Andromedasbitch-blog - Spacey

Traveling across more than seven Midwestern states with a professional storm-chasing group, photographer Eric Meola documents everything from hair-raising tornadoes to serene sunsets in his project ‘Tornado Alley: The Sky Above the Land Below.’ While the deadly force of a storm can wreak havoc upon a community, he hopes his work reminds the safety-conscientious observer that there is another side to these storms. “You are miles away from the nearest town and you are looking at these beautiful, flat horizons with endless wheat fields, long roads and dramatic rolling hills,” Meola tells TIME. “Then in all of the peacefulness comes this angry sky that is almost exploding with energy and light, form and shape. Nature truly is beautiful.” Photograph by Eric Meola. Read more at lightbox.time.com and see a behind the scenes picture @timelightbox. http://ift.tt/1Kvla1j

It’s Red, White and Blue stars month!

This week’s entry: Life of a star Part 2

http://www.schoolsobservatory.org.uk/astro/stars/lifecycle

The Milky Way from Yosemite, CA

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“I liked them before they were famous”

Aboard the International Space Station this morning, Astronaut Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully captured JAXA’s Kounotori 5 H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV-5) at 6:28 a.m. EDT.

Yui commanded the station’s robotic arm, Canadarm2, to reach out and grapple the HTV-5, while NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren provided assistance and Scott Kelly monitored HTV-5 systems. The HTV-5 launched aboard an H-IIB rocket at 7:50 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 19, from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. Since then, the spacecraft has performed a series of engine burns to fine-tune its course for arrival at the station.

The HTV-5 is delivering more than 8,000 pounds of equipment, supplies and experiments in a pressurized cargo compartment. The unpressurized compartment will deliver the 1,400-pound CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) investigation, an astrophysics mission that will search for signatures of dark matter and provide the highest energy direct measurements of the cosmic ray electron spectrum.

Below is a breathtaking image shared by Astronaut Scott Kelly of the HTV-5 and Canadarm2, which reached out and grappled the cargo spacecraft.

1960’s(USA) Color Photography

Light Installation - by Chris Fraser

“••• — •— —•——”

Interstellar (2014)

What is a gamma-ray burst?

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are flashes of gamma rays associated with extremely energetic explosions that have been observed in distant galaxies. They are the brightest electromagnetic events known to occur in the universe. Bursts can last from ten milliseconds to several minutes. The initial burst is usually followed by a longer-lived “afterglow” emitted at longer wavelengths (X-ray, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, microwave and radio).

Most observed GRBs are believed to consist of a narrow beam of intense radiation released during a supernova or hypernova as a rapidly rotating, high-mass star collapses to form a neutron star, quark star, or black hole. A subclass of GRBs (the “short” bursts) appear to originate from a different process - this may be due to the merger of binaryneutron stars. The cause of the precursor burst observed in some of these short events may be due to the development of a resonance between the crust and core of such stars as a result of the massive tidal forces experienced in the seconds leading up to their collision, causing the entire crust of the star to shatter.

Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be highly focused explosions, with most of the explosion energy collimated into a narrow jet traveling at speeds exceeding 99.995% of the speed of light. The approximate angular width of the jet (that is, the degree of spread of the beam) can be estimated directly by observing the achromatic “jet breaks” in afterglow light curves: a time after which the slowly decaying afterglow begins to fade rapidly as the jet slows and can no longer beam its radiation as effectively

Image credit: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde