Orion Nebula In Visible & Infrared

"We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself"

-Carl Sagan

By Lauchie Macdonald, at Boston Barber and Tattoo

May 11, 2009 — The Space Shuttle Atlantis blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, heading to orbit for an 11-day mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

(NASA)

Saturn, as seen from Iapetus, painted by Chesley Bonestell.

Voyager Golden Record - The Sounds of earth. September 5, 1977

it’s always a good day to get drunk and cry about the voyager records

Comet Lovejoy’s long needle-like tail by Fritz Helmut Hemmerich

Jovian ‘Twilight Zone’

This image captures the swirling cloud formations around the south pole of Jupiter, looking up toward the equatorial region. NASA’s Juno spacecraft took the color-enhanced image during its eleventh close flyby of the gas giant planet on Feb. 7 at 7:11 a.m. PST (10:11 a.m. EST). At the time, the spacecraft was 74,896 miles (120,533 kilometers) from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds at 84.9 degrees south latitude. To make features more visible in Jupiter’s terminator — the region where day meets night — the Juno team adjusted JunoCam so that it would perform like a portrait photographer taking multiple photos at different exposures, hoping to capture one image with the intended light balance. For JunoCam to collect enough light to reveal features in Jupiter’s dark twilight zone, the much brighter illuminated day-side of Jupiter becomes overexposed with the higher exposure.  Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt