Category Archives: Astronomy

A quintet of Saturn moons

The ESA posts a great picture of a Quintet of Moons:

The image description:

Five moons pose for the international Cassini spacecraft to create this beautiful portrait with Saturn’s rings.

This view, from 29 July 2011, looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane.

At the far right, and obscuring Saturn itself, is the planet’s second largest moon Rhea, which spans 1528 km. Rhea is closest to Cassini in this composition, at a distance of 1.1 million kilometres. Its heavily cratered surface bears witness to a violent history, with many craters overlapping or erasing the traces of older impact events.

The nearly 400 km-wide Mimas lies just beyond, and seemingly levitates just above Saturn’s innermost rings. The outline of the moon’s large, distinguishing crater Herschel is partially covered by Rhea, but can just be made out along with numerous smaller craters.

Brightly reflective Enceladus appears above the centre of the image and lies beyond the rings, at a distance of 1.8 million kilometres from Cassini. Although not visible in this image, icy Enceladus is covered with a network of frozen ridges and troughs, with plumes of ice particles jetting from fissures in its southern hemisphere.

To the lower left, tiny Pandora, just 81 km across, appears skewered by Saturn’s outer rings – in fact, it orbits between the planet’s A and F rings.

Last but not least, the irregularly shaped Janus lies at the far left of the image, several shadowy surface markings corresponding to large impact craters.

The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington DC, USA.

 

Video: The Sounds of Interstellar Space

The latest NASA ScienceCast is titled The Sounds of Interstellar Space:

For more about space “sounds” see the Natural Radio subsection of  HobbySpace Radio. See also the Natural Space Music section, which offers resources for music created in combination with space radio sounds. Prof. Don Gurnett, who is mentioned in the above video, has had his recordings of space sounds included in a number of works such as the Terry Riley composition titled Sun Rings .

Amateur astronomer building telescope with 1.8 meter mirror

Truck driver and amateur astronomer Mike Clements is building a telescope with a 1.8 meter (70 in) mirror he got as surplus from a government auction:

Here is a fun TV news video about Clements from last year:

And here is their updated report from this week:

 

Update: Via the comments comes this pointer to the company supplying Clements with the spray system to silver the mirror:  Mike Clements  – Angel Gilding.

Video: “Dazzling Time-Lapse Reveals America’s Great Spaces”

Here’s a video with some spectacular time lapse imagery of landscapes and skies coupled with a great soundtrack : Gorgeous Time-Lapse Video Highlights America’s Great Spaces – News Watch/National Geographic

From the caption:

October 23, 2013—After quitting a comfortable day job, photographer Shane Black spent two months on the road shooting time-lapses of some of America’s most beautiful spots. His “Adventure Is Calling” video is the mesmerizing result, made from about 10,000 of the photos he took.

See the complete caption for the list of places seen in the video.