Atlantis moved from the ISS back to the Orbiter and closed the hatches. Tonight at 02:28 Eastern (US) time (06:28 GMT), Atlantis is scheduled to undock from the station, and on July 21st it will return to Earth for the final time, marking the end of the Shuttle era for NASA.

This is pretty amazing: on Sunday, July 17, amateur astronomer Scott Ferguson was able to get video of the Orbiter Atlantis docked to the International Space Station when they passed overhead in broad daylight!

How cool is that?

This looks legit to me. This video was taken about 1.25 hours after the Sun rose! Atlantis is the glowing white object at the top of the ISS. You can clearly see the solar panels on the station, and get a hint of other structures too. The two dark donuts are dust motes on the camera detector; they are out of focus and optical effects make them look like rings — you see these a lot in astrophotography, but they’re generally not noticed because the background is dark. In this case, the morning sky makes them more obvious.

Ferguson used a 20 cm (8 inch) telescope and a video camera optimized for astrophotography. He also used software that predicted the position and path of the two orbiting spacecraft; though the ISS can get about as bright as Venus, it’s very hard to see during the day, so having a solid prediction was critical. He used guiding software which he had to assist by hand, which is remarkable. As he told me, he was hoping to get a night-time pass, but there weren’t any at his location. Rather than give up, he saw an early morning pass, so gave it a shot… and wound up with this astonishing footage.

It’s funny to think of how much detail you can see, but when it passes overhead the ISS is only 350 km (210 miles) or so above you (and even when it’s halfway up the sky it’s only about 150 km farther away). And since it’s 100 meters across, it actually can be easily resolved by binoculars! You won’t see much, but it will clearly be an extended object, and not just a dot. Through a telescope, well, you can see that for yourself.

This is quite an accomplishment, and I’m glad someone was able to do it in the final days of the Orbiter’s mission. I was actually hoping we’d see something spectacular from this last hurrah, and yeah, I think this qualifies.

This picture of Atlantis approaching the International Space Station made me laugh:

That is all.

[UPDATE: OK, maybe that isn't all. A lot of people don't get why this picture made me laugh; I thought it looked funny because it overflows the frame and is upside-down compared to how we usually see it. It's cute. As for the title, how do bats sleep?]

Credit: NASA

Nathanial Burton Bradford takes images from NASA and other science sources and creates 3D red/blue anaglyphs from them. If you have a pair of those glasses, then feast your eyes on this tremendous one he made of Atlantis from yesterday’s 360° pitch maneuver:

Cooool. What really makes this one is the Vertical Stabilizer (the tail fin, if you like) popping out right at you. Nathanial’s also done one of the launch itself. He says he’s looking for more, so I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. Check back on his Flickr pages to see for yourself.

Credit: NASA, Nathanial Burton Bradford

On Friday, the Space Shuttle Atlantis flew into space for the last time. After a dramatic countdown — there was a hold at 31 seconds before launch while a glitch was run down — it leapt into the sky, and into orbit.

It takes a while to catch up with the space station and match orbits, and even when it does there are some chores to perform. After the loss of Columbia in 2003, the Orbiters need to be checked to make sure the heat-retaining tiles are intact; it was damage to the wing that let super-heated plasma into Columbia when it was returning to Earth.

The Orbiters do a slow 360° flip, pitching all the way around, so cameras and astronauts on the station can take a looksee. NASA just released video of Atlantis’s last pirouette yesterday, July 10. I took the video and sped it up by a factor of four so you can see it clearly:

Pretty cool, huh? [Make sure to set the resolution to 720 or 1080p to get the full effect!] You can see the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, named Raffaello, in the payload bay; it’s filled with supplies and spare parts for the station.

You can watch the original version of the video on NASA’s site.

Credit: NASA

Did you know NASA collects 4 terabytes of data each day? And that a lot of this data is available to the public?

My friend Chris Pirillo interviewed Nick Skytland from NASA’s Open Government Initiative, and they talk about what NASA does beyond launching rockets:

Pretty cool. NASA does a lot of stuff… so of course the House of Representatives is talking about massively cutting it back. Incidentally, since writing that post, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is gathering her forces to block canceling the James Webb Space Telescope program. I sent her a note thanking her, and hopefully the Senate can reign in the House’s political bluster.

And speaking of all this, with the successful launch of Atlantis, if you have Google Earth you can track the location of the Orbiter! Pretty cool. Also, as usual, Heavens-Above.com will allow you to predict the times when Atlantis and the Space Station are visible from your location.