Image Credit & Copyright: Alex Cherney (Terrastro, TWAN)

I love this photo — looks like an aurora sunset. A pretty thing for your Wednesday!

Why would the sky glow red? Aurora. Last week’s solar storms, emanating mostly from active sunspot region 1402, showered particles on the Earth that excited oxygen atoms high in the Earth’s atmosphere. As the excited element’s electrons fell back to their ground state, they emitted a red glow. Were oxygen atoms lower in Earth’s atmosphere excited, the glow would be predominantly green. Pictured above, this high red aurora is visible just above the horizon last week near Flinders, Victoria, Australia. The sky that night, however, also glowed with more familiar but more distant objects, including the central disk of our Milky Way Galaxy on the left, and the neighboring Large and Small Magellanic Cloud galaxies on the right. A time-lapse video highlighting auroras visible that night puts the picturesque scene in context. Why the sky did not also glow green remains unknown.

A terrific Moon rocket from 1930. Off to the Moon? If only, if only….

STS-107 Crew Names on the Astronaut Memorial, Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Photo by Danielle Signor

Of the three main “anniversaries” that comprise the NASA Day of Remembrance, this is the one that hits me the hardest. I wrote about why, two years ago. It’s hard for me to read it, even now.

Speaking of the NASA Day of Remembrance, check out this photo by Bill Ingalls from Thursday’s ceremony; beautiful and poignant. You can see the STS-107 monument in the foreground.

Photo by Danielle Signor

Yeah, yeah, it’s a little late for Christmas, but these images are too terrific to wait eleven months to post, I’m sorry! (Hat tip to Rachel Hobson for the find!)

Heh heh, Santa goes out on a LM… (limb! Get it? GET IT?? HAHAHA… okay I’ll shut up now.)

Image Credit & Copyright: Bjørn Jørgensen

Green fairy? Eagle? Angel? Whatever you might see in this aurora’s vast shape, I think “fantastic” is a safe description, don’t you?

What’s that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal mass ejection occurred on our Sun five days ago, throwing a cloud of fast moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Although most of this cloud passed above the Earth, some of it impacted our Earth’s magnetosphere and resulted in spectacular auroras being seen at high northern latitudes. Pictured above is a particularly photogenic auroral corona captured last night above Grotfjord, Norway. To some, this shimmering green glow of recombining atmospheric oxygen might appear as a large eagle, but feel free to share what it looks like to you. This round of solar activity is not yet over — a new and even more powerful solar flare occurred yesterday [January 23] that might provide more amazing aurora as soon as tonight [January 24].

Agoraphobia © Austin Kleon

I’ve only just been introduced to the newspaper-blackout poetry of Austin Kleon — I love this one, ever so much. Buy the print here.

Posting on a stormy Friday night? Why not? This is BEAUTIFUL. (I suppose technically it’s “Vidspam”, not Picspam.)

This is an unusual image, a mix of visible light (red) and X-rays (green). It reminds me of a water opal:

Where’s the other star? At the center of this supernova remnant should be the companion star to the star that blew up. Identifying this star is important for understanding just how Type Ia supernova detonate, which in turn could lead to a better understanding of why the brightness of such explosions are so predictable, which in turn is key to calibrating the entire nature of our universe. The trouble is that even a careful inspection of the center of SNR 0509-67.5 has not found any star at all. This indicates that the companion is intrinsically very faint — much more faint that many types of bright giant stars that had been previous candidates. In fact, the implication is that the companion star might have to be a faint white dwarf, similar to — but less massive than — the star that detonated. SNR 0509-67.5 is shown above in both visible light, shining in red as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, and X-ray light, shown in false-color green as imaged by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Putting your cursor over the picture will highlight the central required location for the missing companion star.

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Hughes et al., Optical: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI /AURA)

An interesting, Norman Rockwell-esque encounter with alien life from 1955. Image courtesy of x-ray delta one.

A lovely spiral galaxy for your Wednesday.

From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. The big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 10 million light-years away, behind a veil of foreground dust and stars in the high and far-off constellation of Cepheus. From the core outward, the galaxy’s colors change from the yellowish light of old stars in the center to young blue star clusters and reddish star forming regions along the loose, fragmented spiral arms. NGC 6946 is also bright in infrared light and rich in gas and dust, exhibiting a high star birth and death rate. In fact, since the early 20th century at least nine supernovae, the death explosions of massive stars, were discovered in NGC 6946. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, NGC 6946 is also known as the Fireworks Galaxy. This remarkable portrait of NGC 6946 is a composite that includes image data from the 8.2 meter Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea.
Composite Image Data – Subaru Telescope (NAOJ) and Robert Gendler; Processing – Robert Gendler