Like human babies, newborn stars tend to blast out gas from both ends. Unlike infant people, when stars do it its because of things like angular momentum, magnetic fields, and radiation pressure.

Also unlike human babies, when stars blast out gas its incredibly beautiful. Like in the case of HH110, seen here using the Hubble Space Telescope:

[Click to encollimate -- and you want to -- or grab the huger 4000 x 3000 pixel version.]

Breathtaking, isnt it? Ironically, given the analogy above.

Massive newborn stars are hot, bright, spin rapidly, and have strong magnetic fields. As matter flows away from the star, all of these combine to form two tornado-like structures, vast and violent, erupting away from the stars poles. These two focused beams (astronomers call them "jets") can scream away from the star at hundreds of kilometers per second. As a class, we call them Herbig-Haro objects, or HH objects for short.

HH110 is a bit of an oddball since it only appears to have one beam of material instead of two. Its also wider than most HH jets, and appears more turbulent, with lots of twisty structures and knots of material in it. And now we think we know why: its a bit of a fraud. Its not its own HH object, but part of another!

Less than a light year away is a fainter HH object, called HH270. One of the jets from HH270 is pointed right at HH110, which seems like a pretty big coincidence. And it probably isnt: the thinking now is that this HH270 jet is slamming into a dense cloud of material and getting deflected, and its this material splattering away thats forming HH110! Ive labeled the image above taken using the Subaru telescope to make this more clear (from the CASA website; there are images showing more of that region of space and its lousy with HH objects).

This idea makes a lot of sense, and explains the weird structure in HH110. Dense clouds of material are common near newborn stars after all, stars form from gas clouds! and its not too surprising that at some point a jet will slam in to one. You can even see the cloud in question in the picture; its the area which is black. The material there is so thick its blocking the light from stars behind it, so we see it because of whats not there.

Continue reading here:

Newborn star makes a cosmic bank shot | Bad Astronomy

02-07-2012 14:57

Link:

Astronomy Cast Ep. 269: Mass - Video

01-07-2012 14:52 Buy "Stars In Your Eyes" here : Like Astronomy on Facebook : Follow Astronomy on Soundcloud : A track I put together named "Stars In Your Eyes". I enjoyed the production in this track very much! I decided to keep the main melody and progression as it is, because any other counter melody or bass would of ruined the emotion of the track. Thanks for all the support on soundcloud! More music to come...

Originally posted here:

Astronomy - Stars In Your Eyes (EDM) - Video

Ive been getting some emails and tweets alerting me to photos that purport to show the debris trail of a meteor after it apparently plunged into the ocean off the coast of Perth, Australia. After looking at the pictures, Im pretty sure this is not a meteor, but an airplane contrail.

First, the picture, from the Australian news site News.com.au:

Its a lovely photo! It shows the ocean off to the west of Perth, a blue sky, and what appears to be some sort of cloud-like vapor or debris trail. Thats probably not just an average cloud: its very linear, and shows signs of being sheared apart by winds. Cirrus clouds can look like this, but generally arent all alone in a blue sky. There are other types of linear clouds (like alto- and cirrocumulus) but those tend to appear in parallel bands.

The cloud is also relatively low above the Earths surface. In another photo from news.com.au, you can see the faint shadow of the cloud on the sky I have inset that here, with the brightness and contrast stretched. The arrows mark the shadow (the bright blobs are most likely internal reflections in the camera, and the dark spot a piece of dust or something like that on the lens). The picture was taken at sunset, so the Sun was low. The shadow of the trail is being cast on haze and other stuff floating in the air above the cloud. Clearly, the trail isnt all that high above the Earths surface.

This doesnt mean its not from a meteor, necessarily. A big rock plunging into the ocean might leave a trail (technically called a "train") like this. But I dont think thats what were seeing. A big rock burning up in the atmosphere wouldve been really conspicuous, and seen by lots of people especially at sunset near a major city like Perth. Id also expect the train to be much longer than this; big meteors start burning up about 100 kilometers (60 miles) over the Earth, so the train would arc across more of the sky.

And no one saw that? Also, there are no confirmations from anywhere else of an impact or even observations of this. So my skeptic sense is tingling hard.

