February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its…
Light travels at a speed of 299,792 km per second (186,282 mps). That’s fast. Jupiter is 778,500,000 km (483,737,000 miles) from the Sun. That’s far. To try to convey the vastness of space, Alphonse Swinehart created this animation to illustrate that even at the blistering speed of light, it takes over 43 minutes just…
In this stabilized time-lapse, the stars’ position in the night sky is fixed so you can get a sense of our planet’s movement through space. And now it’s time for some mind-boggling figures: – Earth rotates around its axis (at the Equator) at roughly 460 meters/second (503 yards/second) – Earth orbits around our Sun…
It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. NASA recently released the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, displaying sweeping views of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a…
Photograph by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Although NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken many breathtaking images of the universe, one snapshot stands out from the rest: the iconic view of the so-called “Pillars of Creation.” The jaw-dropping photo, taken in 1995, revealed never-before-seen details of three giant columns of cold…
WANDERMENT is the result of a 12-month collection of 4K time-lapse sequences captured by the artists at Upthink Lab, an award-winning production house dedicated to time-lapse cinematography. From meandering streams and forest-dwelling organisms to the grandeur of high mountains above tree-line, this short film wanders through the contrasting wilderness of Alaska, North Carolina, Georgia…
Wanderers is a vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where…
On 12 November 2014, the ESA’s Rosetta mission landed its Philae probe on a comet, the first time in history that such a feat has been achieved. Rosetta was launched on 2 March 2004 and travelled 6.4 billion kilometres through the Solar System before arriving at the comet on 6 August 2014. [source] The…
During Expedition 40 in the summer of 2014, NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman — along with European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst — explored the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity on the International Space Station. The crew “submerged” a sealed GoPro camera into a floating ball of water the size…
After a ten-year journey Rosetta and Philae have finally reached their destination, Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Rosetta and the ESA spent the last few weeks studying the comet to find the best place for Rosetta’s lander, Philae, to land. If all goes according to plan, Philae will land on a site named Agilkia on November 12,…