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Zee Evans

The pho­to­graph above was taken by Zee Evans at Palmer Station, the only U.S. research station north of the Ant­arctic Circle. I can’t find much inform­a­tion about Evans, but after a lot of Googling it seems she is a pho­to­grapher spe­cial­ising in Ant­arctic pho­to­graphy. I’d love to know more about her, and about how she came to do what she does, as Ant­arctic pho­to­graphy strikes me as being an idyllic spe­cial­isa­tion; but right now the internet isn’t throwing up anything useful.

I ori­gin­ally saw Evan’s pho­to­graph in an Antarctic-​themed post on The Big Picture, a blog “compiled semi-​regularly by Alan Taylor.” If you’re inter­ested in pho­to­graphy, The Big Picture is an essen­tial addition to your feed reader or bookmark folder or whatever thing you use to keep track of good things on the internet.

The Birth of a Nursery

This image was recently pub­lished on the ESO website:

Here is the press release that accom­panied it:

Illus­trating the power of submillimetre-​wavelength astro­nomy, [the above] APEX image reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-​years across is causing the sur­rounding material to collapse into dense clumps that are the birth­places of new stars. Sub­mil­li­metre light is the key to revealing some of the coldest material in the Universe, such as these cold, dense clouds. Continue reading…

Not Alien

A few weeks ago National Geo­graphic News pub­lished this video of a strange creature from the deep:

You can read more about it here.

December Stars

Alan Taylor is the brain behind the hugely popular The Big Picture, a pho­to­graphy blog hosted on boston.com, the website of The Boston Globe. Posts on The Big Picture are usually compiled “semi-​regularly” by Taylor, each post struc­tured around a news story, or topic, or theme; but this month Taylor is doing some­thing a little dif­ferent:

As we head into the tra­di­tional western Holiday Season, I’d like to present this Hubble Space Tele­scope imagery Advent Calendar. Every day, for the next 25 days, a new photo will be revealed here from the amazing Hubble Space Tele­scope. As I take this chance to share these images of our amazing Universe with you, I wish for a Happy Holiday to all those who will cel­eb­rate, and for Peace on Earth to everyone.

I’m looking forward to seeing each new star of wonder.

In the Carina Nebula

NASA’s Astro­nomy Picture of the Day (or APOD) is a great place to visit if you’re inter­ested in seeing images of, and learning about, the many won­derful things that exist within our universe. I used to visit APOD quite reg­u­larly, but had lost track of it (my mistake was for­get­ting to add it to Google Reader) until yes­terday when I came across the image for the 1st of December, 2008:

This is the explan­atory text that accom­panied the image:

How massive can stars be? Big, hefty stars live short violent lives that can pro­foundly affect their envir­on­ments. Isol­ating a massive star can be prob­lem­atic, however, since what seems to be a single bright star might actually turn out to be several stars close together. Such was the case for two of the brightest objects visible in the open star cluster Trumpler 16, located in the southern Carina Nebula. Upon close inspec­tion by the Hubble Space Tele­scope, WR 25, the brightest object in the above image, was con­firmed to consist of at least two separate stars. Addi­tion­ally, Tr16 –244, just to the upper right of WR 25, was resolved for the first time to be at least three indi­vidual stars. Even so, the brightest star in WR 25 appears to be about 50 times the mass of our Sun, making it one of the more massive stars known. Winds from these stars are likely sig­ni­ficant con­trib­uters to the large bubble that the star cluster sits in. The Carina Nebula, home to unusu­ally shaped dust clouds and the famous variable star Eta Carina, lies about 7,500 light years away toward the con­stel­la­tion of Ship’s Keel (Carina).

And this is the image rotated ninety degrees anti-​clockwise (the full-​size original is extremely beautiful):

The image is credited to NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz of the Insti­tuto de Astro­física de Andalucía.

Colonies in Space

A few weeks ago while I was hunting around for inform­a­tion about ter­ra­forming (the real science, and the fiction), I stumbled upon a gallery of illus­tra­tions of design concepts for possible space colonies of the future. Here are a couple:

The illus­tra­tions were produced as part of a design study con­ducted by the NASA Ames Research Centre during the 1970s. It is genu­inely reas­suring to know that people are thinking about this.

Extraordinary Brightness

A few days after I pub­lished a small post about the work of the mys­ter­ious Mr. Calçada, Mr. Calçada appeared in person in the post’s comments and directed me to his personal website. It is full of superb space art, both still and animated (check out the very pretty ‘Fomal­haut Flyby’ movie), and you should all take a look.

