NASA — James Poling

Blue Marble 2012: Planet Earth in High Resolution

January 27, 2012 By James Poling Leave a Comment

A 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed 'Suomi NPP' on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Click here for higher-res images for download. The 2012 version of this photograph was an homage of sorts to the famous 1972 image taken by Apollo 17 astronauts and which is one of the most widely viewed photographs in existence.

View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. This is the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap. Note the heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible. The Arabian Peninsula can be seen at the northeastern edge of Africa. The large island off the coast of Africa is Madagascar. The Asian mainland is on the horizon toward the northeast.

Filed Under: Science Tagged With: astronomy, blue marble, earth, NASA, pale blue dot, photographs

Amazing Images from Cassini’s Flyby of Saturn in 2004

March 16, 2011 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Yesterday’s APOD was an unreal video of a compilation of images from Cassini’s flyby of Saturn back in 2004. The compilation video uses only photographs from Cassini, no CGI and no 3D models. Apparently there’s going to be an IMAX movie coming out with more of these images called Outside In. If this short video is any indication it’s going to be a must see for all you astronomy geeks out there.

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

Filed Under: Videos Tagged With: cassini, NASA, photos, saturn, space, Videos

Amazing Video of the Space Shuttle Discovery Launch Taken from an Airplane

February 26, 2011 By James Poling Leave a Comment

This airplane just happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch the Space Shuttle taking off and heading to space. I grew up in Florida and saw many Shuttle takeoffs, the night ones were always the most spectacular, but this is a view that I would imagine few people have had the opportunity to see.

The video was taken by YouTube user NeilMonday.

Filed Under: Science, Videos Tagged With: airplane, discovery, NASA, space shuttle, Videos

Forecast: Cloudy with a chance of Welp, We’re Boned

January 31, 2011 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Call Mr. Plow, that’s my name, that name again is Mr. Plow.

This visible image was captured by the GOES-13 satellite and shows the low pressure area bringing snowfall to the Midwest Jan. 31, 2011. Heavy snow is expected today in portions of northern Iowa, southern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Snowfall from the system extends from Michigan west to Montana, Idaho, Utah and Arizona. A mix of rain and snow also stretches into the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, and it is all moving east. This system appears to be as large as 1/3rd of the Continental U.S. The image was created on Jan. 31 at 12:45 p.m. EST (1745 UTC) by the NASA GOES Project, located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The GOES series of satellites are operated by NOAA.

Image courtesy of NASA

Filed Under: News Tagged With: earth, NASA, photos, satellite images, snowpocalypse, snowstorm

Spectacular View of the Nile River and the Life it Supports taken from Space

November 1, 2010 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Astronaut Doug Wheelock posted an amazing photo he snapped from the ISS while passing over the Nile river. It’s a pretty fascinating view of the sheer amount of life that river supports, and really drives home how important a role water plays in defining the history and evolution of humanity.

Filed Under: Photos Tagged With: doug wheelock, international space station, NASA, nile, photos

NASA Naysayers Proved Wrong

October 30, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

I can be the bigger man and admit when I am wrong. I admit that there may have been one (or more) occasions that I have entered into a “spirited” dialogue with someone and tried my hardest to persuade them that the entire moon landing was a hoax. Most of me knew it was bs, but part of me thought it would be much cooler to find out it was a hoax than to confirm it actually happened. I’ll never know what the former would feel like, but I have to admit the latter feels pretty cool too.

LRO maneuvered into its 50-km mapping orbit on September 15. The next pass over the Apollo 17 landing site resulted in images with more than two times better resolution than previously acquired. At the time of this recent overflight the Sun was high in the sky (28° incidence angle) helping to bring out subtle differences in surface brightness. The descent stage of the lunar module Challenger is now clearly visible, at 50-cm per pixel (angular resolution) the descent stage deck is eight pixels across (four meters), and the legs are also now distinguishable. The descent stage served as the launch pad for the ascent stage as it blasted off for a rendezvous with the command module America on 14 December 1972.

via LROC.com

Filed Under: Science Tagged With: apollo 17, moon landing, NASA, space

Starburst Galaxy

November 21, 2008 By James Poling 2 Comments

While it is not a delicious, chewy, fruit flavored galaxy far away, it’s still pretty freaking amazing.

Long ago, astronomers spotted a galaxy far away and wondered why it was giving birth to so many stars. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, they have finally figured out the answer to the puzzle: The starburst galaxy turns out to be farther away than they thought.

Rather than being all by its lonesome, just 7 million light-years away, the starburst galaxy NGC 1569 is stuck in the middle of crowded galactic cluster nearly 11 million light-years away. The resulting gravitational interactions are probably squeezing the galaxy’s gas so much that it’s been forming stars at a rate more than 100 times faster than our own Milky Way … for the past 100 million years or so.

“This was the strongest starburst galaxy in the nearby universe,” Alessandra Aloisi, an astronomer at the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute and the European Space Agency, told me today. “It was really puzzling why it was forming stars at such a high rate. It wasn’t fitting in with current theories.”

This also reminds me of a conversation I was having the other day about the sad but inevitable demise of the Hubble. NASA has claimed that if the telescope breaks down again it will not be fixed, that its lifespan has run its course. Let’s hope there is something bigger and better in line to replace the Hubble quickly when it does reach it’s end.

Just a few weeks ago NASA rebooted several critical backup units on board the Hubble to repair the primary instrument control and data formatting unit which failed in late September this year causing the telescope to shutdown. The first image the Hubble produced after being rebooted was astonishing.