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| Aurora Webcam a great collection of beautiful aurora photos and swirling gif movies, as well as a live webcam, all brought to you by 21 years old Troy Birdsall who lives at Mt. Aurora near Fairbanks Alaska. Via Mefi |
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Home > Space
Category Archives: Space
Alaskan Aurora Webcam
Monday, March 8th, 2004
Flip a Coin?
Tuesday, February 24th, 2004
Fascinating article, behind the scenes with astronomers debating the merits of issuing a 25% chance of mini-asteroid impact warning.
Earth almost put on impact alert - Some scientists believed on 13 January that a 30m object, later designated 2004 AS1, had a one-in-four chance of hitting the planet within 36 hours…. It turned out to be bigger than anyone had thought - about 500m wide. It eventually passed the Earth at a distance of about 12 million km - 32 times the Earth-Moon distance, posing no danger to us whatsoever.
From the BBC - Via Linkfilter
Mars Rover
Sunday, January 4th, 2004
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This mosaic image taken by the navigation camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows a panoramic view of the rover on the surface of Mars. It looks to me like it is surrounded by the deflated air bags that cushioned it’s landing, though the NASA site as per usual has lousy captions for its pix. |
Comet Wild 2
Saturday, January 3rd, 2004
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Team Stardust, NASA’s first dedicated sample return mission to a comet successfully navigated through the particle and gas-laden coma around comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt-2″). The spacecraft flew within 149 miles of the comet, catching samples of comet particles and scoring detailed pictures of Wild 2’s pockmarked surface. Via the Astronomy Picture of the Day |
Aurora Photograpy
Thursday, November 20th, 2003
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The sun is acting up again. Auroras above Wisconsin before sunrise on Thursday, Nov. 20th. Photo credit: Chris VenHaus I asked him about his aurora photograpy, what they look like to the naked eye, and do they visibly move in the sky. He replied “the Auroras do move quite a bit. Thursday morning’s show was perhaps the most intense show I’ve seen in over 2 years. The problem with Aurora that moves fast is that it doesn’t photograph very well. Exposure times are usually between 6 and 30 seconds.” Chris drives three hours to get dark enough skies for his photos. Seespaceweather.com for the latest info on the sun. |
Reading Backscatter
Friday, November 14th, 2003
| SOHO’s SWAN (Solar Wind ANisotropies) observes backscattered photons, that is the satellite can detect specific wavelengths of light reflected back to it from neutral hydrogen atoms surrounding the sun. This allows computers to reconstruct a rough image of the activity on the side of the sun not facing the earth. This is one of the ways that scientist are now able to predict upcoming solar activity. | |
| I constructed the above Flash animation from this gif animation. It’s composed of six images from Oct 24, 26, 31, Nov 5, 7 and 11. The original gif so confused me, that I put the farside image into this format, dissolving between the images to make the timescale more consistent. Flash’s jpeg compression also helps bring the file size way down to 10% of the original gif). The black areas in the middle of the images indicates not enough information from the backscatter to say what is going on there. | |
