I’ve always loved imagery of the Veil Nebula/Cygnus Loop — I guess I’m a sucker for wisps of color. These Hubble images rock my socks off (artistically speaking.)

Credit for both images: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University)

This image shows a small portion of the Veil Nebula – the shattered remains of a supernova that exploded some 5-10,000 years ago. The intertwined rope-like filaments of gas result from the enormous amounts of energy released as the fast-moving debris from the explosion ploughs into its surroundings and creates shock fronts. These shocks, driven by debris moving at 600,000 kilometres per hour, heat the gas to millions of degrees. It is the subsequent cooling of this material that produces the brilliantly coloured glows.

This portion of the Veil Nebula is located in a magnificent part of the Veil known as the Witch’s Broom Nebula to the east (to the right in the overview image). The entire structure spans about 3 degrees, corresponding to about 6 full moons. The bright blue star – dubbed 52 Cygni and unrelated to the supernova explosion – can be observed with the naked eye on a clear summer’s night.

This small portion of the Veil Nebula is located in the larger segment seen in its western part (the top left corner of the large ground-based overview image). The entire structure spans about 3 degrees, corresponding to about 6 full moons.

I’m pretty sure it’s not intentional, but the cropping of this new image of Saturn’s moon Helene makes it really eye-catching. Framing really makes or breaks a photo. I’m in an artsy mood, alright? Also, color images can be gorgeous and breathtaking (and space ones often are), but there’s just something about black and white….

(Somewhere out there, a photographer-reader is nodding. Uh-huh. I see you.)

What’s happening on the surface of Saturn’s moon Helene? The moon was imaged in unprecedented detail last week as the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn swooped to within two Earth diameters of the diminutive moon. Although conventional craters and hills appear, the above raw and unprocessed image also shows terrain that appears unusually smooth and streaked. Planetary astronomers will be inspecting these detailed images of Helene to glean clues about the origin and evolution of the 30-km across floating iceberg. Helene is also unusual because it circles Saturn just ahead of the large moon Dione, making it one of only four known moons to occupy a gravitational well known as a stable Lagrange point.

I am so amused and charmed by Norio Fujikawa’s Rocket Boy — he gets bonus points for being a fellow northern Californian (albeit, far more southerly than my part of northern California.) Rocket Boy reminds me a bit of the title character in Opoona, an RPG for the Wii (I’ve been watching my husband play it, it’s a really neat game. Great soundtrack!)

Found via Curved White.

Credit: H. Schweiker/NOAO/AURA/NSF and T. A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage and NOAO/AURA/NSF

This beautiful image came through my Twitter stream Friday night, so I’m passing the savings onto you! (Thanks @TaviGreiner for retweeting it, and @jimcook310 for finding the larger versions!) Scientifically speaking, this nebula is known as Abell 21, but hey, I can see the “Medusa” bit. I really can. [nod nod]

The Medusa nebula, known scientifically as Abell 21, is an old planetary nebula some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. It is estimated to be over 4 light-years across. This image was taken on Oct 24th, 2008 at the Mayall telescope with the mosaic camera, with [OIII] (assigned a blue color) and H-alpha (orange) filters

This image was released during the 100 Hours of Astronomy webcast, “Around the World in 80 Telescopes” held from April 3-4, 2009, during the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

What are these weird streaks on Mars? Anyone’s guess. They’re neat-looking, at any rate!

What creates these picturesque dark streaks on Mars? No one knows for sure. A leading hypothesis is that streaks like these are caused by fine grained sand sliding down the banks of troughs and craters. Pictured above, dark sand appears to have flowed hundreds of meters down the slopes of Acheron Fossae. The sand appears to flow like a liquid around boulders, and, for some reason, lightens significantly over time. This sand flow process is one of several which can rapidly change the surface of Mars, with other processes including dust devils, dust storms, and the freezing and melting of areas of ice. The above image was taken by the HiRise camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which has been orbiting Mars since 2006. Acheron Fossae is a 700 kilometer long trough in the Diacria quadrangle of Mars.

