11 dezembro 2014

Moondog Night



In this night scene from the early hours of November 14, light from a last quarter Moon illuminates clouds above the mountaintop domes of Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. Bright Jupiter is just left of the overexposed lunar disk with a streak of camera lens flare immediately to the right, but that's no fireball meteor exploding near the center of the picture. Instead, from the roadside perspective a stunningly bright moondog or paraselene stands directly over Kitt Peaks's WIYN telescope. Analogous to a sundog or parhelion, a paraselene is produced by moonlight refracted through thin, hexagonal, plate-shaped ice crystals in high cirrus clouds. As determined by the crystal geometry, paraselenae (plural) are seen at an angle of 22 degrees or more from the Moon. Compared to the bright lunar disk they are more often faint and easier to spot when the Moon is low. About 10 minutes after the photograph even this bright moondog had faded from the night.



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Driving Around New York City - 1928





Driving Around New York City - 1928


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300 block winchester ave., martinsburg, west virginia. google...





300 block winchester ave., martinsburg, west virginia.


google street view study / the promise fulfilled and the promise broken.


animation: ageofdestruction.


age
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Colorful and Plankton-full Patagonian Waters



Late spring and summer weather brings blooms of color to the Atlantic Ocean off of South America, at least from a satellite view. The Patagonian Shelf Break is a biologically rich patch of ocean where airborne dust from the land, iron-rich currents from the south, and upwelling currents from the depths provide a bounty of nutrients for the grass of the sea—phytoplankton. In turn, those floating sunlight harvesters become food for some of the richest fisheries in the world. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP captured this view of phytoplankton-rich waters off of Argentina on Dec. 2, 2014. Scientists in NASA’s Ocean Color Group used three wavelengths (671, 551, and 443 nanometers) of visible and near-infrared light to highlight different plankton communities in the water. Bands of color not only reveal the location of plankton, but also the dynamic eddies and currents that carry them. > More Information Image Credit: Norman Kuring, NASA’s Ocean Color Group, using VIIRS data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership



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