Colors Of The Moon : What Color Is The Moon? It Depends On The Night. Outside Of The Earth’s Atmosphere,

Blackburnian Warbler at bridle path ,reservoir ,Central park.

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European Robin (Erithacus rubecula)

© Pam Parsons

Mercury's tail & Pleiades l Sebastian Voltmer

A Jupiter Vista from Juno : Why do colorful cloud bands encircle Jupiter? Jupiter’s top atmospheric layer is divided into light zones and dark belts that go all the way around the giant planet. It is high horizontal winds – in excess of 300 kilometers per hour – that cause the zones to spread out planet-wide. What causes these strong winds remains a topic of research. Replenished by upwelling gas, zonal bands are thought to include relatively opaque clouds of ammonia and water that block light from lower and darker atmospheric levels. One light-colored zone is shown in great detail in the featured vista taken by the robotic Juno spacecraft in 2017. Jupiter’s atmosphere is mostly clear and colorless hydrogen and helium, gases that are not thought to contribute to the gold and brown colors. What compounds create these colors is another active topic of research – but is hypothesized to involve small amounts of sunlight-altered sulfur and carbon. Many discoveries have been made from Juno’s data, including that water composes an unexpectedly high 0.25 percent of upper-level cloud molecules near Jupiter’s equator, a finding important not only for understanding Jovian currents but for the history of water in the entire Solar System. via NASA

Best quality: her wiggles

“Reconsidering The Pigeon” - photographs by Leila Jeffreys [via]

Solis Lacus: The Eye of Mars : As telescopes around planet Earth watch, Mars is growing brighter in night skies, approaching its 2020 opposition on October 13. Mars looks like its watching too in this view of the Red Planet from September 22. Mars’ disk is already near its maximum apparent size for earthbound telescopes, less than 1/80th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon. The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom and hazy northern clouds are at the top. A circular, dark albedo feature, Solis Lacus (Lake of the Sun), is just below and left of disk center. Surrounded by a light area south of Valles Marineris, Solis Lacus looks like a planet-sized pupil, famously known as The Eye of Mars . Near the turn of the 20th century, astronomer and avid Mars watcher Percival Lowell associated the Eye of Mars with a conjunction of canals he charted in his drawings of the Red Planet. Broad, visible changes in the size and shape of the Eye of Mars are now understood from high resolution surface images to be due to dust transported by winds in the thin Martian atmosphere. via NASA

European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster)

© Nick Brischuk

Spectacled Weaver (Ploceus ocularis)

© Justin Goldberg