What’s happening on the space station?

(CNN) High above us, beyond the skies, is the International Space Station, which weighs nearly 1 million pounds and has a wingspan the length of a football field. It has nine rooms, two bathrooms, two kitchens and two mini-gyms, and it is the largest spacecraft orbiting the Earth. NASA announced this week that an instrument called ISS-RapidScat will be launched to the station in 2014 to improve weather forecasts, by doing things like monitoring hurricanes. Continue reading

The Call of Earth Homecoming Volume 2 (Unabridged) Audio Book – Video




The Call of Earth Homecoming Volume 2 (Unabridged) Audio Book www.qbba.com For millennia, the planet Harmony has been protected by the Oversoul, an artificial intelligence programmed to prevent thoughts of war and conquest from threatening Earths peoples….From:QbbaBooksViews:0 0ratingsTime:05:03More inEntertainment Continue reading

Time lapse: Helvetia’s Dream | Bad Astronomy

Oh my, another lovely night sky (and landscape!) time lapse video; this time from Alessandro Della Bella, and called Helvetias Dream: [Make sure you set it to hi-def and make it full screen.] I love the opening shot! Unless it was just digitally zoomed, it must have taken some planning; you have to know just where the Moon is going to rise to catch it that accurately. A couple of other things to watch for, too: At about 45 seconds in, a bright meteor leaves a long persistent train, a glowing trail that gets blown away by the thin but rapid winds 100 kilometers above the Earths surface. I actually gasped when I saw that! At 1:30 you see the stars of Orion setting behind the Matterhorn, zoomed in Continue reading

Space Station Solstice | Bad Astronomy

This is pretty neat: on June 6, a couple of weeks before the summer solstice, astronauts on the International Space Station pointed a camera to the north and took pictures as they orbited the Earth. Taken over the course of about an hour 2/3 of a full orbit this was made into a video where you can see the Sun setting and rising again Continue reading

Followup: More pink aurorae | Bad Astronomy

Ive been seeing more shots of the pink aurora from a couple of days ago, and they are all really pretty! I love pink; its why I got a phone cover that color. Photographer Mark Ellis captured the magnificent magenta magnetic maelstrom from northern Minnesota, and made a lovely time lapse video of it: Heres a photo he took that is actually part of the time lapse: [Click to embiggen.] Aurorae are formed when subatomic particles from the Sun slam into our atmosphere. Note the streamers; those are caused by the varying strength and direction of the Earths magnetic field as it channels the particles down Continue reading

Fire, water, and ice | Bad Astronomy

Because you simply cannot have enough incredibly beautiful photographs of aurorae in your life, heres one taken near Tromso, Norway, on March 28, 2012 by photographer Helge Mortensen: [Click to coronalmassejectenate, and you should.] What a shot! Dead center in the picture is the Pleiades, the small cluster of bright stars. Continue reading