Les planètes sont à l'affiche. Il y en a qui affichent les Dieux du Stade sur la porte des toilettes, et grand bien leur en fasse. Il y a les aficionados du calendrier des chatons distribué par le facteur. Ceux qui préfèrent les chiens guides d’aveugles ou les pompiers. Et puis, il y a ces chanceux de scientifiques, politiques et autres employés de la Nasa, qui ont reçu en guise de calendrier 2016 une splendide collection de posters de science-fiction sur le thème du tourisme spatial, dessinés par l’agence américaine Invisible Creature. On pourrait être jaloux si nous, pauvres amateurs d’astronomie, n’avions aucun moyen de mettre la main sur ces bijoux de graphisme. Cinq posters célèbrent les vingt ans de la quête humaine d’exoplanètes, depuis la découverte de 51 Pegasi b en 1995. Les autres affiches imaginent des voyages thématisés sur nos voisines les planètes, planètes naines et satellites du système solaire.
Camille Gévaudan. Sans titre. Planetary Posters — Tyler Nordgren. Flowers of the Sky. In this section of the site we bring you curated collections of images, books, audio and film, shining a light on curiosities and wonders from a wide range of online archives. With a leaning toward the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of materials which truly celebrates the breadth and variety of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it.
Some of our most popular posts include visions of the future from late 19th century France, a dictionary of Victorian slang and a film showing the very talented “hand-farting” farmer of Michigan. With each post including links back to the original source we encourage you to explore these wonderful online sources for yourself. Check out our Sources page to see where we find the content.
The Day the Earth Smiled. On July 19, 2013, in an event celebrated the world over, NASA's Cassini spacecraft slipped into Saturn's shadow and turned to image the planet, seven of its moons, its inner rings -- and, in the background, our home planet, Earth. With the sun's powerful and potentially damaging rays eclipsed by Saturn itself, Cassini's onboard cameras were able to take advantage of this unique viewing geometry.
They acquired a panoramic mosaic of the Saturn system that allows scientists to see details in the rings and throughout the system as they are backlit by the sun. This mosaic is special as it marks the third time our home planet was imaged from the outer solar system; the second time it was imaged by Cassini from Saturn's orbit; and the first time ever that inhabitants of Earth were made aware in advance that their photo would be taken from such a great distance. This image spans about 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers) across. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI › Additional views. La roche martienne venue de nulle part. Entre deux photos prises le 6 et le 18 décembre, un caillou est apparu sur le sol martien !
Son origine est inconnue. Présent sur Mars depuis 2004, le rover de la NASA Opportunity a fait une étrange découverte au mois de décembre. Deux photos prises à 12 jours d'écart, montrent « l'apparition » d'un caillou qui n'était pas là auparavant. Trois hypothèses sont envisagées Il peut s'agir d'un rocher qui aurait été éjecté par le mouvement d'une des roues du rover, car il s'est déplacé entre les deux dates de prise de vue. Ci-dessous à gauche, la vue du 6 décembre, à droite celle du 18 décembre. Le mystère s'épaissit à l'analyse Depuis sa découverte, le bloc est étudié par les chercheurs. « La partie centrale plus foncée ressemble à rien que l'on ait vu avant. Au bord du cratère Opportunity se trouve actuellement sur le rempart du cratère Endeavour. Astrophoto: Mars south pole by Mars Express spacecraft. Mars is many things: Fascinating, scientifically interesting, historically interesting, dry, frozen, weird, inhospitable.
And as much as I like images of the red planet, one adjectival phrase I wouldn’t have immediately thought to match with Mars is “jaw-droppingly artistically gorgeous”. I’ll change that opinion right here and now: That is the south pole of Mars, as seen by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. It’s a combination of blue, green, and infrared images (put together into that stunning picture by Riding with Robots creator Bill Dunford). This exaggerates the ruddy ochre hue of the planet, but magnifies the overall impact of the picture. It’s surreal; it looks a lot like the top of the mug of coffee I make myself every morning. Where you see white is a vast region of permanently frozen water ice , many kilometers thick, covered in winter by a few-meter-deep veneer of frozen carbon dioxide, commonly called dry ice. Why no aurora last night? Here’s the scoop. Maybe you were expecting something more like this last night?
Join the club. Credit: Bob King Did you plan a vigil the past two nights in hope of seeing the northern lights? I know I did. Lost some sleep over it for sure. As it happened, the display never materialized. Since auroras in that part of the world are as common as doughnuts, I think we can say this outburst was officially a flop. I spoke with Joe Kunches, space scientist at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, this morning about the matter. Kunches described the solar blast as an empty bottle. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) monitors the sun from the stable L1 Lagrange Point a million miles sunward of the Earth.
“The CME (coronal mass ejection) was slower than the model suggested by 8 hours, which sometimes means that it will be weaker than expected,” said Kunches. “This illustrates our biggest forecasting challenge,” he went on. Embedded within the sun’s plasma swirls are portions of its magnetic field. Exoplanet pictures: Astronomers have photos of alien planets. Astronomers have discovered more than 850 planets orbiting other stars. These exoplanets are found using a variety of techniques, but most are indirect—we see the effect of the planet on its host star, but we don’t see the planet itself. However, a very few handful have actually been directly detected—small sparks of light visible next to the brilliant spotlights of their stars. On this page are pictures all the exoplanets we’ve been able to see so far, including other solar systems, and some planets caught in motion as they orbit their parent stars.
Photo by ESO. The first-ever direct picture of an exoplanet came in 2005. Well, kinda: The planet was seen in 2004 but astronomers had to wait a year to confirm it wasn’t a background star or galaxy. Photo by NASA,ESA, P. Fomalhaut is a star only about 25 light-years from us, making it our galactic next-door neighbor. Just inside that ring is a tiny spark of light, first seen in 2004.
Photo by Paul Kalas, U.C. The First Exosolar System. Gemini Planet Imager: New camera to photograph alien worlds. Photo processing by Christian Marois, NRC Canada Get ready to see a lot of exoplanets images pretty soon: The Gemini Planet Imager is online and ready to seek out strange new worlds. GPI is a camera that is used on the Gemini South telescope, an 8.1-meter behemoth located in Chile.
GPI is the size of a small car and uses advanced optical techniques to provide incredibly crisp images of young planets orbiting distant suns. It will be able to clearly see exoplanets even when they are 10 million times fainter than their parent stars, and separated by as little as 0.2 arcseconds: Roughly the apparent size of a quarter 25 kilometers (16 miles) away! The first test runs were carried out in November 2013 and went very smoothly.
The image above, for example, shows the planet Beta Pictoris b, about 63 light years from Earth (the star itself was masked to reduce its light, and the planet is easy to spot.). Amazing. The camera can also detect polarized light. Brassens dans le Cosmos. Q : Hé moi aussi je veux un beau site comme ça, vous me le faites ? WordPress est un logiciel participatif, normalement chacun peut reprendre un habillage et l’adapter, rien n’est “déposé”.Cela dit nous avons décidé de ne pas le mettre non plus en open-source. On s’est donné du mal pour faire un truc joli et on ne veut pas que ce soit repris n’importe comment par n’importe qui. Nous avons donc préféré nous dire que nous filerions l’accès à ce format d’habillage à des dessinateurs dont nous connaissons/apprécions le travail ! Après, personnellement, je considère la partie WordPress comme le travail d’Arnold et je le laisse complètement décider de ce qu’il veut faire avec !
Q : Ouah quel joli blog, comment t’as fait ? Je n’ai pas fait grand-chose, à vrai dire !
Terre. Lune. Ciel. Astro. Astronautique.