Photo gallery: Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s top 15 pictures from space. (via Slate.com)

Cassini catches an awesome glimpse of Saturn’s north pole hurricane (via io9)

NASA: Prospect

So much fun. So clever, so creative. This is HTML 5 people.

Space Shuttle concept art from the 1970s and 1980s! NASA and the San Diego Air & Space Museum have released several images commemorating the shuttle. The article I came across is here at io9.com, but you can see the rest of the images on the San Diego Air & Space Museum Flickr account.

This spectacular image is the deepest view of the Universe ever captured. The farthest galaxy in this image? 13 BILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY. Amazing. Thanks Hubble!

(via io9)

Want to know what it’s like to land on Mars? AMAZING high-res video of Curiosity’s landing.

Mars Rover Curiosity Survives “Brain Surgery”

Mars Rover Curiosity Survives “Brain Surgery”

VOLCANOES KICK ASS.

(via Astronomy Picture of the Day)

How fast is lightning? Lightning, in fact, moves not only too fast for humans to see, but so fast that humans can’t even tell which direction it is moving. The above lightning stroke did not move too fast, however, for this extremely high time resolution video to resolve. Tracking at an incredible 7,207 frames per second, actual time can be seen progressing at the video bottom. The above lightning bolt starts with many simultaneously creating ionized channels branching out from an negatively charged pool of electrons and ions that has somehow been created by drafts and collisions in a rain cloud. About 0.015 seconds after appearing — which takes about 3 seconds in the above time-lapse video — one of the meandering charge leaders makes contact with a suddenly appearing positive spike moving up from the ground and an ionized channel of air is created that instantly acts like a wire. Immediately afterwards, this hot channel pulses with a tremendous amount of charges shooting back and forth between the cloud and the ground, creating a dangerous explosion that is later heard as thunder. Much remains unknown about lightning, however, including details of the mechanism that separates charges.

(via Astronomy Picture of the Day)

Astronomers make observation of distant quasar with “unprecedented sharpness”

An international team of astronomers has observed the heart of a distant quasar with unprecedented sharpness, two million times finer than human vision. The observations, made by connecting the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope [1] to two others on different continents for the first time, is a crucial step towards the dramatic scientific goal of the “Event Horizon Telescope” project [2]: imaging the supermassive black holes at the centre of our own galaxy and others.

(via ESO - eso1229 - APEX takes part in sharpest observation ever)

At the edge of the solar system, Voyager 1 is reporting a sharp increase in cosmic rays that could herald the spacecraft’s long-awaited entry into interstellar space.

unknownskywalker: