So Juan Carlos Casado took this totally amazing and real photo of an aurora in Greenland in August. Astronomy Picture of the Day posted it (go there and you can mouse over the photo to see constellations highlighted), but that is insufficient. This picture needs to be everywhere. On all the things. Forever.
A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.
Tag Archives: Astronomy Picture of the Day
Well would you look at that, it’s APOD time again.
In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism – a part of the sky identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts. The new star was visible for months and is thought to be the earliest recorded supernova. This multiwavelength composite image from orbiting telescopes of the 21st century, XMM-Newton and Chandra in X-rays, and Spitzer and WISE in infrared, shows RCW 86, understood to be the remnant of that stellar explosion. The false-color view traces interstellar gas heated by the expanding supernova shock wave at X-ray energies (blue and green) and interstellar dust radiating at cooler temperatures in infrared light (yellow and red).
Stunning photo on APOD yesterday:
Pictured, behind this darker cloud, is a pileus iridescent cloud, a group of water droplets that have a uniformly similar size and so together diffract different colors of sunlight by different amounts. The above image was taken just after the picturesque sightwas noticed by chance by a photographer in Ethiopia. A more detailed picture of the same cloud shows not only many colors, but unusual dark and wavy bands whose origins are thought related to wave disturbances in the cloud.
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is the internet’s greatest source of desktop pictures. It by itself justifies the entire technology of RSS. Somehow we’ve gone more than 250 posts here on NS without slapping up something from APOD for you, so that ends right now. This is a photo of the Mount Tiede volcano in Spain, taken by Juan Carlos Casado.
The volcano is the large, triangular shadow in the background. APOD’s writeup talks about how the volcano casts such a triangular shadow even though it’s not really shaped like that at all. And that’s all well and good, but can we talk about how gorgeous this shot is?
- ‘Ili:
- Are these colors even possible?
- Colin:
- Saw that.
- Colin:
- “What the flying fuck?”