#Astronomy

Cool short by Chris Abbass set to music constructed from images of the Cassini mission.

If you’re interested, there’s more info on the ongoing Cassini Solstice mission .

Wow.

Yet another one to have on HD in the dark with the volume up. Well, not sure I would have used the music they did, but still, pretty incredible. The array of four telescopes "

[The array of four European telescopes] can achieve an angular resolution of around 1 milliarcsecond, meaning it could distinguish the gap between the headlights of a car located on the Moon.

Another cool thing you should check out if you have any interest in the stars, is the Photopic Sky Survey .

What is it? A super high resolution, 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from over 35k exposures. A high res time machine to the universe.

Meant to post this last week when I saw it, as I’m reading the Golden Compass right now so thinking about the Aurora (and why the hell haven’t I seen the Aurora Australis while I’ve been here?). I’ve seen the Aurora a bunch of times back in Canada and it’s always jaw-droppingly stunning. Love this week-long time-lapse from Norway showing it in its full glory.

via Neatorama

Alright, it is almost beyond geekery, but since I didn’t even know about this I find this development more than a bit cool .

NASA, in an experiment to test a solar sail for practical use, successfully managed to deploy and have a solar sail circle the Earth, which is an impressive and very pragmatic step forward for making this a working technology for space travel.

I don’t know why, even though we’re talking slow speeds that would accelerate these vessels towards other planets and stars (and massive sails), it really kind of fires my imagination to imagine huge solar sailing vessels in the future, tacking towards distant stars.

With NASA getting desperate enough for cash its auctioning off moon landing memorabilia, it might be a good time to remind ourselves why we strive for the stars in the first place. Cute “infographic”.

via Neatorama .

Fantastic interactive data animation of the scale of the universe you’re currently calling home. Pretty impressive effects. Move the slider back and forth to get a nice interpretation of everything from unimaginably infinitesimal quantum foam to DNA, through to the planets, our local supercluster and the estimated size of the whole thing. Very cool.

Rapture is a gorgeous time-lapse video trailer by astronomy photographer of the year Tom Lowe. The trailer looks absolutely breathtaking combining Southwestern scenery and the stars. Um, definitely watch this in HD and put it on full screen. Wow.

via Geeks are Sexy .

We sometimes forget about those souls slowly pushing forward the edges of science and discovery. Love this time series animation of the discovery of asteroids in the last 30 years. It’s incredible to think how much more we’ve discovered in such a comparatively short amount of time.

Can’t wait till we see a model like this for extrasolar planets we know about or stars we’ve reached… ;-)

Yeah, just geeking out…

For reasons astronomers can’t currently explain completely, Jupiter has lost an entire ginormous and very visible stripe from its surface, altering the face of the solar system’s largest planet.

The entire SEB (South Equatorial Belt), which is twice as wide as the Earth and twenty times as long, just vanished, 2001: A Space Odyssey style. I love all the mysteries about Jupiter and how little we actually seem to know. Like, why the Big Red Spot is red or has been a sustained, raging Earth-sized atmospheric storm for so incredibly long.