Posted on by Jason Major

Get Teased by the New “Interstellar” Trailer

Christopher Nolan, the writer and director of Memento, Inception, and the most recent Batman films, is taking up space on the big screen next year — literally. Nolan’s newest film, Interstellar, will be a space exploration adventure featuring Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine (of course) and, based on this teaser trailer, maintains a reverent awareness of the iconic missions of the Space Age.

Sweet.
Continue reading “Get Teased by the New “Interstellar” Trailer”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Hoping Aliens are Hipsters Who Enjoy Vinyl

Voyager included a golden record with images and sounds of Earthly life recorded on it... just in case. (NASA)

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

JPL’s venerable Ed Stone, the Project Scientist for the Voyager spacecraft for over 40 years, made an appearance on the Colbert Report last night, bantering easily with the no-holds-barred host and discussing the significance of the Voyager mission, from the two launches in 1977 to Voyager 1’s recent celebrated arrival in interstellar space.

Colbert also was tasked by NASA to present Stone with NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal for a lifetime of scientific achievement. See below:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

Posted on by Jason Major

Chris Hadfield Tells Conan O’Brien What Happens to Underwear in Space

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield appeared on Conan last night, and if you missed it here’s a clip in which Conan O’Brien asks Chris to answer one of his most nagging questions about life in orbit: “Do you guys do laundry in space? How do you take care of that issue?”

Like Conan, you might be surprised at his response! (Seen any “shooting stars” recently?)

See this and more videos from Conan on the TeamCoco YouTube page.

Posted on by Jason Major

Do You Need Some Space?

Much to learn about Pluto's surface we have. (Screenshot)

Of course you do! (Who doesn’t?) And so here’s a wonderful tour of our Solar System to provide you with just the type of space you need.


A 3D animation project by Australian video artist Shane Gehlert, I Need Some Space takes us from low-Earth orbit to the Moon and Sun and then through the lineup of planets in the Solar System, using images and models from NASA to accurately depict their unique appearances. Along the way we’ll get some basic info on the planets, select moons, and a few of the various spacecraft that have visited (or are visiting) each world. Set to an intriguing string score by The Zephyr Quartet (of which Shane’s sister Belinda is a member) I Need Some Space is a mesmerizing 6-minute voyage for any space fan — myself very included.

I particularly like the “ghostly” look of Pluto, reminding us that we still have another year and a half before New Horizons reveals its true appearance to us.

Enjoy! (As with most videos, full-screening and HD-ing are strongly suggested.)

Video © Shane Gehlert/BlueDog Films. HT to FastCoCreate.

Posted on by Jason Major

Here’s the Latest Kepler Orrery Video: the Orbits of the Planets Go ‘Round and ‘Round

If you’ve ever wanted to know what 3,538 exoplanets look like spinning around their stars, here you go!

This is the third and latest installment of the mesmerizing Kepler Orrery videos by Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler science team. It shows the relative sizes of the orbits and planets in the multi-transiting planetary systems discovered by Kepler up to November 2013 (according to the Kepler site, 3,538 candidates so far.) According to Daniel “the colors simply go by order from the star (the most colorful is the 7-planet system KOI-351). The terrestrial planets of the Solar System are shown in gray.”

Not that our Solar System is boring, of course, but well, ya know… there are an awful lot of planets out there.

Check out Daniel’s previous version here.

Posted on by David Dickinson

Watch Live: Sunday’s “Hybrid Solar Eclipse”

Totality! As seen during the November 13th, 2012 total solar eclipse. (Image credit: Narayan Mukkavilli, used with permission).

The chase is on. On Sunday, November 3rd, the shadow of the Moon will cross the Earth for one last time in 2013. We recently wrote about the prospects for viewing this “hybrid” annular-total solar eclipse as it crosses the Atlantic and central Africa. Viewers from northern South America across the U.S. Eastern Seaboard up into the Canadian Maritimes will also be treated to a brilliant rising partial eclipse over the Atlantic at sunrise. Tickets are already in hand for many, as umbraphiles wing their way (cue Indiana Jones music) to dusty and exotic far off locales to stand briefly in the shadow of our Moon…

But what if it’s cloudy?

