Tapejara (Media)

‘Twilight stars at Concordia’

Image credit: ESA/IPEV/PNRA–B. Healey

This image of the Concordia research station, in Antarctica, was taken by medical doctor Beth Healey, in 2015. Concordia sits on a plateau 3200m above sea level, where temperatures can drop to –80°C, and the Sun can’t be seen for 4 months of the year. The thin atmosphere, clear skies and zero light pollution around Concordia make it an ideal place for observing the universe, as this picture shows with its aurora and starry backdrop.

For ESA, the isolation and extreme weather offer interesting parallels with spaceflight and living on another planet. Every year, an ESA-sponsored medical doctor joins the Italian-French station’s crew of up to 15, to monitor and run experiments on them, in the way their health varies under the conditions.

‘Space station view of rare noctilucent clouds’

Image credit: ESA/NASA

“Expedition 47 Flight Engineer Tim Peake of the European Space Agency photographed rare, high-altitude noctilucent or "night shining" clouds from the International Space Station on May 29, 2016″

“Polar mesospheric clouds, also known as noctilucent clouds, form between 76 to 85 kilometers (47 to 53 miles) above the Earth's surface, near the boundary of the mesosphere and thermosphere, a region known as the mesopause. At these altitudes, water vapour can freeze into clouds of ice crystals. When the sun is below the horizon and the ground is in darkness, these high clouds may still be illuminated, lending them their ethereal, "night shining" qualities”

“In the late spring and summer, unusual clouds form high in the atmosphere above the polar regions of the world. As the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere gets cooler, and ice crystals form on meteor dust and other particles high in the sky. Polar mesospheric clouds can be observed from both the Earth's surface and in orbit by astronauts aboard the International Space Station”

‘Hubble spots heavy-metal stars in head-banging spherical cluster’

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

“The stars of this spectacular spherical cluster - NGC 6496 - are enriched with much higher proportions of metals - elements atomically heavier than hydrogen - than stars found in similar clusters. A handful of these high-metallicity stars are also variable stars, meaning that their brightness fluctuates over time. NGC 6496 hosts a selection of long-period variables - giant pulsating stars whose brightness can take up to, and even over, a thousand days to change - and short-period eclipsing binaries, which dim when eclipsed by a stellar companion”

‘The transits of ISS and Mercury captured simultaneously’

Image credit: Thierry Legault

“On 9 May Mercury passed in front of the Sun as seen from Earth. These transits of Mercury occur only around 13 times every century, so astronomers all over Earth were eager to capture the event. For astrophotographer Thierry Legault, capturing Mercury and the Sun alone was not enough, however – he wanted the International Space Station in the frame as well.”

‘Secrets Revealed From The Dark Side Of Pluto’

Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

“NASA's New Horizons spacecraft took this stunning image of Pluto only a few minutes after closest approach on July 14, 2015.”

“The inset at top right shows a detail of Pluto's crescent, including an intriguing bright wisp (near the center) measuring tens of miles across that may be a discreet, low-lying cloud in Pluto's atmosphere; if so, it would be the only one yet identified in New Horizons imagery. The scene in this inset is 140 miles (230 kilometers) across.”

“The inset at bottom right shows more detail on the night side of Pluto. The topography here appears quite rugged, and broad valleys and sharp peaks with relief totaling 3 miles (5 kilometers) are apparent. The scene in this inset is 460 miles (750 kilometers) wide.”

‘Shuttle Silhouette’

Image credit: NASA

‘Enceladus And Saturn’s Rings’

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

“This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 0.3 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 25, 2015 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 54 miles (87 kilometers) per pixel”

‘La ilusión óptica del año (Illusion of the year)’

‘Copernicus Sentinel’s Mosaic Of Africa’

Image credit: Copernicus Sentinel / ESA Climate Change Initiative Land Cover project

"Using almost 7000 images captured by the Sentinel-2A satellite, this mosaic offers a cloud-free view of the African continent – about 20% of the total land area in the world. The majority of these separate images were taken between December 2015 and April 2016, totalling 32 TB of data. Thanks to Sentinel-2A's 290 km-wide swath and 10-day revisit at the equator, the chance of imaging Earth's surface when the skies are clear is relatively high. Nevertheless, being able to capture the Tropics cloud-free over the five months is remarkable."

‘350 Million Years In One Picture’

Via Facebook

This sea stack, known as Dun Briste (pronounced ‘doon briss-ter’) measures 63x23 metres and 45 metres tall. It used to be connected to the Irish mainlaind, but its connecting arch collapsed in 1393, rendering its top uninhabitable by humans.

‘The Hubble Bubble: NGC 7635’

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Text credit:  Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP) of APOD

Explanation: Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula.

Although it looks delicate, the 7 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and around 45 times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud.

The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie a mere 7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a composite of Hubble Space Telescope image data from 2016, released to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hubble's launch.

‘Show Mum You Love Her...’

By giving her one of our scented beard oils!? That’s a funny way of doing it :-D

‘Priceless Stupidity’

‘Drugs Ranked According To Total Harm’

Graph credit: Nutt, King & Phillips in The Lancet; taken from Prof. Nutt’s presentation in 2012, linked here.

This graph shows harm normalised to 100 people, so what you’re seeing is a comparison of the drugs themselves. Alcohol is vastly more abundantly consumed than heroin, but if it were consumed in equal quantities, it would still do more damage!

‘Romance Isn’t Dead’

Seen at a Sainsbury’s supermarket in the UK.

‘Putting Pluto’s Geology On The Map’

Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; text credit: Tricia Talbert

This map covers a portion of Pluto's surface that measures 2,070 kilometers from top to bottom, and includes the vast nitrogen-ice plain informally named Sputnik Planum and surrounding terrain.  As the key in the figure below indicates, the map is overlaid with colors that represent different geological terrains.

The base map for this geologic map is a mosaic of 12 images obtained by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) at a resolution of about 390 meters per pixel.  The mosaic was obtained at a range of approximately 77,300 kilometers from Pluto, about an hour and 40 minutes before New Horizons' closest approach on the 14th of July, 2015.

‘Dawn sees the closest shots of Ceres ever’

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Kupalo Crater is shown on the top left; part of Messor Crater on the top right; the floor of Dantu Crater on the bottom left; and the scarps of another Cerean crater on the bottom right.

These pictures are taken from 385 kilometres away from the dwarf planet's surface - the altitude it is expected to stay at until it’s retired from its prime mission, on the 30th of June 2016.