Also? It just really really looks like a typical airplane contrail! We see these all the time. When a plane flies over the horizon it can leave a contrail looking exactly like this, with perspective making it look like its diving down into the ocean. It gets lit by the setting Sun, so it glows red, orange, or yellow. Thinking parsimoniously using Occams razor and looking at probabilities here whats more likely: an airplane flying away from a big city, or a big rock burning up in our atmosphere that almost no one saw?

Furthermore, contrails have been mistaken for meteors and even missile launches in the past!

And Ill save the best for last: as I was wrapping up writing this post I did a Google search to see if anything new popped up, and sure enough theres an article with a witness saying he saw this cloud for a while before sunset, and it was clearly a contrail from an airplane. I dont put a lot of stock in eyewitness testimony in general, but that fits everything else we know.

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Did a meteor plunge into the ocean near Perth? I’m thinking no. | Bad Astronomy

I wouldnt say Im cynical, merely skeptical. Still, the webcomic Megacynics does capture how I look as a typical conversation I might have degenerates into nonsense. Click the drawing to see the whole strip!

Im pleased to join my pals Bonnie Burton and a certain red-headed lady in the comic, too. One of the brains behind Megacynics is my old friend Steve Dengler, who runs the fantastic DracoGen website, where he backs geeky and techy ventures. Steves one of the good guys, and Im glad to be a cartoony part of this.

Related Posts:

- xkcd is the very model of a modern major science grad - Supermoon Supercomic - A new SMBC book! Plus, bonus me. - SMBC on the brain

Continued here:

A Megacynic? Me? | Bad Astronomy

Via reddit (if youre a redditor, go there and upboat!) I found a very interesting use of astronomical data in music. The composer took the orbital information from the six-planet system called Kepler 11 and codified it into musical notes! From the YouTube notes:

Here, Ive taken each transit seen by the observatory and assigned a pitch and volume to it. The pitch (note) is determined by the planets distance from its star (closer=higher), and they are drawn from a minor 11 chord. The volume is determined by the size of the planet (larger=louder).

The result is actually quite listenable!

Thats lovely, and oddly compelling. Its like the notes are trying to reach some sort of coherence, straining to achieve a melody, but dont quite make it. I find this interesting: after listening, and without having to check, I knew the planets werent in orbital resonance.

A resonance is when one planets orbit is a simple fraction of anothers; for example, one planet might circle the star every 2 days, and the next one out in 4 days. Resonances take many ratios, like 3:2, or 5:3. The planets in Kepler-11 dont do this (though two of them are near a 5:4 resonance). If they did, then eventually the sonatas melody, such as it is, would repeat. But I didnt get a sense of that listening to it.

Isnt that amazing? You can take data using light, convert it to sound, and actually be able to get insight into it. In this case, of course, you could just make a spreadsheet with the planetary periods in it and start dividing away, but thats no fun!

Perhaps this is just an oddity with no real impact. But I wonder. We convert data into charts and graphs so that we can look for trends, correlations, compare one datum to another visually. In a sense haha, "sense"! this is just another case of that, appealing to hearing instead of sight. Im not a musician per se* so I dont know if this method has real use or not.

But its still cool. And rather pleasant, dont you think?

* 20+ years of playing bass trombone may be used to argue my musicianship either way, I suspect.

Related Posts:

Excerpt from:

Piano sonata in the key of Kepler-11 | Bad Astronomy

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Astronomy society fires up barbecue

When I picture an exploding star in my head which I do unsurprisingly often the imaginary mental detonation I picture is symmetric. That is, it expands like a sphere, getting bigger in all directions equally.

Supernovae are actually not like that though. Stars are messy affairs, and when massive ones explode they tend to have internal factors that distort that nice, smooth expansion. One big factor is that the actual point of explosion is off-center in the star, not at its exact heart. That can create a massively asymmetric explosion, blasting vast amounts of material and energy off to one side.

Mind you, the core itself in such a star still collapses to become a super-dense neutron star (or a black hole), but the sideways nature of the explosion can give a kick to the leftover ball of neutrons. Quite a kick. In fact, the energies are so titanic that an off-center supernova explosion can blast the neutron star in the other direction, screaming away from the explosion site like a shell out of the muzzle of a battleship gun.

And now astronomers may have found the most extreme example of this: what looks to be just such a neutron star barreling away from a supernova at high speed:

[Click to Chandrasekharenate.]

This image is a combination of observations from the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray observatories, the Digitized Sky Survey, and the 2MASS infrared survey. It shows the supernova remnant SNR MSH 11-16A, located about 30,000 light years away. The purple glow is from X-rays emitted by the gas superheated to millions of degrees by the exposion.

