An animation of the sun, seen by NASA’s Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) over the course of 6 days, starting June 27, 2005. (Courtesy of SOHO/EIT consortium).
Image featured from “The Sun – The Big Picture” part of a jaw-dropping set of images via boston.com
Full link: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/the_sun.html
Ok so something of a different post – real world – a 21st century frontier town glowing in Antarctic twilight.
This photograph is of Antarctica’s largest settlement & it’s logistical hub, the US administered “McMurdo Station” at it’s peak home to over 1,200 residents…
I picked this image for a couple of reasons, firstly because anything to do with the icy wastes of Antarctica fascinates me! and secondly because it looks very much like a recently “terraformed” world in the mould of a certain James Cameron film….
Also of note, that is an active volcano in the background; the 3,794 meters high Mount Erebus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus here’s another excellent shot that gives a real sense of it’s mass http://bit.ly/5hC69I the nearby neighboring New Zealand research station “Scott Base” (seen on right) is approx 3 miles from McMurdo…
Read more about McMurdo at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station Photo is via the National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov
Two scans from the 1999 300mm squared Hardcover Publication “Full Moon” a photographic odyssey to the Moon and back, featuring a selection of 128 images, just a fraction of NASA’s 32,000 pictures from the Apollo Missions. Full Moon is a superb coffee table book brimming with simply breathtaking shots documenting arguably mankind’s greatest ever achievement, no detail is spared: blast off, rocket separation, crater vistas, earthrise, moon buggies, remote cameras… etc etc right through to splash down. If you have even a casual interest in space then this is a must read, available on amazon.com here: http://ow.ly/zgoO
Details on the featured images…
Top: Apollo 15; Dave Scott manipulates collection tongs at Spur Crater – Photo: Hassleblad 70mm Black and White Negative by Jim Irwin, August 1971
Middle: Apollo 12, Alan Bean at Sharp Crater – Photo: Hassleblad 70mm Black and White Negative by Charles Conrad, Novemeber 1969
Bottom: The Sahara desert at the orbital altitude of 200 miles, this circular feature is “Irdehan Marzuq” located in Libya Photo: Hassleblad 70mm Transparancey by Richard Gordon, Gemini 11 Sept 1966
I recently picked up some semi-vintage Scientific/Natural History Books that belonged to my late uncle, loads of superb stuff that I’ll be posting over the course of the rest of the year…
Onto the first scan then – this amazing image is taken from the 1970 edition of the Time-Life International book “The Universe” and is by an artist I’d not come across before, Italian American Antonio Petruccelli (1907-1994) born in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Alas I’ve had to crop this as the painting covers the spread, it really has to be seen to be believed the colours are something else, and I’ve done my best to keep them intact here….
A snippet from the Illustrations accompanying text: “A Close look at the Solar Furnace”
The Sun’s vast sphere, 864,000 miles in diameter contains 335 billion cubic miles of violently hot gasses that weigh more than 2,000 quadrillion tons. Direct study can probe no deeper than the sun’s double atmosphere (the tenuous outer corona and the shallow, inner chromosphere) and it’s surface skin (the photosphere), because only the energy from these two zones reaches the earth after a 93-million mile journey in the form of visible light or invisible radiation. Yet the density, temperature and composistion of gasses in the suns’s hidden interior have been calculated, and astrophysicists know the nuclear processes that make them burn…
Antonio Petruccelli was an extremely versatile Illustrator, a very capable space artist just one of his attributes – read a bit more about him at buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com
A selection of five galactic vista’s featuring the phenomenon ‘Aurora Australis‘ dancing high above the South Pole Telescope at Amundsen-Scott Station, Antarctica.
The Aurora Australis is the Southern Hemispherical equivalent of the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights. Auroras occur when Solar Wind carrying charged particles from the Sun enter the upper atmosphere and are accelerated through Earth’s magnetic field. The Southern lights are less witnessed than there Northern counterpart, mainly due to the fact there’s much less inhabited land at high southern latitudes.
Read more about Auroras here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(astronomy)
The Photo’s are taken from the National Science Foundation (NSF) website’s multimedia gallery which is fantastic source of high res imagery, from Galactic Panorama’s to renderings of Computational Fluid Dynamics – suffice to say there’s some pretty trippy stuff, well worth a look: http://ow.ly/kabe
Photography by Keith Vanderlinde, National Science Foundation / U.S. Antarctic Program. Hi-Res versions of these shots are at: http://ow.ly/kadM
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