Once the bane of eclipse-chasers, you can now thwart our sometimes murky atmosphere by catching the solar eclipse online.

I remember our first experience with eclipse-chasing on the internet, trying to catch an eclipse broadcast on ye ole dial up modem from an internet café (remember internet cafes?) way back in the late 90s. This was pre-You Tube, pre-UStream. Needless to say, the tenuous connection afforded nary a frozen glimpse of the partially eclipsed Sun, and crashed all together at the onset of totality.

Fast forward to 2013, when ginormous data packets routinely fly around the globe.

True, this eclipse presents a challenge, as it crosses some pretty wild and unconnected terrain. But one standby that we can expect is the good people at Slooh, who have dispatched a broadcast team to the African nations of Gabon and Kenya:

As of this writing, Slooh looks to be going live at around 11:45 UT on Sunday November 3rd. This is 6:45 AM EST, which takes into account our “falling back” one hour to UT -5 hours on Sunday morning. Astronomer Brian Cox will be broadcasting live from Kenya, and the broadcast starts just over two hours prior to the first landfall of totality at just before 14:00 UT. From Gabon, Maximum totality will be a brief 1 minute and 5 seconds, and will dwindle to an even briefer 14 seconds over Lake Turkana in Kenya before ending as a brilliant sunset eclipse over Somalia and Ethiopia. A backup broadcast of the partial phases of the eclipse is also planned from Slooh’s home base site in the Canary Islands.

Another fascinating potential broadcast may come our way from the BRCK organization basing their observations of the eclipse from the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya.  Billed as “Your Backup Generator for the Internet,” BRCK’s mission is to bring broadband access internet to people in remote regions of the world. This weekend’s eclipse certainly qualifies. As of writing this on Halloween, October 31st, the BRCK team had gone into the field to “stress test” their webcasting capability onsite; follow them on Twitter as @brcknet for the latest updates. As of yet, there’s no embed for the broadcast, though we’ll be sure to drop it in if it surfaces!

There’s also some interesting science afoot during this eclipse as well. A recent press release out from Williams College notes that Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy and chair of the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Eclipses Jay Pasachoff will observe the eclipse, along with a student and tourist expedition from Gabon. A veteran eclipse chaser, Pasachoff will be working in concert with Dr. Vojtech Rusin of the Astronomical Institute of Slovakia, solar researchers Aris Voulgaris and Robert Lucas and William College students to study the ethereal solar corona.  Satellite-based coronagraphs, such as the one employed by SOHO, can create an “artificial eclipse” of the Sun to study the corona, but also face the challenge of scattered light via a phenomenon known as Fresnel-diffraction. Pasachoff and team hope to combine their observations with those being routinely carried out by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Royal Observatory in Belgium to characterize the solar corona and improve our understanding of the space weather environment. Pasachoff’s expedition is being assisted via support from the South African Astronomical Observatory, Nommo Astronomia, the Gabon Astronomy Society and the Gabon Space Agency. Veteran eclipse chaser and historian Michael Zeiler (@EclipseMaps) has also joined up with Pasachoff’s group in Gabon.

In space, the NASA/JAXA joint solar observing Hinode spacecraft and ESA’s Sun watching Proba-2 will also catch several partial eclipses from their respective perches in low Earth orbit. Expect to see these pics in the days following Sunday’s eclipse.

We’ll be dropping in more broadcasts as they come to our attention this weekend here at Universe Today. Planning an ad-hoc webcast of the eclipse? Let us know in the comments below! Even if it’s just a brief view of the rising partially eclipsed Sun from the beach, its worth the effort. Just remember that you’ll need a fairly long focal length (in the range of 200mm or longer) and a proper solar filter for the Sun to appear like anything more than a washed out dot in the broadcast. And always run a test of your rig beforehand!

Good luck, happy eclipse chasing, and don’t forget to send those eclipse pics to Universe Today!

