ASTRONOMY - WR32 and Interstellar Clouds in Carina

 2021 February 8

WR32 and Interstellar Clouds in Carina
Image Credit & Copyright: Ariel Cappelletti

Explanation: Stars can be like artists. With interstellar gas as a canvas, a massive and tumultuous Wolf-Rayet star has created the picturesque ruffled half-circular filaments called WR32, on the image left. Additionally, the winds and radiation from a small cluster of stars, NGC 3324, have sculpted a 35 light year cavity on the upper right, with its right side appearing as a recognizable face in profile. This region's popular name is the Gabriela Mistral Nebula for the famous Chilean poet. Together, these interstellar clouds lie about 8,000 light-years away in the Great Carina Nebula, a complex stellar neighborhood harboring numerous clouds of gas and dust rich with imagination inspiring shapes. The featured telescopic view captures these nebulae's characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to the red, green, and blue hues of the popular Hubble Palette.

ASTRONOMY - A Northern Winter Night

 2021 February 6

A Northern Winter Night
Image Credit & Copyright: Lukasz Zak

Explanation: Snow blankets the ground in this serene forest and sky view. Assembled in a 360 degree panoramic projection, the mosaicked frames were captured at January's end along a quiet country road near Siemiony, northeastern Poland, planet Earth. The night was cold and between trees reaching toward the sky shine the stars and nebulae of the northern winter Milky Way. Near zenith is bright star Capella, a mere 43 light-years above the tree tops. Alpha star of the constellation Auriga the Charioteer and part of the winter hexagon asterism, Capella is a well-studied double star system. Follow the Milky Way above and right of Capella and you might spot the familiar stars of Orion in the northern winter night.

AERONAUTIQUE - Avion du futur en 1944

Avez-vous déjà imaginé votre transport du futur ? C’est l’idée du magazine Popular Science qui a laissé à Douglas Rolfe tout le loisir de créer son avion personnel. Le résultat est plutôt réaliste et bluffant, ce qui peut s’expliquer par le fait qu'en 1944 l’aviation avait déjà fait un grand bon avec la première et la seconde guerre mondiale.

© Douglas Rolfe, juillet 1944, revue Popular Science

ASTRONOMY - A view from Antares

 2021 February 4

Apollo 14: A View from Antares
Image Credit: Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14, NASA; Mosaic - Eric M. Jones

Explanation: Fifty years ago this Friday, Apollo 14's Lunar Module Antares landed on the Moon. Toward the end of the stay astronaut Ed Mitchell snapped a series of photos of the lunar surface while looking out a window, assembled into this detailed mosaic by Apollo Lunar Surface Journal editor Eric Jones. The view looks across the Fra Mauro highlands to the northwest of the landing site after the Apollo 14 astronauts had completed their second and final walk on the Moon. Prominent in the foreground is their Modular Equipment Transporter, a two-wheeled, rickshaw-like device used to carry tools and samples. Near the horizon at top center is a 1.5 meter wide boulder dubbed Turtle rock. In the shallow crater below Turtle rock is the long white handle of a sampling instrument, thrown there javelin-style by Mitchell. Mitchell's fellow moonwalker and first American in space, Alan Shepard, also used a makeshift six iron to hit two golf balls. One of Shepard's golf balls is just visible as a white spot below Mitchell's javelin.

ASTRONOMY - Found on the Moon: Candidate for Oldest Known Earth Rock

 2021 February 3

Found on the Moon: Candidate for Oldest Known Earth Rock
Video Credit: NASA, Astromaterials 3D, Erika Blumenfeld et al.

Explanation: Was the oldest known rock on Earth found on the Moon? Quite possibly. The story opens with the Apollo 14 lunar mission. Lunar sample 14321, a large rock found in Cone crater by astronaut Alan Shepard, when analyzed back on Earth, was found to have a fragment that was a much better match to Earth rocks than other Moon rocks. Even more surprising, that rock section has recently been dated back 4 billion years, making it older, to within measurement uncertainty, than any rock ever found on Earth. A leading hypothesis now holds that an ancient comet or asteroid impact launched Earth rocks into the Solar System, some of which fell back to the Moon, became mixed with heated lunar soil and other rocks, cooled, and re-fragmented. The video features an internal X-ray scan of 14321 showing multiple sections with markedly different chemistries. Moon rocks will continue to be studied to learn a more complete history of the Moon, the Earth, and the early Solar System. Friday marks the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 14 landing on the Moon.

ASTRONOMY - A Colorful Quadrantid Meteor

 2021 February 2

A Colorful Quadrantid Meteor
Image Credit & Copyright: Frank Kuszaj

Explanation: Meteors can be colorful. While the human eye usually cannot discern many colors, cameras often can. Pictured is a Quadrantids meteor captured by camera over Missouri, USA, early this month that was not only impressively bright, but colorful. The radiant grit, likely cast off by asteroid 2003 EH1, blazed a path across Earth's atmosphere. Colors in meteors usually originate from ionized elements released as the meteor disintegrates, with blue-green typically originating from magnesium, calcium radiating violet, and nickel glowing green. Red, however, typically originates from energized nitrogen and oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. This bright meteoric fireball was gone in a flash -- less than a second -- but it left a wind-blown ionization trail that remained visible for several minutes.

ASTRONOMY - Lunar Halo over Snowy Trees

 2021 February 1

Lunar Halo over Snowy Trees
Image Credit & Copyright: Göran Strand

Explanation: Have you ever seen a halo around the Moon? This fairly common sight occurs when high thin clouds containing millions of tiny ice crystals cover much of the sky. Each ice crystal acts like a miniature lens. Because most of the crystals have a similar elongated hexagonal shape, light entering one crystal face and exiting through the opposing face refracts 22 degrees, which corresponds to the radius of the Moon Halo. A similar Sun Halo may be visible during the day. Exactly how ice-crystals form in clouds remains a topic of research. In the featured image taken last week from Östersund, Sweden, a complete lunar halo was captured over snowy trees and rabbit tracks.

PRACTICAL - Way to open a lock with matches

 

ASTRONOMIA - Lua colorida

Na noite de 23 para 24 de janeiro, o fotógrafo italiano Alberto Ghizzi Panizza tirou centenas de fotografias à Lua em Parma, norte de Itália. O resultado é esta foto colorida de um halo lunar.

Um halo lunar é um fenómeno ótico provocado pela refração da luz - quando a luz emitida pela Lua atravessa os vários e minúsculos cristais de gelo em suspensão na atmosfera, explica o IPMA.

Sic Noticias - Portugal

ASTRONOMY - The Vertical Magnetic Field of NGC 5775

 2021 January 27

The Vertical Magnetic Field of NGC 5775
Image Credit: NRAO, NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Text: Jayanne English (U. Manitoba)

Explanation: How far do magnetic fields extend up and out of spiral galaxies? For decades astronomers knew only that some spiral galaxies had magnetic fields. However, after NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope (popularized in the movie Contact) was upgraded in 2011, it was unexpectedly discovered that these fields could extend vertically away from the disk by several thousand light-years. The featured image of edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 5775, observed in the CHANG-ES (Continuum Halos in Nearby Galaxies) survey, also reveals spurs of magnetic field lines that may be common in spirals. Analogous to iron filings around a bar magnet, radiation from electrons trace galactic magnetic field lines by spiraling around these lines at almost the speed of light. The filaments in this image are constructed from those tracks in VLA data. The visible light image, constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data, shows pink gaseous regions where stars are born. It seems that winds from these regions help form the magnificently extended galactic magnetic fields.