But look off to the right. See that comet-looking thing? Ive put a close up of it here. You can see a dot at the head of the "comet": astronomers think that might be the runaway neutron star from the explosion that created SNR MSH 11-16A! Its hard to know for sure, but a lot of things add up to make me think theyre right.

The most obvious is that tail of gas pointing right back to the center of the supernova gas cloud. A hot, young neutron star blows out a high-energy wind of subatomic particles called a pulsar wind, and that pushes against gas floating out in space. As a runaway neutron star blasts through space, it would leave a glowing trail like that. The X-rays appear to be coming from a single, tiny point, just what youd expect for a neutron star, and observations using optical and infrared dont see it; again, just what youd expect since neutron stars are tiny and dont glow visibly. Theyre brightest in X-rays due to their phenomenally strong magnetic fields whipping particles around at high energies.

The fainter tail to the side is something of a mystery, though. Apparently things like this have been seen before, but its not clear whats causing it.

Read more here:

Cannonball star blasts away from the scene of the crime | Bad Astronomy

[Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I am friends with many of the folks on both teams described below. I have tried to be scrupulously fair to both missions, and to be honest - as I say below - the best thing to happen would be for both missions to be locked, loaded, and looking for potentially hazardous rocks.]

The B612 Foundation is a group of scientists, astronauts, astronomers, and engineers who have come together to do nothing less than literally save the world: they want to find and deflect asteroids that can potentially hit the Earth. While really big asteroids are rare after all, the one 10 km (6 miles) across that wiped out the dinosaurs only hits Earth every few hundred million years smaller ones in the 100 meter range are far more common and can still do devastating damage. Even one just 50 meters across (smaller than a football field) can impact and explode with the yield of millions of tons of TNT. Thats in the range of the biggest nuclear weapons ever detonated.

Finding these asteroids is notoriously difficult. Theyre small and dim, and sometimes only discovered once theyve already passed us! The best way to find them in large numbers is to launch a space telescope to survey the sky, tuned to the infrared where these asteroids are far brighter and easier to spot.

Today, B612 made a big announcement: they want to build just such a mission. They call it Sentinel, and it will be the first privately funded deep space mission ever launched. Built by Ball Aerospace and launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, it will be placed into a Venus-like orbit, giving it a good view of the volume of space where these asteroids prowl:

[Click to chixchulubenate.]

The plan is to raise the money philanthropically, like museums do: donations from private funders. Observatories have long been funded this way, and the proposed cost of a few hundred million dollars is roughly on par with many civic projects. Their target launch date is 2017 to 2018, and the mission will last about 5 years.

Interestingly, a group of scientists and engineers with NASA/JPL is planning a similar mission! Called NEOCam (for Near Earth Object Camera), its based on previous missions like WISE and Hubble.

Sentinel and NEOCam have many similarities: they both use a 50 cm or so telescope, both are tuned to infrared, and both will launch into orbit to get a better view of potentially threatening asteroids. Unlike Sentinel, NEOCam will stick closer to the Earth, placed into an orbit that keeps it about a million miles away. The advantage of this is that being closer, the rate at which data can be sent to Earth is very high. That allows more and higher-resolution observations to be made. While Sentinel is designed to look at one broad region of the infrared spectrum, NEOCam will look in multiple wavelengths, giving it the ability to characterize the size and chemical composition of asteroids more accurately.

This part is important: the two missions do two different things! Sentinel is designed to find and get accurate positions and orbits for these asteroids. NEOCam will also find lots of asteroids, but is optimized for science, to understand the asteroids physical characteristics. Both of these factors are critical and complementary. We need both.

Go here to see the original:

Privately and publicly looking for Earth-threatening asteroids | Bad Astronomy

One of my favorite quotations of all time is by Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe." The poetry and lyrical nature of that line are wonderful, and the sentiment well. He was exactly right. Sagan was one of many people who influenced me, and of course so many of us who promote astronomy to the public owe our careers to him.

Thats why I was so pleased when I found that Kenley Kristofferson, a music teacher and composer in Canada, wrote a lovely choral suite in three movements based on Carl Sagans words! He has put all three on Sound Cloud, so you can listen to them for free. Each uses quotations from Sagan and weaves them into a tale of discovery, beauty, and astronomy. Theyre performed beautifully by the Antiphony Music Ensemble, a group of ten young singers from Winnipeg. On his website Kristofferson has the three movements downloadable as MP3s, and also has the lyrics written out as well.

