A tour of aurora borealis and other gorgeous sites from the ISS;

From the caption:

NASA Television’s newest offering, NASA TV UHD, brings ultra-high definition video to a new level with the kind of imagery only the world’s leader in space exploration could provide.

Harmonic produced this show exclusively for NASA TV UHD, using time-lapses shot from the International Space Station, showing both the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis phenomena that occur when electrically charged electrons and protons in the Earth’s magnetic field collide with neutral atoms in the upper atmosphere.

For more info: http://go.nasa.gov/1lyUGlY

Update: More ISS earth views:

Update: Yet more ultra high-def views of earth:

Activism, Space Policy, SpaceCasts

Video: TMRO 9.13 – #VoteForSpace

April 18, 2016 TopSpacer

The latest episode of the TMRO.tv live show is now available in the archive: #VoteForSpace – TMRO

This week we bring on guest John Benac, Managing Director of Vote For Space. For more information on Vote For Space hit up their website at http://www.voteforspace.com

News topics discussed:

* Russian billionaire devotes $100 million to star flight initiative
* Final space shuttle fuel tank in existence heads to California museum
* Binary star discovered approaching galactic escape velocity
* BEAM installed on ISS
* Bigelow Aerospace partners with ULA to launch private space habitats
* Chain of onboard failures dooms Hitomi – Kepler Returns

TMRO is viewer supported:

TMRO Live is a crowd funded show. If you like what you see, don’t forget to Subscribe to our YouTube channel and consider becoming a citizen of TMRO over at http://www.patreon.com/tmro

Space Arts

Rik Allen creates sci-fi glass sculptures

April 18, 2016 TopSpacer

Glass artist Rik Allen specializes in sci-fi space inspired sculptures: Area glass artist making art of rocket science – Connecticut Post.

Allen made his first glass spaceship in 1998 as a gift for his nephew.

Since then, he has built spaceships, pieces of space travel equipment and astronaut-like figures of various sizes. He’s built them out of glass and some metals.

Check out his portfolio here.

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History

The Kettering Satellite Tracking Group

April 16, 2016 TopSpacer

Check out this interesting history of the Kettering Satellite Tracking Group, a club of students organized by teacher Geoffrey Perry at the Kettering Grammar School in Northamptonshire, England during the Cold War: Kettering Cosmos: How school children exposed Soviet secret – BBC News.

The group monitored Soviet radio communications dealing with the space program and made a number of revelations about Soviet space activities. For example, in 1966 they were the first to reveal publicly the location of the Plesetsk launch site in north Russia.

Videos: Rocket landings update

April 16, 2016 TopSpacer

Michael Clark gives an update on recent rocket developments by Blue Origin and SpaceX:

Here are scenes of the Port Canaveral dock where the SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage that successfully landed on a droneship was prepared this week for transport to Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center (video via www.USLaunchReport.com):