 

Posted on by Jason Major

Watch the Sun Split Apart

Canyon of Fire on the Sun, Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA)

Here’s your amazing oh-my-gosh-space-is-so-cool video of the day — a “canyon of fire” forming on the Sun after the liftoff and detachment of an enormous filament on September 29-30. A new video, created from images captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and assembled by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, shows the entire dramatic event unfolding in all its mesmerizing magnetic glory.

Watch it below:

Solarrific! (And I highly suggest full-screening it in HD.) That filament was 200,000 miles long, and the rift that formed afterwards was well over a dozen Earths wide!

Captured in various wavelengths of light by SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) the video shows the solar schism in different layers of the Sun’s corona, which varies greatly in temperature at different altitudes.

According to the description from Karen Fox at GSFC:

“The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt. The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F, are useful for observing material coursing along the sun’s magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption. The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F, and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious.”

Now, there’s not really any “fire” on the Sun — that’s just an illustrative term. What we’re actually seeing here is plasma contained by powerful magnetic fields that constantly twist and churn across the Sun’s surface and well up from its interior. The Sun is boiling with magnetic fields, and when particularly large ones erupt from deep below its surface we get the features we see as sunspots, filaments, and prominences.

When those fields break, the plasma they contained gets blasted out into space as coronal mass ejections… and this is what typically happens when one hits Earth. (But it could be much worse.)

Hey, that’s what it’s like living with a star!

Stay up to date on the latest solar events on the SDO mission page here.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Watch All Six Apollo Moon Landings at Once

Apollo moon landing sites
Apollo moon landing sites

So often, when we think of all the Apollo missions to the Moon, we recall the videos of the astronauts walking, jumping and driving around on the Moon. But the actual landing of the Lunar Module was such a key – if not nail-biting – part of the mission. Here in this video you can watch all six Apollo lunar landings at once. The footage uses the original descent camera coverage, realigned by the person who put this together —lunarmodule5 on YouTube — to 45 degrees to show what the lunar module pilots saw on the descent. There’s also the actual audio from all the landings. It’s amazing to hear both calm and anxiety in the voices of the LMP, Commander and Mission Control, as well as the jubilation after landing.

You can also watch all thirteen Saturn V launches at once in the video below — Apollo 4 thru Skylab with the Apollo 4 CBS audio added.

Best to go full-screen on these!

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

One Year Later, New POV Video of Baumgartner’s Freefall

Felix Baumgartner celebrates after successfully completing his record-breaking jump. Credit: Red Bull Stratos.

A year ago, BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner dove out of a balloon-borne capsule in the stratosphere (not space), 39 kilometers (24 miles) up. It was what I called “part science experiment, part publicity stunt, part life-long ambition,” with Baumgartner attempting to break the speed of sound with his body in a record-setting freefall. He accomplished just that, although many have questioned the usefulness of this “stunt” (read Amy Shira Teitel’s great piece from last year.)

But, in some sense, you gotta admire Baumgartner’s courage.

Red Bull has now released a new full 9.5-minute video of the entire dive, showing several views, including what Baumgartner saw during the dive, along with real-time readouts of his altitude, airspeed, G-force load, heart rate and other data. It’s interesting to watch how he got himself out of the incredible spin he was in, and fun to see how he opened up his visor before hitting the ground.

Here’s what Baumgartner said about the spin in the post-jump press conference last year:

“It started out really good because my exit was perfect, I did exactly what I was supposed to do… It looked like for a second I was going to tumble two more times and then get it under control, but for some reason that spin became so violent over all axis and it was hard to know how to get out of it, because, if you are trapped in a pressurized suit – normally as a skydiver you can feel the air and get direct feedback from the air — but here you are trapped in a suit that is pressurized at 3.5 PSI so you don’t know how to feel the air. It is like swimming without touching the water. And it’s hard because every when time it turns you around you have to figure out what to do. So I was sticking my arm out and it became worse and then I stuck arm out the other side and it became less, so I was fighting all the way down to regain control because I wanted to break the speed of sound. And I hit it. I don’t know how many seconds, but I could feel air was building up and then I hit it.”