Clouds seen from the International Space Station

Clouds seen from the International Space Station

Expedition 53 Flight Engineer Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency (ESA) photographed cloudy skies over Sudan during an International Space Station flyover on October 22, 2017.

Image Credit: ESA/NASA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Protoplanetary Disk AS 209

Image
Nestled in the young Ophiuchus star-forming region, 410 light-years from the Sun, a fascinating protoplanetary disc named AS 209 is slowly being carved into shape. This wonderful image was captured using the high-resolution ALMA telescope, revealing a curious pattern of rings and gaps in the dust surrounding a young star. Protoplanetary discs are dense, rotating planes of gas and dust that surround newly formed stars; providing the matter that one day becomes orbiting planets, moons and other minor bodies. At less than one million years old, this system is very young, but already two clear gaps are being sculpted from the disc. The outer gap is deep, wide, and largely a dust-free zone, leading astronomers to believe that a giant planet almost the mass of Saturn is orbiting here — around 800 light-minutes from the central star, and more than three times the distance between Neptune and the Sun! As the planet carves out its path, dust piles up at the outer edge of its orbit, creating eve...
Read more

Venus

Image
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. It has the longest rotation period (243 days) of any planet in the Solar System and rotates in the opposite direction to most other planets. It has no natural satellite. It is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. It is the second-brightest natural object in the night sky after the Moon, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows. Because Venus is an inferior planet from Earth, it never appears to venture far from the Sun; its elongation reaches a maximum of 47.8°. Venus is a terrestrial planet and is sometimes called Earth's "sister planet" because of their similar size, mass, proximity to the Sun, and bulk composition. It is radically different from Earth in other respects. It has the densest atmosphere of the four terrestrial planets, consisting of more than 96% carbon dioxide. The atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface is 92 times that of Earth...
Read more

Snow Fields of Pluto

Image
In this digital painting, Pluto is depicted as a world of ice in many forms. Its surface shows mountains of rock, thought to be super-cold water ice, and vast fields of carbon dioxide, ammonia, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide snows. Pluto's largest moon, Charon, composed of the same materials, looms large in the sky. This illustration is based on images and data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft currently exploring the outer reaches of our Solar System. Image Credit: K.B. Kofoed
Read more