Common Themes

Today’s Picture of the Day @ NASA is the Peony Nebula, and this dreamily-colored image is downloadable in standard desktop/wallpaper sizes.

If our galaxy were to host its own version of the Olympics, the title for the brightest known star would go to a massive star called Eta Carina. However, a new runner-up, now the second-brightest star in our galaxy, has been discovered in the galaxy’s dusty and frenzied interior. This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the new silver medalist, circled in the inset above, in the central region of our Milky Way.

Dubbed the Peony nebula star, this blazing ball of gas shines with the equivalent light of 3.2 million suns. The reigning champ, Eta Carina, produces the equivalent of 4.7 million suns worth of light. However, astronomers say these estimates are uncertain, and it’s possible that the Peony nebula star could be even brighter than Eta Carina.

If the Peony star is so bright, why doesn’t it stand out more in this view? The answer is dust. This star is located in a very dusty region jam packed with stars. In fact, there could be other super bright stars still hidden deep in the stellar crowd. Spitzer’s infrared eyes allowed it to pierce the dust and assess the Peony nebula star’s true brightness. Likewise, infrared data from the European Southern Observatory’s New Technology Telescope in Chile were integral in calculating the Peony nebula star’s luminosity.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Potsdam Univ.

NASA Images is a great new(er) resource developed last year as a joint project between NASA and Archive.org. If you’ve been looking for a one-stop resource for everything NASA does, you just found it!

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.

An amusing interesting little post on Slashdot earlier this week:

“Michael Benson is proposing that NASA send the ISS to the moon instead of leaving it low earth orbit. (While we’re at it, we should re-brand it as the ‘International Space Ship.’) He points out that it’s already designed to be moved periodically to higher orbits so instead of just boosting it a few miles, strap on some ion engines and put it in orbit around the moon instead of the earth. That would provide an initial base for the astronauts going to the moon and give the ISS a purpose other than performing yet more studies on the effect of micro gravity on humans. Benson concludes: ‘Let’s begin the process of turning the ISS from an Earth-orbiting caterpillar into an interplanetary butterfly.’”

My favorite part? Among the tags listed on the article: “goodluckwiththat”.

Edit: If anyone’s interested, the orange moon icon used as this site’s favicon, as well as in the above graphic, is available here:

The Kennedy Media Gallery is my one-stop source for launch and landing photos of the Space Shuttle missions. Sure, the NASA Human Spaceflight site gives you some of them… but not ALL, not like this! The above is just one example (from the STS-123 night landing, earlier this year) of the gobs and gobs of photos awaiting your downloading pleasure. Got broadband?

Released last week, the Apollo Surface Panoramas archive gives public access to some remarkable photographic panoramas taken on the lunar surface.

Apollo Surface Panoramas is a digital library of photographic panoramas that the Apollo astronauts took while exploring the Moon’s surface. These images provide a spectacular boots-on-the-ground view of the lunar landscape. The panoramas are stitched together from individual 70mm Hasselblad frames, each of which is also accessible through this new atlas. Lunar surface features captured in the panoramas can be studied using zoom and pan tools. An annotated version of each panorama is also available to assist users with the identification of major geographic features around each Apollo landing site.

I was pointed to the Great Images in NASA (GRIN) website earlier this week; GRIN offers high-resolution image galleries for everything that is NASA. The above is just one example; thousands of images await your browsing pleasure!