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That’s Saturn’s moon, Titan. Straight chillin’, balancing on top of Saturn’s gorgeous rings. Sort of. The powers of perspective, summoned! Consummated. But what is really interesting is how fucking thin Saturn’s rings are. Something I don’t really stop and contemplate. Well, I don’t contemplate much, but that’s obvious.

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This video of the solar eclipse is rad for several reasons. For starters, you can see some pretty righteous magnetic activity on the Sun’s surface. The Sun is spittin’ like a mad dragon, fiery hotness! Also, it features an optical illusion wherein the Moon appears to enter the scene, and then somehow, reverse direction.

Hit the jump for the video.

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You need to click this pig to get a full sense of her majesty. This is an image of the Discovery, taken a few weeks ago. Tomorrow, Discovery is taking her final voyage into space. Sloughing off the shackles of our niggling orbit and ascending to the cosmos. Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy notes that “barring this and one more flight of  Endeavour later this year, it’ll be a while before we can put humans into space at all.”

What.

A.

Fucking.

Bummer.

We need to take to the stars, to exert our reach through the cosmos. All the time and energy wasted here, lead-footed and fighting amongst one another. Ah, to dream! Of a day when we can look forward to launches again.

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NGC 2174 ain’t your average nebulae. No sir. Instead it’s the stomping grounds. A battlefield where cosmic forces are throwing down.

NASA:

The energetic light and winds from massive newly formed stars are evaporating and dispersing the dark stellar nurseries in which they formed. The structures of NGC 2174 are actually much thinner than air and only appear as mountains due to relatively small amounts of opaque interstellar dust. A lesser known sight in the nebula-rich constellation Orion, NGC 2174 can be found with binoculars near the head of the celestial hunter.

About 6,400 light-years distant, the entire glowing cosmic cloud covers an area larger than the full Moon and surrounds loose open clusters of young stars. The above image from the HubbleSpace Telescope shows a dense interior region which spans only about three light years while adopting a color map that portrays otherwise red hydrogen emission in green hues and emphasizes sulfur emission in red and oxygen in blue. Within a few million years, the stars will likely win out completely and the entire dust mountain will be dispersed.

C’est La Vie. Or uh, C’est La Existence or something.

Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy posted a gorgeous video today of solar eclipse seen from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft.

In a previous post, Plait explained what NASA’s STEREO spacecraft was:

STEREO –  SolarTErrestrial  RElations  Observatory – they traveled in opposite directions, one ahead and the other behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The goal was to get a wide, stereoscopic view of the Sun which would provide 3D information on our star.

Hit the jump for the video, and go here to read Plait’s more detailed description of STEREO.

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Today, NASA announced the finding of Kepler 10-b, and it’s the first “confirmed discovery of a rocky planet around another star.” Righteous! It’s also the most Earth-like of all the exoplanets that have been found, clocking in at 1.4 times the size of our lovely Blue Marble.

Don’t pack your fucking bags yet though, cautions io9:

Unfortunately, Kepler-10b doesn’t fit any of the other criteria for a potentially habitable planet. It’s 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to ours, placing it far from the habitable zone that would allow life to survive there. Indeed, Kepler-10b races around its star, completing an orbit every 0.84 days. And, though it’s only 1.4 times the size of Earth, Kepler-10b is a dense world, with a mass 4.6 times that of Earth and an average density similar to an iron dumbbell.

Totally depressed now? Yeah, me too. Frak. Scientist Douglas Hudgins drops some encouraging words:

The discovery of Kepler 10-b is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own. Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come.

Well then! Party on.

Hinode, NASA’s solar observatory caught the solar eclipse. Oh goodness, it’s a stunning sight. Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait puts it into perspective,  saying the “cool thing is the size difference between the Sun and the Moon. The Sun is roughly 400x bigger than the Moon and 400x farther away, so they look about the same size in the sky. But the Moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse, and can change its distance to us by quite a bit, well over 10% – that means its apparent diameter as seen on Earth can change by 10% too.”

Hit the jump for the video. It’s sexy.

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Since I’m a life long geek, everything is filtered through Star Wars and video game metaphors. So when I saw this picture of a solar eclipse taken by the Mir space station in 1999, all I could think was the daunting shadow of the most famous planet obliterator. Earth about to go Alderaan!

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Behold! The Lunar Eclipse as captured from space shuttle Discovery. Pretty.

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Thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we have the most detailed reliefs of the far side of the moon. Ever! Ever! Oh, technology. The Orbiter was capable of capturing the surface down to thirty-meters. G’damn. The trippy colors? False colors used to denote the various heights. The reds are the highest areas, the blues are the lowest.

Hit the jump for the psychedelic space porn.

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