There is no reason to post this except it is amazing to watch. This footage was all taken with a 1080P camera from the ISS, or International Space Station. I so want to go, but for now videos like this will have to do.
If you haven’t stopped by recently, the Planetary Society website has undergone a facelift and added all sorts of content, including a report about Planets around Alpha Centauri. They don’t have an answer yet as to whether our nearest stellar neighbor has anyplace we might land on, but the report does go into details of the technology being utilized for the search that I found very interesting.
The 2012 USA Science & Engineering Festival will be taking place April 28th and 29th all over the country, with a specific focus at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. There will be a ton of stage performances from a host of people and organizations, and a lot of things happening outside the scope of the time and location of the event proper, such as the Rockville Science Day gathering.
There have never been that many moments of actual footage of Jupiter videos or individual photos of the planet, because no physical camera has ever returned from there for us to develop the film. But this compilation of digital images returned to Earth over the last handful of decades and assembled by some of the more skillful editors at NASA gives you a taste of what is going on out there, and I for one would love to get a closer look.
That is the title of this posting from Phil Plait, mister Bad Astronomy himself. I have to mention it here because this is exactly the kind of thing comics (and everything else) need more of; support for science and education in the sciences. How are we ever going to get stellar exploration going if we won’t even go back to the Moon, or get ready to go to Mars? Somebody else will be building the future if we don’t get education in the sciences and math fully funded and supported here.
One of the most interesting Apps not included in NASA Apps is 3D Sun. This is a display interface taking the data-stream output of two satellites orbiting Sol which, between them, cover around 87% of the sun’s surface at any given time. The results are generated into a 3D image on your screen, giving you a near-realtime idea of what exactly is going on the Sun. That also gives you some great advance warning about possible disruptive events that might be about to overtake you, your computer systems, your communications networks, and and other non-hardened systems that work on electricity or magnetism. The sun is the origin of most (but not all) disruptive events that might come from space and mess with your systems, and there are factors which can mitigate even its effects on your environment. To refine the results and factor in other influences, the NASA Space Weather App gives you most of the rest of the tool set you need. It includes data sources from NOAA, GOES, and SOHO, among more.