Month: August 2021

A Blue Moon in Exaggerated Colors

Posted on Posted in NASA, TweetTagged , , Leave a comment

The Moon is normally seen in subtle shades of grey or gold. But small, measurable color differences have been greatly exaggerated to make this telescopic, multicolored, moonscape captured during the Moon’s full phase. The different colors are recognized to correspond to real differences in the chemical makeup of the lunar surface. Blue hues reveal titanium rich areas while orange and purple colors show regions relatively poor in titanium and iron. The familiar Sea of Tranquility, or Mare Tranquillitatis, is the blue area toward the upper right. White lines radiate across the orange-hued southern lunar highlands from 85-kilometer wide ray-crater Tycho at bottom right. The full moon that occurred earlier this month could be counted as a seasonal blue moon because it was, unusually, the third of four full moons to occur during northern summer (and hence southern winter). The featured 272-image composite demonstrates that the full Moon is always blue, but usually not blue enough in hue to ooh. via NASA https://ift.tt/2Y0Fnvd

Wikipedia article of the day for August 31, 2021

Posted on Posted in Tweet, WikipediaTagged , , , Leave a comment

Wikipedia article of the day is Bajadasaurus. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Bajadasaurus is a genus of sauropod dinosaur of northern Patagonia, Argentina, from around 145 to 133 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous epoch. It was first described in 2019 based on a single specimen (elements pictured) found in 2010 that includes a largely complete skull and parts of the neck. The only species is Bajadasaurus pronuspinax. The genus is a member of Dicraeosauridae, a group of relatively small and short-necked sauropods. Bajadasaurus sported bifurcated (two-pronged), extremely elongated neural spines extending from the neck; the 2019 description of Bajadasaurus suggested that they could have served as passive defense against predators. The skull was slender and equipped with around 48 teeth that were pencil-shaped and restricted to the front of the jaws. Its eye openings were exposed in top view, possibly allowing the animal to look forwards while feeding. It shared its environment with other dinosaurs including the sauropod Leinkupal and different theropods.

A Fire Rainbow over West Virginia

Posted on Posted in NASA, TweetTagged , , Leave a comment

What’s happening to this cloud? Ice crystals in a distant cirrus cloud are acting like little floating prisms. Known informally as a fire rainbow for its flame-like appearance, a circumhorizon arc appears parallel to the horizon. For a circumhorizontal arc to be visible, the Sun must be at least 58 degrees high in a sky where cirrus clouds present below — in this case cirrus fibrates. The numerous, flat, hexagonal ice-crystals that compose the cirrus cloud must be aligned horizontally to properly refract sunlight in a collectively similar manner. Therefore, circumhorizontal arcs are somewhat unusual to see. The featured fire rainbow was photographed earlier this month near North Fork Mountain in West Virginia, USA. via NASA https://ift.tt/3zsyAIN

Wikipedia article of the day for August 30, 2021

Posted on Posted in Tweet, WikipediaTagged , , , Leave a comment

Wikipedia article of the day is Mary Shelley. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Mary Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818), an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a sailing accident in 1822. Scholarly appreciation has increased in recent decades for her novels, including Valperga, Perkin Warbeck, Lodore, Falkner, and the apocalyptic The Last Man, as well as her biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia. The influences of her mother, the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, are evident in Shelley’s travel narrative Rambles in Germany and Italy. Shelley often argued in favour of cooperation and sympathy as skills for reforming civil society; this view challenged the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by her husband and the Enlightenment ideals of her father, William Godwin.

Orbits of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids

Posted on Posted in NASA, TweetTagged , , , Leave a comment

Are asteroids dangerous? Some are, but the likelihood of a dangerous asteroid striking the Earth during any given year is low. Because some past mass extinction events have been linked to asteroid impacts, however, humanity has made it a priority to find and catalog those asteroids that may one day affect life on Earth. Pictured here are the orbits of the over 1,000 known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). These documented tumbling boulders of rock and ice are over 140 meters across and will pass within 7.5 million kilometers of Earth — about 20 times the distance to the Moon. Although none of them will strike the Earth in the next 100 years — not all PHAs have been discovered, and past 100 years, many orbits become hard to predict. Were an asteroid of this size to impact the Earth, it could raise dangerous tsunamis, for example. To investigate Earth-saving strategies, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is planned for launch later this year. Of course rocks and ice bits of much smaller size strike the Earth every day, usually pose no danger, and sometimes creating memorable fireball and meteor displays. via NASA https://ift.tt/2XX0n64

Wikipedia article of the day for August 29, 2021

Posted on Posted in Tweet, WikipediaTagged , , , Leave a comment

Wikipedia article of the day is Raiders of the Lost Ark. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1981 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Lawrence Kasdan, based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. It stars Harrison Ford (pictured), Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, and Denholm Elliott. Ford portrays Indiana Jones, a globe-trotting archaeologist vying with Nazi forces in 1936 to recover the lost Ark of the Covenant, a relic said to make an army invincible. With his former lover Marion Ravenwood (Allen), Jones races to stop rival archaeologist René Belloq (Freeman) from guiding the Nazis to the Ark. Principal photography took place during June–September 1980 on sets at Elstree Studios, England, and on location in Tunisia, Hawaii, and La Rochelle. The highest-grossing film of 1981, it won five Oscars, seven Saturn Awards, and one BAFTA. Appearing in many lists of all-time best films, it has had a lasting impact on popular culture. It led to further Indiana Jones films, games and toys.