Three Bands Of Light

Milky Way

Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, FL

A nebulous sky

The incredibly dark and transparent sky of Paranal, in the Atacama Desert, Chile, is the perfect place to see the bright emission of various nebulae. The white dome of the Residencia occupies the bottom of the image. La Residencia hosts those working at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The hotel represents an oasis in the dry and harsh conditions of the Chilean Atacama desert.

Credit: ESO/M. Claro

Afternoon Thunderstorms roll across the prairie. 

Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, FL

Milky Way over Paranal

A trail of lights leads the way towards Cerro Paranal, atop which sits ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Looming over the flagship observatory, the familiar glow of the Milky Way, studded by dark dust lanes, appears to touch the telescopes. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are also visible in the lower left of the image.

Credit: ESO/A. Ghizzi Panizza (www.albertoghizzipanizza.com)

Blood Red Suwannee River.

The water is stained by decaying vegetation (similar to how tea is made), giving it this amazing blood red color (photo not edited) that looks like its out of a horror movie.

Upper Suwannee River, FL

An EPIC View of Earth

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” 

Carl Sagan wrote those words in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision For The Human Future In Space. His now-famous ode to our home planet (listen to the full passage here, in animated form) is perhaps our most poignant and humble reminder of the exquisite beauty and shared fragility of this planet we call home. 

NASA is now bringing us a daily reminder of that message, thanks to the EPIC camera (a very appropriately named camera, in my opinion) on board NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. You can see some of its handiwork in the image sequence above.

DSCOVR’s official space job is to observe weather on and around the sun, to extend its mechanical finger into the solar wind and measure how strongly that stream of charged particles is gusting toward Earth. It does this job from a special spot in space called the L1 Lagrange point. If you were to draw a line between us and the sun, DSCOVR would be sitting along it, like so (not to scale):

That’s a convenient place to put a spacecraft, especially one whose job it is to stare at the sun. See, DSCOVR is nestled inside a pocket where it’s tugged equally by the Earth’s and Sun’s gravity, like a stalemate in an orbital game of tug-o-war. Gravity does all the work, and the spacecraft doesn’t need to maneuver much to stay in position. There’s a few of these gravity-neutral Lagrange points out there, as you can tell in the image above, and we’ve got spacecraft residing at all of them. 

As a side effect of its sun-staring mission, DSCOVR’s backside happens to be looking back at Earth full-time. In a way, I think that makes it a different sort of moon. 

NASA doesn’t like to let any opportunity go un-scienced, of course, so they decided to slap a camera on DSCOVR’s rear, the one named EPIC, and use their stable perch to keep a regular eye on us. Good lookin’ out, NASA.

A little change in perspective can do a planet good. In 1990, from a vantage point beyond Pluto, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward home to take one last look, giving us the image that inspired Carl Sagan’s ode to ol’ Dotty Blue:

This was not an easy shot to take. Voyager’s camera wasn’t the fancy digital type like most of us have in our phones. It was essentially an old-fashioned black and white tube TV in reverse, relying on colored filters held in front of the camera to highlight different wavelengths of light. Voyager stored its image data on magnetic tape, and each of the shots took more than five hours to reach Earth. Sagan and NASA’s planetary science team had to practically move the heavens (since they were unable to move the Earth) in order to take that picture. 

Now consider the effect this picture has had. That’s home. That’s us. Even if you weren’t born in 1990, everyone and everything that made you is in and on that hazy blue speck. I hope you never lose sight of how amazing it is to view our planet from this perspective. 

Luckily, you can get a reminder every day. The DSCOVR satellite is now sending roughly a picture an hour back to Earth, 24/7/365. That’s a near real-time view of our home. Go take a look. It’s pretty epic.

To see a daily look at what a day on Earth looks like, check out EPIC’s daily updates here.

The Galactic Core over Sharkfin Cove, CA.

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What is so special about Saturn’s moon Titan?

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the only natural satellite in our solar system known to have a dense atmosphere. But there is something much more amazing about the Saturnian orbiter.

Titan has a vast system of oceans, lakes, and huge mountain ranges. How, though, could a body whose average temperature is -290°F (-179°C) contain liquid water on its surface? It doesn’t.

The oceans and lakes on Titan are made of liquid methane (CH₄) and ethane (C₂H₆). The mountains are made of water ice. That’s right. The “waters” of titan are made of not water, but hydrocarbons, and its mountain ranges are made of not minerals like calcium, iron, and cobalt, but ice.

Could, then, there be not water-based, but hydrocarbon-based life on Titan? Astrobiologists (scientists who study possible extraterrestrial life forms) are hoping to send rovers there one day to sample the oceans and answer that question.

If it turned out that there is life somewhere else in the solar system, it would be so much more than just a cool scientific discovery. For two hundred thousand years, we humans have thought that we were alone in the universe. We thought that only our blue and green home harbored life. If life turned up elsewhere, we would know that we were wrong all along.

(pictured: Titan; source: NASA, Cassini spacecraft, 2006)

So I run, a lot. I’ve dealt with assholes trying to throw soda on me to screaming as they drive by, or yelling ‘fag’ at my brightly colored 6 inch shorts (they do have an inner netting). The thing I hate the MOST is when people honk, not to alert me of their presence, but to try to scare me, I mean loud ass slam on your horn for 5 seconds types of honks.

Anyway, I noticed that a white camaro in my neighborhood always did this when he saw me running. It turns out to be some teenage punk. One day, I see the car coming up from behind me on a reflection on a parked car. So I prime myself for an Oscar worthy performance.

Sure enough, he honks as he passes. I stop, and clutch my chest, I mean, like informercial levels of dramatics. And I crumble on the street. The little jerk has a conscience, apparently, because he turns the car around and drives back. He gets out and is audibly freaking out.

I’m still playing dead and he gets closer to try to check on me. He crouches down next to me to try to check for breathing.

I SCREAM in his ear, get back up, and go on the rest of my run.

Haven’t had to deal with the white camaro since.

Olympics Meme