You absolutely must carve out 11 minutes and 20 seconds of your time to see this animation of the voyage of Curiosity Rover to Mars. View the beautiful lift-off for the mission. I can’t help but ponder the theological implications of this unbelievable NASA mission. Why would God enable some of his creatures the ability [...]
Here is a colorful, even garish, image of the Flame Nebula with the Horsehead Nebula lurking behind. I’ve had fun with this one, because it has led me up a few more steps on the Photoshop learning curve. These nebulae are part of the wintertime Orion constellation scene. If you want to know more about [...]
I’m pretty proud of this one. In a previous post I showed off the grayscale luminance image taken remotely by a LightBuckets observatory in Rodeo, New Mexico on January 3, 2011. To get color, I needed images of the same nebula taken through red, blue, and green filters, and it took me until January 27 [...]
I say “again” because I have been worrying this poor nebula to death for the past month or so. I promised myself that after I had wrung all I could out of the hours of data I have collected, I would write a little essay about the Crescent Nebula. Maybe this is it and maybe [...]
Gaze at the dark sky and what do you see? Mostly white stars against a black background. A few of the brighter ones show some color, but the human eye is pretty picky when it comes to transmitting color information to our brain. Really dim stuff always comes out bland and gray. The eye needs [...]
This is the Black Eye Galaxy, one of the thousands of deep space galaxies that pepper the universe. It is about 17 million light-years distant, giving us a glimpse into the past of the expanding universe. The dark clouds that give this galaxy its “black eye” are enormous dust clouds associated with star formation, I [...]
Credit & Copyright: Ole Christian Salomonsen Now, I ask you, “Ain’t that grand?” This picture interests me because it triggers memories (here I go again) of time spent in Norway in the sixties as well as a glimpse we had of the aurora from our back yard in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one fall evening at [...]
I was getting worried that maybe my muse had walked the plank, but he/she has returned with a vengeance. The vernal equinox may have something to do with it. Although my personal “summer” officially ends with the last game of the World Series, the end came early this year, thanks partly to the hapless Redbirds. [...]
In a press release dated June 29, 2020, the Gemini Observatory announced the first confirmed planet in orbit around a sun-like star. A planet only about eight times the mass of Jupiter has been confirmed orbiting a Sun-like star at over 300 times farther from the star than the Earth is from our Sun. The [...]
A previous post showed Space Shuttle Atlantis being readied for its final mission to the International Space Station. Photographer Thierry Lagault caught Atlantis 50 minutes before docking as it passed across the face of the sun. By now, Atlantis has returned safely, but you sure wouldn’t know it from the headlines. Here’s an expanded view [...]
