The little blotch you see in this Cassini image of Saturn’s Southern Hemisphere is actually a massive storm, some 10,000 times more powerful than those we find on Earth, at least according to the Cassini press release located here.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

If you are having trouble seeing the site, you may need to clear your cache. Everything is fixed other than that.

Hopefully you won’t have to, we just cleared up a last minute glitch I think

Hold the phone!  I do seem to still have a problem with my Mac!

I can hardly believe it, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer is five years old! Where did the time go? It’s almost scary, but when I consider what has been accomplished I begin to understand why.

GALEX has imaged over a half a billion objects over 27,000 square degrees of the sky – that’s something like the area of 138,000 full moons.

The big question for GALEX is: How do galaxies grow and change over 10 billion years of cosmic history? One way to answer that is to look at LOTS of galaxies, and look at LOTS of gathered data. Think about it this way: If we were to look at a single tree in a forest we couldn’t tell much about the whole forest and the way it ages, but if we look at many different trees in many different parts of the forest, we can use that data to not only tell a lot about the individuals but we can also answer the underlying question about how the forest as a whole ages. On a cosmic scale the job is staggering, it might be another decade before we can draw any really accurate conclusions.

One of the fun things, is all the things we learn along the way.

GALEX released the image above of M106 also known as NGC 4258, Image credit and source: NASA/JPL. You can read the caption supplied by NASA by clicking the “More” link at the bottom of the page. Clicking the image above will get you a larger version of the image (75k) and you can get full res versions at this GALEX image page (linked below)

Read more »

Hopefully the server issues have been taken care of and the site will be moved back “home”. I won’t know for sure until tomorrow most likely, but my host contributed a solution late last night and I think it’s going to do the trick. That’s what you get when you have a good host though. More about what is going on in a day or two.

I went outside at 4 am figuring to get a look with the scope now that I have that working properly again. It is going to rain but I could see stars through the bedroom window. Well I got out there and the moon looks like a fuzz ball, darn, it was very nice out.

For today, Cassini gives us an interesting look at Cassini’s F ring, a very nice edge on perspective. Click the image for a larger version to see the detail better.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Here’s the press release:
The complex structure of Saturn’s quirky F ring is unfurled in this mosaic made up of images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

The mosaic covers 255 degrees of longitude within the F ring, which represents about 70 percent of the ring’s circumference around Saturn. From top to bottom, the mosaic represents an area 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) in radial width.
Read more »

If you are seeing this post, consider yourself lucky

I am continuing to work some issues and probably will have them resolved one way or another tomorrow, in the mean time the availability of the site will be erratic.

The day I was having troubles with the website happened to be Hubble’s birthday April 24th. The Hubble site put out a collection of colliding galaxies.

They have a poster page (you can find it here) and another page (located here) with each of the galaxies separately imaged complete with a caption if you click on the provided link and you can get multiple sized images.

The image (click it for a larger version) and caption below is one of my favorites, probably because I’ve seen it. Anyway, check them all out see which you like best.

NGC 5331 is a pair of interacting galaxies beginning to hold their arms . There is a blue trail which appears in the image flowing to the right of the system. NGC 5331 is very bright in the infrared, with about a hundred billion times the luminosity of the Sun. It is located in the constellation Virgo, the Maiden, about 450 million light-years away from Earth.

This image is part of a large collection of 59 images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on the occasion of its 18th anniversary on 24th April 2008.

Object Names: NGC 5331, VV 253, KPG 401

Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)