This is a very pretty piece, and I hope some choral teachers out there pick it up and perform it. I think it sends a great message, and it does so in a beautiful way.

Addendum: Producer/writer/actor Seth MacFarlane yes, from "Family Guy" helped the Library of Congress acquire Sagans personal papers. MacFarlane is a science nut, and as you may already know, is working with Neil Tyson to update and bring Sagans "Cosmos" back to the TV. I think this is great, and its fantastic to know that there are folks out there like MacFarlane willing to put their money where their brain is. Good on him.

Tip o the elbow patch to the wonderfully named blog Its OK to be Smart.

Here is the original post:

Singing the praises of Carl Sagan | Bad Astronomy

Its generally said that discoveries in science tend to be at the thin hairy edge of what you can do always at the faintest limits you can see, the furthest reaches, the lowest signals. That can be trivially true because stuff thats easy to find has already been discovered. But many times, when youre looking farther and fainter than you ever have, you find things that really are new and can (maybe!) be a problem for existing models of how the Universe behaves.

Astronomers ran across just such thing recently. Hubble observations of a distant galaxy cluster revealed an arc of light above it. Thats actually the distorted image of a more distant galaxy, and its a common enough sight near foreground clusters. But the thing is, that galaxy shouldnt be there.

This picture is a combination of two images taken in the near-infrared using Hubble. The cluster is the clump of fuzzy blobs in the center left. The small square outlines the arc, and the big square zooms in on it.

The cluster is unusual. Its at a distance of nearly 10 billion light years away. Clusters have been seen that far away, so by itself thats not so odd. The thing is, its a whopper: the total mass in all those galaxies combined may be as much as a staggering 500 trillion times the mass of the Sun, making this by far the most massive cluster seen at that distance.

But that arc First, things like this are seen pretty often near clusters. Theyre gravitational lenses: the gravity from the cluster bends the light from a more distant galaxy in the background, bending its shape into an arc. See Related Posts below for lots of info and cool pictures on these arcs. In this case, Ill note the shape of the arc implies the biggest galaxy in the cluster, the one right below the small square, is doing most of the lensing.

But heres the problem: the galaxy whose light is getting bent has to be on the other side of the cluster, and that cluster is really far away. Note only that, the galaxy has to be bright enough that we can see it at all. Combined, this should make an arc like this rare. Really rare.

So rare, in fact, that it shouldnt be there at all! The astronomers who did this research worked through the physics and statistics, and what they found is that the odds of seeing this arc in this way are zero. As in, what the heck is it doing there at all?

Now we have to be careful here. What we have is one observation of one arc, and it happens to be behind an extraordinarily massive cluster. Its hard to extrapolate exactly what this means. Maybe galaxies formed more vigorously than we thought in the early Universe, so there are more than we might suppose. Maybe its a huge coincidence, with a bright galaxy behind a massive cluster. Maybe the galaxy in the cluster doing most of the heavy lifting is surrounded by more than the usual amount of matter, making it an even stronger lens. Interestingly, using the arc itself, astronomers calculated the mass of that one big galaxy is something like 70 trillion times the mass of the Sun, making it bigger than most entire clusters at that distance!

If you get one weird thing happening, you might be able to shrug it off as coincidence. But two? In this case the existence of the arc at all coupled with the huge mass of this galaxy and cluster make me think theres more going on here than we see. Still, its not clear what it might be.

Visit link:

The galaxy that shouldn’t be there | Bad Astronomy

One thing I like to see is kids getting their hands on doing science. Theres something about being involved with something, actually doing it for yourself, that gives you a sense of ownership over the knowledge, makes you part of something bigger.

Heres another chance to do that for students across the world: the ERGO telescope project. ERGO stands for "Energetic Ray Global Observatory" and the idea is to build simple cosmic-ray detectors that can be sent to classrooms all over the world. Heres a short video describing the project:

Cosmic rays are energetic subatomic particles that come blasting in from space. Theyre created by the Sun, by exploding stars, but distant galaxies basically, by cool, interesting objects. By distributing these detectors across the world, students can share their data and come up with their own ways of examining them.

If youre a teacher and you want your students to not just learn science, but to experience it, then this sounds like a good way to do it! They even have a simple form you can fill out to apply for a grant to get started.

