Astronaut Jimblows
So forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today
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(Source: valkk)
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(Source: 4ourty6ix)
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(Source: baseball-heaven)
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…and that’s the space shuttle
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(Source: somegirlsart)
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Africa’s First Night Sky ‘Reserve’ Is Stargazing Haven
Image: The Milky Way, photographed from NamibRand reserve. Credit: George Tucker
The NamibRand Nature Reserve, a private nature reserve in southern Namibia, has gotten the stamp of approval to become an official night sky reserve — a spot supremely suited for some of the best stargazing on Earth.
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M39: Open Cluster in Cygnus
Credit: Heidi Schweiker, WIYN, NOAO, AURA, NSF
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Two spacecraft, one public and one private, linked in orbit today when SpaceX’s Dragon was attached to the International Space Station.
The historic moment represented the first time a commercial spacecraft has ever docked at the weightless laboratory.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit, controlling the space station’s 58-foot (18-meter) robotic Canadarm2, berthed the unmanned Dragon capsule, built by commercial company SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.), to the space station’s Harmony node at 12:02 p.m. EDT (1602 GMT).
The docking came about two hours hours after Pettit reached out to grab the free-floating Dragon with the arm at 9:56 a.m. EDT (1356 GMT).
“Houston, Station, it looks like we’ve got us a dragon by the tail,” Pettit said at the time, while applause rang out in Mission Control back in Houston. [SpaceX’s Historic Dragon Flight to Space Station (Photos)]
The link-up marks the end of the workday for Pettit and the other spaceflyers helping to welcome Dragon, NASA astronaut Joe Acaba and European Space Agency astronaut Andrei Kuipers. Tomorrow (May 26) around, the crew will open the hatches between the station and the capsule and float inside to begin unpacking the new arrival.
Delivery services
SpaceX was founded in 2002 by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also co-founded internet payment service PayPal. This mission is the second-ever flight of Dragon, which first launched to orbit in December 2010.
The current mission is a test flight under NASA’s COTS program (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services), which helps private companies develop unmanned space freighters to haul supplies as a replacement for the retired space shuttles.
SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., has a $1.6 billion contract with the space agency to fly 12 cargo-delivery missions to the space station after this test flight is complete. If the rest of the mission goes smoothly, the first of these could launch as early as this autumn.
Laser troubles
Dragon’s arrival at the space station this morning was somewhat delayed by unexpected readings from one of Dragon’s navigation systems.
Dragon has been using a laser-based LIDAR system to send laser pulses toward the space station and measure its distance by calculating how long the pulses take to reflect back. Mission controllers realized the LIDAR was picking up stray light reflections from the station’s large and shiny Japanese Kibo laboratory that were confusing the sensors.
Engineers quickly came up with a solution.
“The SpaceX team believes they have found a way to fix the problem with their LIDAR sensors on Dragon,” NASA commentator Josh Byerly said. “SpaceX was able to basically adapt their LIDAR sensors onboard Dragon to sort of, for lack of a better word, close its eyes a little bit and have a more narrow field of view.”
That seemed to correct the readings, and Dragon got back on track to pursue a meeting with the station.
However, this and other minor delays pushed back the time for this “grappling” from 7:59 a.m. EDT (1159 GMT). The timing was also dependent on lighting conditions.
“They have to do this in daylight because obviously they don’t want the crew trying to capture a brand-new vehicle in the dark,” Byerly said.
Test flight
NASA and SpaceX officials stressed that anomalies and delays are normal in such a novel situation.
“That is to be expected,” Byerly said. “As we keep reminding everyone, this is a test flight.”
The 14.4 foot tall (4.4 meter) and 12 foot wide (3.7 m) gumdrop-shaped Dragon is carrying food, supplies and student-designed science experiments for the space station.
It was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Tuesday (May 22). The vehicle is due to spend just under a week docked at the space station being unpacked.
Next Thursday (May 31), Dragon will be packed with its return cargo — completed science experiments and equipment no longer needed on the station — and sent back to Earth. The spacecraft is equipped with a heat shield to survive the temperatures of re-entry, and the capsule is intended to be recovered by ship crews after it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean.
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The Flaming Star Nebula blazes beautifully in the night sky in this skywatching photo.
Astrophotographer Bill Snyder took this spectacular image of IC405, also known as the Flaming Star Nebula, on March 26 from his home observatory in Connellsville Pa.
IC405, named after its resemblance to burning flames, lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Auriga. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). It has two regions, an emission nebula and a reflection nebula. The reflection nebula region reflects the light of the nearby blue-ish star AE Aurigae. The emission region emits lights of many colors from clouds of ionized gas. When seen together, these are called diffuse nebulas.
The flaming star nebula can be seen at magnitude + 6.0. On this scale, smaller numbers represent brighter objects. The dimmest objects visible to the human eye are about magnitude 6.5. It’s little more than one degree away from IC 410 and skywatchers can view the nebula with a small telescope.
Editor’s note: If you have an amazing skywatching photo you’d like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com.
via space.com
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In The Shadow of the Moon: A Lunar View of an Eclipse
The May 20 annular eclipse may have been an awesome sight for skywatchers across many parts of the Earth, but it was also being viewed by a robotic explorer around the Moon!
During the event NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter turned its camera to look back home, acquiring several images of the Earth with the Moon’s fuzzy shadow cast onto different regions during the course of the eclipse. The image above is a 4-panel zoom into one particular NAC image showing the Moon’s shadow over the Aleutian Islands.
LRO captured a total of four narrow-angle camera (NAC) images during two of its orbits. During one orbit the Moon’s shadow was over the southern part of Japan, and during the next it had moved northeast to cover the island chain of Alaska.
According to the LROC site run by Arizona State University:
The NAC is a line scanner, meaning that it has only one row of 5064 pixels per camera. Instead of snapping a single frame, an image is built up by the motion of the spacecraft in orbit about the Moon (about 1600 meters per second). To obtain an image of the Earth the spacecraft is turned 180° to face the Earth, then the spacecraft is pitched as quickly as possible (one-tenth of a degree per second), so that the image is built up line by line.
This also explains why some of the images are “clipped” on the edges… LRO ran out of time during its lunar orbit. Still, it’s great to be able to show some photos of the eclipse from quite possibly the most distant viewer anywhere!
Read more on the LROC site here.
Check this out: Animation of four LROC images of the solar eclipse
Alex - 20 - Simi Valley, California - Astrophysics - Music - Life
