Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Stars | Mika Suutari

Auroras on Jupiter [NASA/ESA Hubble]

Itty bitty Mercury transits the Sun. It was a terribly cloudy morning with really poor seeing, but managed to snap this. 

Messier 1 - The Crab Nebula

Potentially Humanity’s First Historically Observed Supernova

The Crab Nebula is the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion. Around in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers identified a large bright object that suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. The explosion was so bright that it was even visible during the day time.

700 years later the super nova remnant faded in brightness as it expanded and was nearly forgotten. The Super Nova Remnant was rediscovered in 1758 ( officially re-recorded) by Charles Messier while he was creating a catalog of mysterious objects that looked like comets but were not.

We now know that the beautiful Crab Nebula is the magnificent result of the death of a star, which was unknown to Charles Messier and the Chinese Astronomers that discovered the Object. Now, thanks to space telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, we can image the Nebula in great detail. The bottom left image is of a small region of the Crab Nebula. It shows “Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in its intricate filamentary structure” and gives scientists a better understanding of the death of stars. The image to the bottom left shows combined visible light data from Hubble and x-ray data from Chandra.

Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra

Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744

Fluorite

Locality: Jaimina Mine, Caravia, Asturias, Spain

Allophane

Locality: Cala Mine, Huelva, Andalusia, Spain

Very strange things happen to your body if you spend a year in space

NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly returns to Earth Tuesday night after spending almost a year in space.

But his 340 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS) haven’t been all fun and games.

Our bodies evolved on Earth, so they’re not built for weightlessness — which is exactly why NASA plans to use Kelly to study the long-term effects of spaceflight the human body.

Azurite & Malachite

Locality:  Bisbee, Warren District, Mule Mts, Cochise Co., Arizona, USA

The Horsehead Nebula in Infrared from Hubble by NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team

Anticrepuscular rays are spectacular optical phenomena that are quite rare and they require the viewer to have his or her back to the sun or sunset point. They are columns of sunlit air streaming through gaps in clouds. Yet while the former seem to converge from the sun, anticrepuscular rays converge toward the antisolar point, the point in the sky directly opposite the sun, creating some stunning effects. (Source)