Related Posts:

- Something powerful lurks nearby - Attack of the galactic subatomic particles - No, a new study does not show cosmic-rays are connected to global warming - Bobbing for extinctions

See the rest here:

Teachers: help your kids detect cosmic rays | Bad Astronomy

25-06-2012 15:23

See original here:

Astronomy Cast Ep. 268 - Energy - Video

MURFREESBORO - Astronomy Night will be held from 4:30 to 7 p.m. Tuesday on the patio at the Discovery Center at Murfree Spring, 502 S.E. Broad St.

See more here:

See Venus at Astronomy Night on Tuesday at Discovery Center

SpaceX successfully launched the first privately owned rocket (Falcon 9) and space capsule (Dragon) to the International Space Station in May. The engine that propelled them there is called the Merlin, built by the company based on known technology and NASA heritage.

Several generations of Merlin engines have been made, and the newest, the 1D, was recently test fired in May at the SpaceX facility in Texas. This video of it is pretty darn cool. Turn the volume up!

The full firing was a bit over three minutes long. The 1D performed well by all accounts, and will be used for the first time next year on an upgraded version of the Falcon 9 rocket. The 1D has the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any engine of its kind ever used, meaning it produces a lot of bang for its weight.

There will be two versions of this engine: one to be used on the first stage of the Falcon 9, and designed for use in air, and another for the second stage, to be used in a vacuum. The exhaust from an engine behaves differently in air (where the pressure of surrounding air changes the way the exhaust expands) versus in a vacuum, so different designs can be used to optimize the thrust. These will be used on the upgraded Falcon 9 as well as the in-production Falcon Heavy rocket.

Im even more interested in the proposed Merlin 2, which SpaceX claims will have 1.7 1.9 million pounds of thrust more than the Saturn V F5 engines did! These will be used on a future generation Falcon heavy-lift rocket.

Image credit: SpaceX

Related Posts:

- History is made as Dragon splashes down safely in the Pacific! - SpaceX Dragon on its way to the ISS! - SpaceX reveals plans for heavy lift rocket - Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids and I think they can do it

See the article here:

SpaceX successfully tests new engine (VIDEO) | Bad Astronomy

Oh, I do love good news. A few days ago I wrote about a small group of aerospace experts who put up a Kickstarter project to launch a small satellite. The news? Its fully funded! That means this satellite will get built and launched into space.

Be aware that, as with most Kickstarter projects, reaching their goal doesnt mean you cant or shouldnt pitch in. More money pledged even after the goal is achieved means more and cooler stuff the project people can do with it!

And in this case, kicking in some cash gives you a chance to quite literally be a part of this mission: Discover Magazine is holding a contest where you can enter to get your experiment performed on this wee satellite. The details can be found here. Heres the basic stuff:

(1) Fund the ArduSat project, for however much or little as you desire. Youll receive a personal code that identifies you as a donor.

(2) Read the contest guidelines here to learn about how you should design and submit your idea.

(3) Enter with this entry form, making sure to include your personal code.

(4) Wait for winners to be announced on July 20th, after judging by Discover blogger Phil Plait, Discover Editor-in-Chief Corey Powell, and an expert panel of judges.

(5) Rejoice!

Note #4 there: Im a judge! Im pleased and honored to be asked to participate in this, and Im very excited to see what folks come up with. I think this is an excellent project for a high school class or similar groups, and given it only costs a dollar minimum its well worth the effort.

Very important: the contest ends on July 6, 2012! So get moving. And maybe get your very own idea off the ground, and literally into space.

Read more here:

In which I become… SPACE JUDGE | Bad Astronomy

The door to the airlock closes behind you before you can stop it. You turn slowly to face the outer doors, and with growing dread you realize you are face to face with the worst fear of every astronaut since the dawn of the space age: when the outer doors open, youll experience explosive decompression. Youre about to be introduced to the hard vacuum of space.

What would that be like? If you watch movies, you might get a somewhat confused view of this. Your head will explode like a balloon full of pizza ("Outland"), your eyes and tongue will bug out as you choke to death ("Total Recall"), youll freeze instantly ("Mission to Mars").

The problem is that none of these things is right.

Artist Nathan Hoste got as tired as I was of Hollywoods depiction of getting tossed out the airlock, so he decided to draw a series of comic book-like panels showing the fact and fiction of breathing vacuum. Hes calling the series Bodies in Space, and the drawings are really cool.

