Apollo 7 Roars Upward To Space From Cape Canaveral, October 11, 1968.

First time shooting the Perseid meteor shower. Definitely doing this again and I’ll try to get the Geminids in December as well. Finally edited and put these pictures together. This one turned out pretty good I think, I also have some more on my flickr account with better quality. There’s about 40 meteors here, captured from both nights and combined into one. Was up on Mt. Lemmon for both nights and started shooting from midnight to about 4am.

A photo of Saturn. Took by Cassini with COISS on May 22, 2008 at 13:31:01. Detail page on OPUS database.

Sea Level Rise

For thousands of years, sea level has remained relatively stable. But now, Earth’s seas are rising. Since the beginning of the 20th century, they have risen about eight inches, and more than two inches in the last 20 years alone!

As water warms, it expands and takes up more space. That means that when oceans warm, the sea level rises. This summer, we’ve been researching exactly how global warming has impacted Greenland’s ice sheet. Our ICESat-2 mission will use a laser to measure the height of the planet’s surface. Over time, we will be able to provide a record of elevation change, and estimate how much water has melted into the ocean from land ice change.

So how much ice are we actually losing? Great question, but the answer might shock you. In Greenland alone, 303 gigatons of ice was lost in 2014!

Since we know that ice is melting, we’re working to gain a better understanding of how much and how fast. We’re using everything from planes, probes and boats, to satellites and lasers to determine the impact of global warming on the Earth’s ice.

Follow along for updates and information: http://climate.nasa.gov/

Hubble Peers into the Heart of a Galactic Maelstrom

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows Messier 96, a spiral galaxy just over 35 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (The Lion). It is the nearest group containing both bright spirals and a bright elliptical galaxy (Messier 105).

September 04, 2015

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

(via GIPHY)

The Beauty of Earth

Hundreds of Galaxies, captured by Hubble js

A galactic sunflower

New video! Dark nebulae in a nutshell!

Follow Evanthorizon for more astronomy posts!

To visualise the black hole in Interstellar, the VFX team collaborated with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to solve the equations for propagation of light around a spinning black hole. The shape is due to way light is lensed (deflected) by the strong gravitational field of the black hole. The asymmetry is caused by the relativistic time dilation near the event horizon.

The top image shows the black hole in the movie. The bottom image is a more accurate visualisation taking into account Doppler and gravitational frequency shifts. This was considered too confusing for the audience. They also slowed the black hole’s spin down from that required to explain the time dilation experienced in the movie, to make the black hole appear less asymmetric.

The are releasing two papers on their work, the first of which is available in preprint on arXiv.