Microscopics

Sky Guide is the new star gazing app from Nick Risinger, with music by High Skies.

Nick has been featured in Wired and on BBC Horizon as he travelled the globe taking 37,000 photographs of the night sky for this app. Point your iPad or iPhone at the sky. day or night, and it will align [...]

A mini video of a super-massive coronal mass ejection, travelling at 900 miles per second. The Earth would be about the same size as the smallest feature you can see on the Sun’s surface, or about 1/100th the diameter of the Sun.

Images were captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, August 2012.
Music by High Skies.
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We’re pleased to tell you that two Gas and High Skies tours have been added to Worldwide Telescope. WWT is a virtual telescope that allows you to explore the universe through the lens of Hubble, Spitzer and others, without leaving your computer.
Universal Beauty
A tour of the beautiful. Music is Gas – Microscopic. You can download the [...]

NASA has just released new images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the original Apollo Moon landing sites. Some even show the astronauts tracks when carrying out their surface experiments.
 
The Lunar Landers highlighted with a shadow from the low Sun.

Apollo 14. You can just about make out the astronauts tracks in the dust.

Apollo [...]

To mark the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, we have NASA TV, live from Space Shuttle Endeavor (STS-127).

Click to play. All the usual controls; full screen, mute, volume, pause…
It will be docking live with the International Space Station, and the crew will be moonwalking performing five spacewalks and complete construction of the Japan [...]

Our posts for today all have a space theme.
Here are a few pics of contenders for the next Space Shuttle…

NASA and Paragon are designing a new spacesuit.

Paragon has received authorization to begin work on NASA’s Constellation Space Suit System (CSSS). Paragon is beginning this work on the first major space suit redesign in over 40 years. Paragon is responsible for the design and manufacture of the suit’s life support and thermal control system. The first [...]

Here is a time-lapse animation of the ISSs progress.

 
Click image to view animation

Worldwide Telescope has just been updated with a browser version, so now everyone can gaze at the heavens with telescopic detail. It’s not as smooth when zooming and scrolling as the installed program, so I would still recommend installing the full version if you can, but it does have most of the features of the [...]

Comet Lulin is coming this week, and it may well be visible by the naked eye, or at the least with a pair of binoculars. We’ve made a Lulin skymap to make finding it as easy as finding a needle in a needle shop.

Lulin skymap, click to enlarge.
Map created with images from Worldwide Telescope 
Comet Lulin, [...]