what a "shooting star" looks like from space

ever wonder what a meteor might look like from space?

here's the view from the international space station during last night's persied meteor shower, as the earth passed through the space dust left over from comet swift-tuttle.

more than a doodle....

how academics see each other

here's a funny little graphic created by PhD student matus sotak. click to see full size:

zombie bowling

in order to advertise a german horror TV channel, a group designed a series of bowling balls that look like chopped off heads which they are calling 13th Street Bowlingheads. spray paint artist Oliver Paaß helped to make them look fairly convincing! they put these bowling balls (and a few other designs) in several bowling alleys around germany...

do they remind anyone else of classic garbage pail kids?

if not now

nice design and message...

via fffound

dirty space news: juno launches to jupiter

yesterday the juno spacecraft launched into space aboard an Atlas V rocket, headed for a mission to analyze jupiter. apparently i wasnt the only one who thought the event qualified as dirty space news!

right??

juno will arrive at jupiter in july 2016 in order to study many still mysterious aspects of the giant planet's existence. astronomers are hoping juno will help our understanding of whether jupiter has a solid core, how much water and ammonia are deep in jupiter's atmosphere, what exactly jupiter's strong magnetic fields look like, and observe jupiter's auroras in detail.

cat's map of the bed

link

horizontal milky way

i'm out at siding springs observatory again this week hanging out with some telescopes and kangaroos. this first night of observing has been a hectic one, getting the quirks of the telescope worked out and debugging some new code issues.

luckily, things are running mostly smoothly now, we are collecting spectra of 400 galaxies each hour, and a fellow observer managed to get outside for a few minutes to capture this lovely image of the milky way laying across the night sky :)

Photo Credit:  Maritza Lara-Lopez

red life

link

comet crashes into the sun

here is nice footage from NASA of a comet that crashed into the sun on july 5th, 2011.



more details available at skymania

standardized testing

doesnt work.

mail: then and now

so true...

link

the shuttles have landed

older generations saw the first humans launch into space and land on the moon. the shuttles have been a solid fixture in my life, all their successes and their incredible challenges.

no matter what difficult decisions the US space program must make over the next several years in light of financial decreases, we should all sit back and appreciate with awe just how much NASA has accomplished over the last several decades with a relatively small investment. they have inspired people all over the world and made space exploration seem like a normal facet of human existence.

truly awesome in the true sense of the word.

there are more photos of the shuttle program available at the big picture.

i'll leave you with this lovely nature video. as sarah suggests, switch to full screen, sit back and enjoy!

marbelous table

fun! want!

attraction/aversion

if this is jewelery artist kerry howley's goal with this collection, she has completely succeeded with me!

Attraction/Aversion is a material exploration of how people can feel seemingly opposing emotional responses simultaneously. The necklaces are made of human hair, a familiar material that we take pride in. However once off of the body hair becomes an innate source of aversion.

because they are truly beautiful pieces, but... ew!!

i'm trying to get over the creepiness and wondering why i find it so creepy. it's something about all the straggly, whispy bits of hair. they remind me of a wad of hair i might find in a shower drain, only beautifully designed.

also, i have no idea how she actually made the hair stay in these shapes.

dirty space news: the flow of pulsar wind

astronomer bryan gaensler recently claimed that the original dirty space news collection is incomplete unless i add Figure 10 of this paper, and then note the first author. so without further ado, here is an illustration of a supernova remnant in the large magellanic cloud:

Figure 10 from authors:  Q. Daniel Wang and Eric V. Gotthelf (1998)

some text from the paper with added emphasis and explanation:

"Such a relatively fast moving young pulsar [star leftover after a supernova explosion] can produce a strongly elongated pulsar wind bubble (Fig. 10). This bubble consists of several distinct regions. First, one may expect a bow shock running ahead of the pulsar, while the corresponding reverse shock terminates the free pulsar wind. The size of the region enclosed by this bow shock can be small, but the pressure can be large, depending on the ram pressure.

Enhanced synchrotron radiation can then make the region especially bright in the X-ray region. Second, accelerated by the pressure gradient between the bow shock and the ambient medium, the shocked wind materials, which are relativistically hot, naturally forms a supersonic jet inside a tunnel in the opposite direction of the pulsar's motion (Wang, Li, & Begelman 1993). Third, the jet likely shoots through the bubble and then induces another bow shock (or a series of oblique shocks) on the other side. Fourth, the terminated wind materials are forced back to the bubble, where most of the pulsar spin-down luminosity is dumped. Let us now examine this picture in a more quantitative way."

indeed.

splitscreen: a love story

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.