This one is called "Radiation". I love the retro feel to it, and his caption is great: "Another thing that happens in space, away from an atmosphere or space ship, is being bombarded by cosmic rays. Many many years after he dies of oxygen deprivation, he will die of cancer." Ha!

The other drawings are equally excellent (though some are arguably NSFW). His science is good, and he plans on doing several more in the near future. I cant wait! I love stuff like this, and its great that hes using this medium of comic art to show real science which in this case is both scarier and more interesting than fiction.

If you want to know more, Ive written on this topic several times, including my reviews of Mission to Mars and Star Trek (the reboot), and twice on my old website: in a short article as well as answering a readers question.

I also talked about this in an episode of Q&BA:

So there you go. The bottom line: stay out in the vacuum of space and youll die, in a horribly unpleasant way. Just not in the horribly unpleasant way shown in movies!

See the original post here:

Bodies in space | Bad Astronomy

This. Is. AWESOME! How the bat-guano crazy engineers at NASA and JPL are going to land the Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars:

Holy crap. NASA, throw lots more money at the production company that made this video! You want to excite the public? They did it right.

Now think about this: the rover weighs get this 890 kilograms, nearly a ton. The Mars air is thick enough that engineers have to deal with it, but too thin to bring Curiosity all the way to the surface safely. So they need a heat shield to slow it initially, a parachute to brake even more, and then rocket motors to drop it the rest of the way.

Craziness. But no worse, I suppose, than using a bouncy ball made of airbags to protect it, like Spirit and Opportunity used (Curiosity is way too heavy to use that method of landing). Its funny landing on Mars is harder than getting stuff back to Earth from space, or landing on the Moon. Our air is thick enough to make it relatively simple to slow something down enough for a comfortable landing, and since the Moon has no air, you just use rockets the whole way.

But you know what? I think theyll do it, and thisll work. Why? Because theyve landed probes on Mars before. Many times. We hear a lot of about failed attempts to get to Mars, but in fact JPL and NASA have done an amazing job of getting ever-increasingly sophisticated probes down to the surface of the Red Planet. Heck, Spirit and Opportunity were only supposed to work for a nominal period of 90 days, but Spirit kept going for over six years, and Opportunity is still going strong after more than eight years!

Curiosity is due to land on August 6, 2012, at 05:31 UTC. Thats before midnight in Boulder, so I plan on staying up and watching. I missed most of the fun stuff for the SpaceX mission to the space station because it all happened in the middle of the night, so itll be great to finally watch another space event live. This will be very exciting, and Ill post more info here as I hear it.

Related Posts:

- Curiosity on its way to Mars! - NASA lets go of Spirit - Mars Science Lab gets a name - Sunset on Mars

Original post:

Landing on Mars: Seven minutes of terror | Bad Astronomy

Oh, wow. Were having a heat wave here in Boulder which isnt helping the fire situation so Im really glad I watched this time lapse video by Tor Even Mathisen. It is, quite literally, cool.

He filmed this in Troms (specifically Kvalya and Tromsya), in northern Norway, which is apparently a mecca for aurorae (see Related Posts below). Mathisen is an editor and cameraman for Norwegian Broadcasting, and clearly has an excellent eye for the sky. He has another aurora video he shot in 2010.

This is exactly what I needed as temperatures here push 40C. Its nice to know that while were sizzling here, the atmosphere is sizzling with cold light elsewhere.

Tip o the parka hood to John Markus Bjrndalen.

Related Posts:

- Fire, water, and ice - Real time footage of aurora shows them dancing and shimmering - Will you see the lights tonight? - The softly glowing night sky

View post:

Surreal Arctic time lapse | Bad Astronomy

Kaltreider-Benfer Library, 147 S. Charles St., Red Lion, has two events this week.

* The York County Astronomical Society's Darrell Frey will present Star Lab at 2 p.m. Wednesday. Frey will be in the library's planetarium and will show real photos taken from space, and much more. Ages 7 to 12. Registration is required.

* From 3 to 7 p.m. Thursday, you can design your own pillowcase or T-shirt. Bring a plain, light-colored or white cotton pillowcase or T-shirt and create your own one-of-a-kind design using special crayons and the T-shirt machine. One item per person.

Continued here:

Astronomy, T-shirt design at Red Lion library