Asperatus Clouds
2 months ago
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| Notes: 4
A composite of 31 different images, taken in the shadow of the solar eclipse that passed over Asia and parts of the Pacific for 6 minutes and 39 seconds. That’s the longest solar eclipse anyone on Earth will witness this century; a longer one isn’t coming until 2132.
The photo shows the solar corona that make up the sun’s “atmosphere” in glorious detail. Its whorls and loops extend millions of miles into space, are nearly 200 times hotter than the visible surface of the sun, and yet aren’t nearly as bright (by a factor of something like a million), hence, we can only see them during eclipses.
7 months ago
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| Notes: 7
In astronomy, an analemma (
/ˌænəˈlɛmə/; from Greek ἀνάλημμα “pedestal of a sundial”) is a curve representing the changing angular offset of a celestial body (usually the Sun) from its mean position on the celestial sphere as viewed from another celestial body (usually the Earth).
Because of the Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun in an orbit that is elliptical and tilted relative to the plane of the equator, an observer at a fixed point on the Earth sees the Sun appear to move in an analemma around a mean position, taking a year to do so.
8 months ago
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| Notes: 10
8 months ago
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"At the dead hour of the night, when the world is hushed in sleep and all is still; when there is not a sound to be heard save the dead beat escapement of the clock, counting with hollow voice the footsteps of time in ceaseless round, I turn to the Ephemeris and find there, by calculations made years ago, that when that clock tells a certain hour, a star which I never saw will be in the field of the telescope for a moment, flit through and then disappear. The instrument is set; the moment approaches and is intently awaited—I look—the star mute with eloquence that gathers sublimity from the silence of the night, comes smiling and dancing into the field, and at the instant predicted even to the fraction of a second, it makes its transit and is gone. With emotions too deep for the organs of speech, the heart swells out with unutterable anthems; we then see that there is harmony in the heavens above; and though we cannot hear, we feel the ‘music of the spheres."
- Matthew Fontaine Maury, in an 1849 presentation to the Virginia Historical Society
9 months ago
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Mammatus, also known as mammatocumulus (meaning “mammary cloud” or “breast cloud”), is a meteorologicalterm applied to a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud.
10 months ago
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Lovely Sky Monsters
Award-winning photographer Camille Seaman, best known for her earlier work depicting massive polar icebergs, recently turned her lens on another incredible natural phenomenon - storm clouds above the American Midwest. She partnered with experienced storm chasers and began to stalk a particular type of storm cloud - the supercell. On June 22, 2012, in western Nebraska, she encountered an enormous supercell and captured its many faces.
Source: The Atlantic