What’s Up For May 2016?

Astronaut Leland Melvin includes his rescued dogs in best NASA portrait ever.

Tilt Shift filters applied to Hubble Space Telescope photos.

Tilt Shift filters make the foreground and background of images more blurred, changing the depth of field of these images. 

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Grasping the stars 💫⭐

Einstein’s gravitational waves found at last

One hundred years after Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, scientists have finally spotted these elusive ripples in space-time.

In a highly anticipated announcement, physicists with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) revealed on 11 February that their twin detectors have heard the gravitational ‘ringing’ produced by the collision of two black holes about 400 megaparsecs (1.3 billion light-years) from Earth.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves,” David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, said at a Washington DC press conference. “We did it!”

Continue reading via source: Nature

Infographic: Nik Spencer/Nature

Answer Time from Space!

I’m on day 321 of my #YearInSpace, and today I surpassed 500 days in space total. Let’s chat! Sat., Feb. 13 at 1:45 p.m. ET. 

The spacecraft Cassini captured some raw images of the icy Saturn moon, Enceladus from just 30 miles away. The small crescent moon erupted a geyser at its South Pole, backlit plumes filled with salt water and organic compounds. Read full article and view these pictures here.

What’s Up for March 2016?

In March, Jupiter, it’s moons and moon shadows will all be visible in the sky. Find out when and where to look up:

Jupiter dominates the evening sky this month, rising at sunset and setting at dawn. On March 8, Jupiter reaches what is called “opposition”. Imagine that Jupiter and the sun are at opposite ends of a straight line, with the Earth in between. This brings Jupiter its closest to Earth, so it shines brighter and appears larger in telescopes.

On the nights of March 14 – 15, March 21 – 22 and March 29, two of Jupiter’s moons will cross the planet’s disk. 

When the planet is at opposition and the sun shines on Jupiter’s moons, we can see the moon’s shadow crossing the planet. There are actually 11 of these double shadow transits in March!

The next six months will be awesome times for you to image Jupiter when it’s highest in the sky; near midnight now, and a little earlier each night through the late summer.

Even through the smallest telescopes or binoculars, you should be able to see the two prominent belts on each side of Jupiter’s equator made up of the four Galilean moons: Io, Europa Ganymede and Calisto. If you have a good enough view, you may even see Jupiter’s Red Spot!

Our Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter on July 4th of this year and will go into orbit around the giant planet. Right now, the Juno mission science team is actively seeking amateur and professional images of the planet. These images are uploaded to a Juno website, and the public is invited to discuss points of interest in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Locations will later be voted on and the favorites will be targets for JunoCam, the spacecraft’s imaging camera. Once JunoCam has taken the images, they’ll be posted online. Imaging participants can then process these raw mission images and re-upload them for others to view.  

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Saturn’s hexagonal storm system in it’s north pole

We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us. - Interstellar, 2014.