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Pictured is a Delta IV rocket launch from Cape Canaveral on November 21st, 2010. The image is a 20 second exposure taken at dusk, shot from about 100 miles west of the launch site. The launch placed a classified payload in orbit for the United States Air Force.
Difficult but not impossible to catch against the dawn or dusk sky, spotting an extreme crescent moon can be a challenge. The slender crescent pictured was shot 30 minutes before sunrise when the Moon was less than 20 hours away from New.� A true feat of visual athletics to catch, a good pair of binoculars or a well aimed wide field telescopic view can help with the hunt.
The Sun is our nearest star, and goes through an 11-year cycle of activity. This image was taken via a properly filtered telescope, and shows the Sun as it appeared during its last maximum peak in 2003. This was during solar cycle #23, a period during which the Sun hurled several large flares Earthward. The next solar cycle is due to peak around 2013-14.
Located in the belt of the constellation Orion, Messier 42, also known as the Orion Nebula is one of the finest deep sky objects in the northern hemisphere sky. Just visible as a faint smudge to the naked eye on a clear dark night, the Orion Nebula is a sure star party favorite, as it shows tendrils of gas contrasted with bright stars. M42 is a large stellar nursery, a star forming region about 1,000 light years distant.
Orbiting the planet in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) every 90 minutes, many people fail to realize that you can see the International Space Station (ISS) from most of the planet on a near-weekly basis. In fact, the ISS has been known to make up to four visible passes over the same location in one night. The image pictured is from the Fourth of July, 2011 and is a 20 second exposure of a bright ISS pass.
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Next to the Sun, the two brightest objects in the sky are the Moon and the planet Venus. In fact, when Venus is favorably placed next to the Moon, it might just be possible to spot the two in the daytime. Another intriguing effect known as earthshine or ashen light is also seen in the image on the night side of the Moon; this is caused by sunlight reflected back off of the Earth towards our only satellite.
A mosaic of three images taken during the total lunar eclipse of December 21st, 2010. The eclipse occurred the same day as the winter solstice. The curve and size of the Earth�s shadow is apparent in the image.
24.02.11: Hefty Anti-particle Found.
The menagerie of bizarre sub-atomic particles just got stranger, as scientists at Long Islands Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider recently unveiled the discovery of the heaviest anti-particle yet discovered. Dubbed the antihypertriton, this strange beast sits at 200 milli-electron volts (for comparison, an electron volt about 1.602 x 10-19 joules), beating out old fashioned anti-helium.
To make the discovery, scientists smashed heavy gold ions together after accelerating them at dizzying speeds and recording over a hundred thousand collisions. About 70 antihypertritons were created. So what, you say? Well, understanding the role of anti-matter in cosmology may go a long way towards understanding why there is anything at all. If the initial universe was symmetrical, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have spontaneously annihilated moments after the Big Bang, and Galaxies, Earth, and Tiger Woods should have never come into existence. Either a fair amount of this stuff exists somewhere out there, or the universe we see and detect today is a remnant of that initial collision, and somehow only a slice of normal matter survived. Antimatter is similar to normal matter, except it is opposite in charge and magnetic properties. Antihypertritons are even more peculiar in that they are the first particle identified that would sit below the plane of a three dimensional periodic table. Some types of the familiar elements such as lithium, helium, and hydrogen are comprised of strange quarks, but antihypertritons are composed of� you guessed it anti-strange quarks.
The next name of the game may be to detect antihypertritons in nature. Fans of this space will already remember that NASA�s Fermi satellite has detected antimatter in the form of positron emissions (the sister particle of the humble electron) in terrestrial thunderstorms, and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer destined for installation on the International Space Station during the final flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavour later this year may detect more strange anti-beasties in space. Just how does the role of anti-matter play into our universe? Are there anti-galaxies out there, populated by anti-beings, or did the anti-matter universe �sluice off� from ours into another membrane of existence? Whatever the case, devices such as the LHIC and CERN, and the AMS are heralding in a golden age of particle physics.