Valentina Tereshkova orbited the Earth 48 times during her three day spaceflight in Vostok 6 in 1963. First woman in space!

A friend pointed me to these excellent and quirky sketches of the first 14 women in space. Actually, to be precise, the first 13 women in space, and a sweet sketch of Christa McAuliffe. In the artist’s words:

Working for months at a time just penciling a comic book I started these portraits to get a bit of inking and colouring out of my system. I shouldn’t say ‘portraits’, I’m not going for much of a likeness. Usually I’ll glance at a couple of photographs and then go off and draw a vague impression. Margaret Seddon is blonde, Judith Resnik is a bit barmy looking, that sort of thing.

I started with Valentina Tereshkova in January 2009 thinking if I drew one every week I’d finish the series around the end of the year. See how well that worked out.

Regardless of how fast or slow the series is coming, I think they’re very unique — Valentina Tereshkova is my favorite, but I also really like his Judith Resnik.

Svetlana Savitskaya

Sally Ride

Judith Resnik

Anna Fisher

I think it’s good to look at our home now and then, from a different perspective than the ground-view we get every day. The image above is simply stunning:

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth.

And below, an enchanting view of the Moon, as seen from the International Space Station by astronaut Noguchi Soichi on February 28:

Another beautiful “Silver” moon! I love it! Enjoy full moon tonite, everybody.

Photo by Astro_Soichi, twitter.com/astro_soichi

“Handshake in Space” by Robert McCall

The great space artist Robert McCall passed away on February 26 at the age of 90. McCall’s illustrations of the space age are nothing but iconic, and epic in scale. I’ve seen the Opening the Space Frontier, The Next Giant Step mural at Johnson Space Center, and would love to see the others. If nothing else, you’ve seen his work on stamps, mission patches, and 2001: A Space Odyssey posters. He will be missed.

February 28, 2010 — An artist whose visions of the past, present, and future of space exploration have graced U.S. postage stamps, NASA mission patches, and the walls of the Smithsonian, Robert McCall died on Friday of a heart attack in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 90.

Once described by author Isaac Asimov as the “nearest thing to an artist in residence from outer space,” McCall’s paintings first attracted the public’s attention in the 1960s on the pages of LIFE, illustrating the magazine’s series on the future of space travel. He expanded on that theme at the invitation of director Stanley Kubrick, who had McCall paint the advertising posters for his seminal 1968 science fiction film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
— collectSPACE

“Opening the Space Frontier, The Next Giant Step” by Robert McCall

NASA has a gallery of his work online; collectSPACE has this excellent post, and NASA Watch has additional links.

“Orion Leaving Space Station” by Robert McCall

“The White Cosmonaut” by Jeremy Geddes - Oil on Board, © 2009

I find these paintings by Jeremy Geddes utterly fascinating, particularly his attention to architectural detail. The contrast between grounded, photo-realistic detail and a sense of… floating… is quite striking. Also, I really love the colors of Freeway. (Via Curved White.)

“Freeway” by Jeremy Geddes - Oil on Board, © 2007

Today’s photo was featured on APOD last week, and probably several other places by now, but that’s because it’s an AMAZING image. Taken from the ISS, it shows Space Shuttle Endeavour approaching the station to dock.

What’s that approaching? Astronauts on board the International Space Station first saw it far in the distance. Soon it enlarged to become a dark silhouette. As it came even closer, the silhouette appeared to be a spaceship. Finally, at just past 11 pm (CST) last Tuesday, the object, revealed to be the Space Shuttle Endeavour, docked as expected with the Earth-orbiting space station. Pictured above, Endeavour was imaged near Earth’s horizon as it approached, where several layers of the Earth’s atmosphere were visible. Directly behind the shuttle is the mesosphere, which appears blue. The atmospheric layer that appears white is the stratosphere, while the orange layer is Earth’s Troposphere.