Showing posts with label photo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photo. Show all posts

Thursday, August 5, 2010

little bits

Life is very busy at the moment, but good-busy. I haven't been able to post as much as usual, but it's swings and roundabouts. I'm enjoying studying, and feeding the chickens and playing with my son.

Bit of a bummer about the light show not turning up.

A facinating post by maps here on hone's latest "I don't want a pakeha inlaw" outburst.
"By implicitly endorsing the view that the children of unions between Maori and non-Maori represent some sort of diminution of Maori identity, Harawira gives a boost to the sort of racism he has spent his career trying to defeat."
The comments, as usual are excellent. I can't be bothered with hone at the moment - less talk more action needed.

Monday, July 5, 2010

light your fire

I like the idea of fires of warning on the beach. It is a traditional method of saying something is wrong, and that is exactly the tone needed when discussing the attempts to mine and find oil and gas reserves off the coast. The fires want be lit and be lit they will be.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

what a galaxy

The latest from the HubbleSite NewsCentre

November 18, 2009: The magnificent galaxy NGC 4710 is tilted nearly edge-on to our view from Earth. This perspective allows astronomers to easily distinguish the central bulge of stars from its pancake-flat disk of stars, dust, and gas. What's striking in the image is a ghostly "X" pattern of stars. This natural-color photo was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys on January 15, 2006.


For more information about galaxy NGC 4710 visit here



Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Goudfrooij (STScI)

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Colliding galaxies - The Mice NGC 4676


The Mice (NGC 4676): Colliding Galaxies Stream Stars and Gas. Source Hubblesite

When great masses of stars and energy called galaxies collide, best to be out the way.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

View from mars



The Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars (PSP_005558_9040)



Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

From the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) website

"This is an image of Earth and the Moon, acquired at 5:20 a.m. MST on 3 October 2007, at a range of 142 million kilometers, which gives the HiRISE image a scale of 142 km/pixel and an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a Moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disks of the Earth and Moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth/Moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.


On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the Moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact, the RED-filter image was almost completely saturated, the blue-green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the IR image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release."

Hat tip - Open Parachute Blog

Monday, September 28, 2009

Planetary Nebula K 4-55

Planetary Nebula K 4-55

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: R. Sahai and J. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)


Amazing to think that we can see these images.

Friday, September 11, 2009

light from 6 million light years away arrives

Image Credits NASA Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217

6 million light years away.
Would it be there if we couldn't see it?

Sunday, July 26, 2009

What is real?


Image credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / The SINGS Team (SSC/Caltech)

Amazing new image from space. I reproduce the article and explaination in full below from here.

"NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a wild creature of the dark -- a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center.

The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of stars, white.

The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star. Our Milky Way's central black hole is tame in comparison, with a mass of a few million suns.

The ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy is causing the ring to light up with new stars. The galaxy's red spiral arms and the swirling spokes seen between the arms show dust heated by newborn stars. Older populations of stars scattered through the galaxy are blue.

The fuzzy blue dot to the left, which appears to fit snuggly between the arms, is a companion galaxy. Astronomers say it is unclear whether this companion poked a hole in the larger galaxy, or just happens to be aligned in a gap in the arms.

Other dots in the picture are either nearby stars in our galaxy, or distant galaxies.

This image was taken during Spitzer's cold mission, before it ran out of liquid coolant. The observatory's warm mission is ongoing, with two infrared channels operating at about 30 Kelvin (minus 406 degrees Fahrenheit).

Infrared light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns is blue; 4.5-micron light is green and 8.0-micron light is red. The contribution from starlight measured at 3.6 microns has been subtracted from the 8.0-micron image to enhance the visibility of the dust features."

The fractual nature of reality where the macro reflects the micro. Looks maori in design to me.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Can you see the shuttle?


Here's the full sun... amazing - can you see the shuttle?
Look at how beautiful the sun is in this photo - wow!