Here is one of the images (I keep wanting to write “pho­to­graphs”, as they feel very real) that jumped out:

And here, the accom­pa­nying caption:

The gamma-​ray burst GRB 080319B was so intense that, despite hap­pening halfway across the Universe, it could have been seen briefly with the unaided eye. Astro­nomers from around the world combined data from ground– and space-​based tele­scopes to conclude that the burst’s extraordinary bright­ness arose from a jet that shot material almost directly towards Earth at almost the speed of light — the dif­fer­ence is only 1 part in 20 000. This 0.4 degree wide jet is con­tained within another slightly less ener­getic jet about 20 times wider. It also appears that the jets were aimed almost directly at the Earth.

A gamma-​ray burst aimed almost directly at Earth sounds quite dan­gerous, but I’m sure we’re all fine.

Blended Wing X-​48B

The X-​48B looks like a prop lifted from an episode of a Gerry Anderson show, but is in fact very real. Real or not, it does have the look of the future about it:

I found that pho­to­graph inside the Dryden Image Gallery, one part of NASA’s vast image archive. You can see a larger version on this page, (they have a 1600 x 1200 copy, too, which would be ideal as a wall­paper for my LCD, if I wasn’t already using a giant octopus).

Acidic Oceans

I read a few days ago that some of our oceans are becoming acidic far more quickly than sci­ent­ists had pre­vi­ously thought. Here is an extract from the Sci­entific American report about the new research:

Increased carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmo­sphere is making the Pacific coast acidic far more rapidly than pre­vi­ously believed, poten­tially wreaking havoc for creatures living in it that are unable to tolerate the swiftly changing environment.

Eco­lo­gists at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago tracked the acidity of the Pacific off an island close to Wash­ington state over the course of eight years. Their results, pub­lished today in Pro­ceed­ings of the National Academy of Sciences: the waters here are becoming acidic 10 times more quickly than had been pre­dicted using other models.

Some more inform­a­tion on acidic oceans here, here, and here.

A Field of Sastrugi

I really like this photograph:

According to the caption that accom­panies it on The Big Picture, the photo was taken by Bill McAfee in 2003, and shows “[t]he Dome at Amundsen-​Scott South Pole Station […] above a field of sastrugi — ridges of snow formed by wind erosion.”

The Stars Our Destination

The image above is an artist’s impres­sion of an object sci­ent­ists believe could be an “optic­ally active magnetar”. The image was created by Luis Calçada, an employee of ESO (ESO is the pleas­ingly short acronymn for the European Organ­isa­tion for Astro­nom­ical Research in the Southern Hemi­sphere). I first noticed Luis Calçada’s name in the caption of an image that accom­panied a recent NASA press release about the dis­covery of a new planet. Continue reading…

The Last Throes

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon this inter­esting post on Kevin Drum’s blog about “all the new reg­u­la­tions and exec­utive orders the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is rushing to put into effect before they leave office”. After a little Googling I found this article on Yubanet.com. Here is a portion:

“In its final days in office, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion is trying to make whole­sale changes to the Endangered Species Act,” Attorney General Brown said. “The Bush Admin­is­tra­tion wants to elim­inate a require­ment in the Endangered Species Act that mandates sci­entific review and con­sulta­tion of any land-​use decision that might threaten endangered species and their habitats. These proposed changes are unlawful, contrary to the National Envir­on­mental Policy Act, and put entire species and eco­sys­tems at risk for complete destruc­tion. The Admin­is­tra­tion should abandon this effort, or at the very least, complete a full Envir­on­mental Impact Statement.”

[…]

In August 2008, the Depart­ment of the Interior proposed to elim­inate a require­ment in the Endangered Species Act that mandates sci­entific review and con­sulta­tion of any land-​use decision that might threaten endangered species and their habitats. The proposed changes could allow a gov­ern­ment agency to permit mining, logging, and other com­mer­cial activ­ities to take place on fed­er­ally pro­tected land without sci­entific review. The Depart­ment is required to open its proposal to public comment in order to make any changes, and it received approx­im­ately 300,000 comments. Yet, the Depart­ment took only three days to review the letters, including detailed eval­u­ations of the proposed changes.

Crazy, but a really good reason for people not to forget “them” for a long, long time.