Science

And you thought Kansas was windy … This small image from NASA shows a dust-devil on the surface of mars. A short movie of the Martian dust-devils is also available. Update: Here’s another link to a movie of the Martian dust-devils, plus a link to another photo of the Martian dust devils.

The full size image is quite stunning.

A few days ago we were fortunate enough to observe a somewhat unusual cloud formation known as mammatus clouds. We first became aware of them via an entry on the astro photo of the day site a while back, and were quite happy to see them for ourselves. Looking like giant cloud “drops” in the … Read more

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted an interesting astronomy photo, and the one below, though subtle, is very beautiful. The image is of Saturn’s “northern” hemisphere and was taken by the spacecraft Cassini in early 2005, as it orbited the planet. It turns out that the atmosphere of Saturn’s “northern” hemisphere is blue, … Read more

Night Sky Live is an interesting website that chronicles the efforts of a group whose goal "is to create a useful continuous record of the night sky". The worldwide system is built around small fisheye lens cameras that are controlled by laptop computers and deployed at major observatories around the world. This image above is … Read more

The Cassini spacecraft has been returning wonderful photos of Saturn and its rings all summer, but this image of Mimas, one of the moons of Saturn, really caught my eye. The crater that is visible near the top is about 80 miles wide, and the mountain in the middle is as high as Mt. Everest. … Read more

According to this BBC report, the objects shown below are only 5 millionths of an inch in size and are “grown” using advanced semiconductor techniques. (See the referenced article for more technical details.) I’m sharing them here simply because they are beautiful and provide a fascinating view of the nano-world. (images courtesy of the BBC)