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12 posts total
So many beautiful aurora photos going around right now. Wonder where those amazing colors come from? Here's a helpful breakdown. When you split up the light of a typical aurora, it looks like this. Many colors from just nitrogen & oxygen! https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/content/aurora-tutorial #aurora #space #science #nature This is the surface of a comet! Dust is swirling around the surface of Comet 67/P -- captured in 2016 by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, processing by Jacint Roger Perez. Still one of the most remarkable scenes in space exploration.
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@coreyspowell  I remember seeing this for the first time back then. Watching the dust passing in front of us. It was, and frankly still is, just astounding.  For decades, astronomers have dreamed of setting up an observatory on the far side of the Moon. I read about it as a kid. Now it's happening! The LuSEE-Night radio telescope is under construction, and is scheduled to land on the lunar farside in 2025. It's a pathfinder for a much bigger radio telescope that would follow. https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/09/26/listening-to-the-radio-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon/ #space #nasa #science
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@coreyspowell 2025? That's way sooner than I ever expected. I kind of thought of this as one of those "hopefully 20 years from now" kind of things.   I can't help wondering what Pink Floyd would think of listening to radio on the dark side of the moon The expansion of the universe stretches time as well as space: A new study of distant quasars shows that their clocks appear to be ticking just 1/5th as quickly as our clocks here. https://theconversation.com/astronomers-see-ancient-galaxies-flickering-in-slow-motion-due-to-expanding-space-208621 #science #cosmology #nature Full study here: "Detection of the Cosmological Time Dilation of High Redshift Quasars" 24 hours of Earth's rotation, with the camera locked to the sky instead of the ground. We're all hanging out on this spinning rock.
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@coreyspowell perfectly looped as well! Any idea how it was done? Did they hook it up to a motor to have the opposite spin?  New images from JWST, zooming in on Uranus. https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-117 #NASA #JWST Look west this evening for a beautiful celestial display. For those who missed it, this is a fabulous photo of today's conjunction of Jupiter & the crescent Moon: 10.8% waxing crescent moon w/lovely Earthshine Jupiter w/handful of it’s moons To the right of Jupiter is HD 3628, a high proper motion star of the constellation Pisces If you saw this headline, or one like it, you might reasonably have thought the world has gone mad. The inside of the Earth is spinning backwards? This is a real time-lapse video of planets orbiting the star HR 8799, 133 light years away: four super-Jupiter worlds dancing around their sun. Amazing! The planets around star HR 8799 are unusually easy to detect because they're massive (heftier than Jupiter), young (still glowing with heat from their formation), and widely separated. Planet b is twice as far from its star as Pluto is from the Sun. Even Planet e, the innermost, is about as far out as Uranus. The view from NASA's Artemis mission yesterday is just...words fail me. HT @JPMajor@twitter.com and the brilliant engineers & scientists who made this happen.
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@coreyspowell have you ever watched kubrik's 2001? this reminds me of a central theme Aurora borealis on Jupiter, imaged by the Hubble telescope on Sept 29, 2022. Any time you need to escape from this world, drop by the PlanetaryLightShow site & watch flickering auroras on Saturn and Jupiter. Beautiful and mind-boggling. A group at Johns Hopkins has created a scrollable, interactive map of the entire universe, from here to the cosmic microwave background.
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@coreyspowell Everyone has already said it, but I’ll add mine: this is a childhood and adult dream come true. Amazing, thanks for sharing! |
Gregory's Server
Colors of an aurora depend not only on which element is emitting light, but also on *where* it is.
Oxygen at high altitudes glows red; at lower altitudes it glows green. Purple nitrogen is lower still.
Atoms are complicated creatures!
#aurora #science #nature #physics