Three Moons Of Jupiter : Ganymede, Callisto And Io. Credits : NASA/JPL.

Happy Earth Day

Gorgeous ultra HD fly-through of the inside of the International Space Station

NASA has uploaded a beautiful and relaxing 18-minute fly-through video of the International Space Station filmed in ultra high-definition 4K resolution. They used to a fisheye lens to film it, which means you get plenty of detail and depth of field.

Today NASA released parts of the set of highest-resolution pictures of Pluto from the New Horizons probe’s fly-by in July. As they write, “these latest images form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide on a world 3 billion miles away.” Imagine that. They are also the highest resolution images we’ll have of Pluto in a long, long time.

This picture, a crop, shows Sputnik Planum and the al-Idrisi mountains, which are made of big chunks of water ice. Be sure to check out the whole thing.

The Last Shuttle, Dan Winters

The leisurely pace of light speed

In a 45-minute video called Riding Light, Alphonse Swinehart animates the journey outward from the Sun to Jupiter from the perspective of a photon of light. The video underscores just how slow light is in comparison to the vast distances it has to cover, even within our own solar system. Light takes 8.5 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth, almost 45 minutes to Jupiter, more than 4 years to the nearest star, 100,000 years to the center of our galaxy, 2.5 million years to the nearest large galaxy (Andromeda), and 32 billion years to reach the most remote galaxy ever observed.1 The music is by Steve Reich (Music for 18 Musicians), whose music can also seem sort of endless.

If you’re impatient, you can watch this 3-minute version, sped up by 15 times:

This isn’t strictly true. As I understand it, a photon that just left the Sun will never reach that most remote galaxy.↩

Milky Way Over Mt. Bachelor - Mitch Darby

International Space Station flyover

In color and silhouette, The Last Planet

The Poles of Mars.

L: The North Pole, pictured down to the equator R: The South Pole, in more detail

Credit: ESA

lackyblue:

(by Thomas Shahan)