Category Archives: Unrelated but Interesting

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station’s modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

 

 

SAN FRANCISCO — The Earth at night looks more beautiful than it ever has before in these incredible new images from NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite.

More images at this link: (click)

Cheetahs are the fastest runners on the planet. Combining the resources of National Geographic and the Cincinnati Zoo, and drawing on the skills of an incredible crew, we documented these amazing cats in a way that’s never been done before.

Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, the team captured every nuance of the cat’s movement as it reached top speeds of 60+ miles per hour.

The extraordinary footage that follows is a compilation of multiple runs by five cheetahs during three days of filming.

(link: http://vimeo.com/53914149)

See how it was filmed:

(link: http://vimeo.com/53129783)

A question that bothered me a lot when I was younger, and it bothered me even more when I found out about Olber’s Paradox. Here’s my take.

Get astronomy twitter posts here:

http://twitter.com/DeepAstronomy

Music used:

Revised Youth – Broken Kites:
http://www.archive.org/details/brokenkites_the_envious_dead

Touch the Sky – Iambic^2:
http://www.archive.org/details/laridae031

This video takes SDO images and applies additional processing to enhance the structures visible. While there is no scientific value to this processing, it does result in a beautiful, new way of looking at the sun. The original frames are in the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet. This wavelength shows plasma in the solar atmosphere, called the corona, that is around 600,000 Kelvin. The loops represent plasma held in place by magnetic fields. They are concentrated in “active regions” where the magnetic fields are the strongest. These active regions usually appear in visible light as sunspots. The events in this video represent 24 hours of activity on September 25, 2011.

Courtesy of NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center