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Incredible night sky photos of the Milky Way galaxy

Russian ambulance driver Boris Dmitriev took wonderful photos of the  amazing Milky Way galaxy from his vantage point in Russia and Georgia. According to DailyMail, Dmitriev said “There’s nothing quite like photographing the night sky. I photograph where I travel.” He loves night shooting due to the emotion of being alone with nature and space. Take a look at these photos to see if you feel closer to the universe!

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Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov, the first man to perform a spacewalk, sticks his head through the Soyuz orbital module mock-up during training for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The other astronaut is Thomas P. Stafford.

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Extraordinary new NASA images of Pluto. 

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Broad Brushstrokes (in Space), Michael Kagen

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August 19, 2007 – Backdropped by the Earth, the International Space Station is seen receding into the distance as the Space Shuttle Endeavour departs the orbital outpost. (NASA)

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Flickr: Hubble Space Telescope Berthed in Columbia’s Cargo Bay (Archive: NASA, Marshall, 3/2002) by NASA’s Marshall Space Center

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There’s something wonderful about Marvin Bileck’s minimal illustrations for All About the Stars.  

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Incredible “EPIC” View Of The Moon Passing In Front Of The Earth

This is real, folks. It is not a computer-generated animation. NASA’s DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) satellite took these incredible shots on July 16 using its Earth-facing EPIC camera from its vantage point between the Earth and the Sun, a million miles away!

DSCOVR sits at what’s known as the L1 Lagrangian point, where the gravitational pull of the Earth and Sun balance out in such a way that satellites positioned there can remain in stable orbit while using minimal energy:

Image: NASA/NOAA

This view of the far side of the Moon reminds us that it is anything but dark. The Moon is tidally locked, meaning that we see the same face all the time, but the sun regularly shines on the side that we don’t see (we’re just seeing a new or crescent moon when that happens). The far side also lacks the dark plains, or maria, that texture the Earth-facing side, made of basalt laid down by ancient lunar lava flows, reminding us that our lunar satellite has a complex geologic history:

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NGC 3576

Located 9,000 light-years away, NGC 3576 is a gigantic region of glowing gas about 100 light-years across, where stars are currently forming. The intense radiation and winds from the massive stars are shredding the clouds from which they form, creating dramatic scenery. The black area in the right middle part of the image is dark because of the presence of very dense, opaque clouds of gas and dust.

Credit: ESO Source: http://www.eso.org/public/unitedkingdom/images/eso0817b/

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Astronaut Rips Handle Off Hubble Space Telescope

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Dione, One of Saturn’s Moons

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

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Pluto as seen by Hubble in 2010 ➡️ Pluto as seen by New Horizons in 2015

Credits: NASA/ESA/M. Buie (SwRI)/STScI/JHU-APL/SwRI

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Pluto Through The Years…

NASA’s New Horizons probe completed its fly-by of the dwarf planet Pluto this morning at 7:49 AM ET, completing a 9+ year, 3 billion mile journey to our favorite Kuiper belt object and is now continuing off into the outer reaches of the solar system. 

On its way by Pluto, New Horizons snapped the clearest and most hi-resolution images ever taken of the dwarf planet, but since the probe can’t upload data back to Earth while it’s scienceing, we won’t see the best ones until tomorrow (also keep in mind that it takes 4.5 hours for signals to travel between Earth and Pluto, even at the speed of light!). New Horizons’ multiple instruments are collecting so much data that it will take nearly 16 months to get it all sent back to Earth! So keep following the NASA mission page and official Twitter account for plenty of Pluto updates over the next year.

Above is a collection of Pluto as we’ve seen it through the years, from its 1930 discovery at Lowell observatory (bottom), to Hubble’s 100-pixel Atari version taken in 1996 (middle), to New Horizons’ most recent color image taken July 13, 2015. 

Here’s to the New Horizons team, congratulations from everyone on Earth! 

(scale image of Pluto and its moon Charon compared to Earth)

Interesting side note: The dwarf planet Pluto’s name was suggested in a letter by an 11-year-old schoolgirl named Venetia Burney. But what about this Pluto?

While there’s no documentation to back up the claim, Disney’s Pluto character debuted just nine months after the dwarf planet’s discovery in 1930, and it’s widely assumed that Walt Disney’s animators were capitalizing on Pluto fever. I’d say we’ve got it again, wouldn’t you?

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NASA’s New Horizons probe is on schedule for a 7:30 AM ET #PlutoFlyby tomorrow, July 14th! With every passing hour we are quite literally redefining what we know about everyone’s favorite dwarf planet. 

It’s so wonderful watching such groundbreaking science unfold before our eyes, isn’t it? 

As Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons project put it, “People love turning little dots, little points of light, into planets, and writing new textbooks from scratch.” Yes we do.

New Horizons won’t be sending back live images because of bandwidth and Pluto-is-really-freakin-far-away limitations, but follow all the latest mission updates and photo releases at the New Horizons NASA page or on the official Twitter.

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Have you seen the new pictures of Pluto and Charon already? The incredible New Horizons mission sends these back to earth.This couldn’t have been done without a team on the ground. Did you know the New Horizons team consist of 25% women?

NASA:

Women make up approximately 25 percent of the New Horizons flyby team. The female team members were photographed at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on July 11, 2015, just three days before the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto. Kneeling from left to right: Amy Shira Teitel, Cindy Conrad, Sarah Hamilton, Allisa Earle, Leslie Young, Melissa Jones, Katie Bechtold, Becca Sepan, Kelsi Singer, Amanda Zangari, Coralie Jackman, Helen Hart. Standing, from left to right: Fran Bagenal, Ann Harch, Jillian Redfern, Tiffany Finley, Heather Elliot, Nicole Martin, Yanping Guo, Cathy Olkin, Valerie Mallder, Rayna Tedford, Silvia Protopapa, Martha Kusterer, Kim Ennico, Ann Verbiscer, Bonnie Buratti, Sarah Bucior, Veronica Bray, Emma Birath, Carly Howett, Alice Bowman. Not pictured: Priya Dharmavaram, Sarah Flanigan, Debi Rose, Sheila Zurvalec, Adriana Ocampo, Jo-Anne Kierzkowski.

Image Credits: SwRI/JHUAPL Source: NASA

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