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Awesomeness Round-up

Awesomeness Round-up – 2/7/11

Check out this amazingly cool orrery, created by the creative director, of Dynamic Diagrams, Piotr Kaczmarek. It shows the motion of the planets in our solar system. You can change it by setting the date, and you can speed it up or slow it down! You can even click on … Continue Reading →

Awesomeness Round-up

Awesomeness Round-up – 1/31/11

  • By Sara Mitchell
  • January 31, 2011
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Credit: NASA/GSFC/Debbie Mccallum I know that I kicked off last week’s round-up with a snow picture, but look! We got another six inches! Here’s the real NASA connection, though… imagery of the storm from the MODIS instrument, aboard the Terra satellite. Credit: NASA Goddard/MODIS Rapid Response Team

Awesomeness Round-up

Awesomeness Round-up – 12/20/10

It’s been very cold and windy here in Maryland lately – but not quite THIS cold. I guess the upside to extreme temperatures is that you can do experiments like this one, done at Mount Washington Observatory when it was nearly -35 degrees F. Do you know what happens when … Continue Reading →

Awesomeness Round-up

Awesomeness Round-up – 12/13/10

Credit: Photo by Drew Noel One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s many feats of engineering will be its actuators – tiny mechanical motors on the back of its primary and secondary mirror segments that will help the telescope focus by changing the mirrors’ curvature. You can’t see the actuator … Continue Reading →

EPOXI Mission's Close-Up Views of Comet Hartley 2

Awesomeness Round-up – 11/8/10

  • By Sara Mitchell
  • November 8, 2010
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This past week marked a major milestone in mankind’s exploration and understanding of comets – the EPOXI mission flew just 700 km from the nucleus of comet Hartley 2 and snapped some amazing images! This close pass will give researchers incredible new insight into the structure of comets. As we … Continue Reading →

Awesomeness Round-up

Awesomeness Round-up – 11/1/10

  • By Sara Mitchell
  • November 1, 2010
  • Comments Off on Awesomeness Round-up – 11/1/10

Last week was apparently a great week for astronomy – the shared file where Maggie and I gather all of the images, videos, and stories that we see all week was absolutely overflowing with possible content for today’s round-up!  So we’ve distilled it to the best of the best, and … Continue Reading →

Spooky Astronomy

Spooky Astronomy

Sometimes clouds and dust can take on recognizable shape – like, a horse’s head. But astronomical imagery can be more…well…sinister in appearance. Which makes these perfect for Halloween! Thanks to our friend @NASAUniverseEDU for compiling these. Credit:A. Fabian (IoA Cambridge) et al., NASA This screaming skull above is actually a … Continue Reading →

Awesomeness Round-up

Awesomeness Round-up – 10/4/10

Credit: OPTIMUS PRIME image courtesy Hasbro Transformers, roll out! This NASA news headline caught our eye last week: NASA and OPTIMUS PRIME Collaborate to Educate Youth. NASA announced a video contest for students from third to eighth grade that will feature spinoffs from NASA technologies. There have been some pretty … Continue Reading →

Awesomeness Round-up

Awesomeness Round-up – 9/13/10

Another milestone for the James Webb Space Telescope – the first primary mirror segment to be coated in gold (it’s a flight spare and engineering design unit) is undergoing cryo testing! Isn’t it pretty? I can’t wait to see what the whole mirror assembly will look like once it’s all … Continue Reading →

Awesomeness Round-up

Awesomeness Round-up – 8/30/10

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech What happens when planets form around a tightly orbiting binary star system? A cosmic smashup! As this particular type of binary stars get cozier, they cause a disturbance in the force… err, I mean, in their gravitational influences on their local planetary system. Things start colliding, and it’s … Continue Reading →

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