Blogs

Strong convection created “hot towers” near the eye of Tropical Storm Danielle.

Camelopardalis. It’s a strange-sounding name for a constellation, coming from the Greco-Roman word for giraffe, or “camel leopard”. The October Camelopardalids are a collection of faint stars that have no mythology associated with them — in fact, they didn’t begin to appear on star charts until the 17th century. Even experienced amateur astronomers are hard-pressed …

The skies were clear over New Mexico last night — Oct. 6, 2010 — so Rhiannon Blaauw of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., captured this image of Comet Hartley 2 at a distance of “only” about 14 million miles from Earth.Hartley 2 has passed out of the constellation Cassiopeia and …

 In this image taken on the evening of  Friday, Oct. 1, Comet Hartley 2 can be seen in the constellation Cassiopeia (north-east sky, not far from horizon). Hartley 2 will only be in Cassiopeia for a few more day before traveling through the constellation Perseus. It’s a Jupiter Family Comet that we can’t see right now because it’s too tiny at …

From the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory.

It was brief, but it was brilliant! On Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010 at approximately 8:50 p.m. CDT, cameras operated by NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., recorded a slow moving fireball moving from the north to the southwest.  Enhanced-color image of Alabama fireball meteor. The fireball was moving approximately 35,300 mph (15.8 …

North and South America, August 9, 2010. Full Caption By Mark Robinson, LROC Team. As LRO orbits the Moon every two hours sending down a stream of science data, it is easy to forget how close the Moon is to the Earth. The average distance between the two heavenly bodies is just 384,399 km (238,854 […]

A little bit off topic, but worth it. Time lapse photography of clouds & fog in the Bay Area. Watch to the end, it’s worth it. From the Mother Jones Blue Marble blog.

A pale green interloper among the stars of Cassiopeia, Comet Hartley 2 shines in this four-minute exposure taken on the night of Sept. 28, 2010, by NASA astronomer Bill Cooke:Still too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, the comet was 18 million miles away from Earth at the time. Cooke took this image …

An astronaut took this photograph of dust obscuring the Taklamakan Desert, with the Tien Shan mountains in the distance, on September 5, 2010.