FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 16

DO YOU SEE A BIRD?

This image of the Seagull Nebula's 100-light-year wingspan was NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday.

Harel Boren

MERCEDES WITH CLOAKING DEVICE

In the latest Mercedes commercial, one side of this F-Cell car has a camera recording the scenery it passes, while the other side displays that scenery on a field of LEDs, effectively letting you see through the car. Engadget has the video.

Mercedes

A DUST DEVIL ON MARS

Pictured: a Martian dust devil twisting across the Martian Amazonis Planitia region. The 100-foot-wide column of swirling air was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter last month as it passed over the northern hemisphere of Mars.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

BRICKLAYING WOMAN

Channi Anand captured this image of a female bricklayer at a plant on the outskirts of Jammu, Indian, on International Women's Day. Anand is an AP photographer based in and around India. From American Photo.

AP Photo/Channi Anand

FIRESTORM BIRTH

This image, from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, shows the chaos of star birth, dust, and collision out in the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. Read more here.

NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 14

THE PRAWN

Astrophotographer Dieter Willasch created this great shot of the Prawn Nebula, in the tail of Scorpius. It's about 6,000 light-years away. Read more here.

Dieter Willasch

NOT FROM OUTER SPACE

This image may look like it's capturing a faraway star or some other celestial body, but it's not--it's actually the first-ever snapshot of an individual atom's shadow. Read more here.

Kielpinski Group, Griffith University

FOURTH/MOON

Another great fireworks shot, this was taken in Kansas City, Kansas, where the fireworks and the moon both lit up the sky. For more great photojournalism like this, check out American Photo.

AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

SIFTING STARLIGHT

New tech offers a better view of exoplanets by using advanced optics to remove the starlight from a photograph. Here's a look at HD 157728, a nearby star 1.5 times larger than the sun. Be sure to check out the whole story here.

Project 1640/NASA-JPL

DARK GALAXIES

For the first time, astronomers have been able to get a better look at starless "dark galaxies," theorized to exist but never directly seen. Even now, it takes some annotation in this image. The quasar lighting them up is circled in red; the dark galaxies are circled in blue. Read the whole story here.

Royal Astronomical Society

MARS PANORAMA

It took 817 images to create a composite panoramic view from NASA's Mars rover, but the results are worth the effort, offering a rare glimpse of the red planet. For more on the image, check out PopPhoto.

NASA

STUNNED FISH

Scientists are using an electric current, shown here, to stun fish in Mississippi and Illinois rivers so they can be studied. It's thought the local fish populations might be hurt by the arrival of Asian Carp, and researchers are scooping up the stunned fish for a closer look.

AP Photo/Robert Ray

A FICTIVE FLIGHT ABOVE REAL MARS

A FICTIVE FLIGHT ABOVE REAL MARS from Jan Fröjdman on Vimeo.

The anaglyph images of Mars taken by the HiRISE camera holds information about the topography of Mars surface. There are hundreds of high-resolution images of this type. This gives the opportunity to create different studies in 3D. In this film I have chosen some locations and processed the images into panning video clips. There is a feeling that you are flying above Mars looking down watching interesting locations on the planet. And there are really great places on Mars! I would love to see images taken by a landscape photographer on Mars, especially from the polar regions. But I'm afraid I won't see that kind of images during my lifetime.

It has really been time-consuming making these panning clips. In my 3D-process I have manually hand-picked reference points on the anaglyph image pairs. For this film I have chosen more than 33.000 reference points! It took me 3 months of calendar time working with the project every now and then.

The colors in this film are false because the anaglyph images are based on grayscale images. I have therefore color graded the clips. But I have tried to be moderate doing this. The light regions in the clips are yellowish and the dark regions bluish. The clips from the polar regions (the last clips in the film) have a white-blue tone.There are a lot of opinions and studies of what the natural colors on Mars might be. But the dark regions of dust often seems to have a bluish tone. Please study this issue on e.g sites by NASA.

This film is not scientific. As a space enthusiast I have just tried to visualize the planet my way.
The video begins with a nearby approach to Mars moon Phobos.
Some of the anaglyphs used can be seen on my blog, please visit:
av-creo.com/fictive-flight-real-mars

Please watch the film in 2K if possible for greater details.

Year in review: Best evidence yet for water on Mars

SALT STORY  Seasonal water flows might have created dark streaks on Mars’ slopes, as seen in this computer-generated view of Hale Crater.

Red Planet’s slopes ooze brine, data from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed

BY 

ALEXANDRA WITZE

There’s water on Mars. Yes, again.

In the most highly publicized Mars discovery of the year, NASA announced that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft had spotted hydrated salt minerals on the Red Planet (SN: 10/31/15, p. 17). The salty streaks appear in the same places as dark, hillside marks that lengthen and shrink with the Martian seasons. Brine probably oozes from the steep slopes, scientists concluded.

Water on Mars has been reported many times in the past, with each discovery adding fresh nuance to scientists’ picture of the planet. The brine finding is the most detailed evidence yet that water flows on the planet’s surface today. And liquid water — no matter the saltiness — has exciting implications for whether life could exist on Mars.

Chemical evidence for Martian habitability, both past and present, is piling up elsewhere as well. The Curiosity rover, which has been rolling across the planet since 2012, identified a form of nitrogen in Martian rocks that, on Earth, is used to construct biological molecules (SN Online: 3/23/15). Studies of six Martian meteorites, blasted into space by asteroid impacts, reveal that they contain methane, which serves as a food source for microbes on Earth (SN Online: 6/16/15).

Knowing whether there really is life on Mars — or ever was — will have to wait until at least 2020, when NASA plans to launch a rover to collect and store rocks that would eventually be flown back to Earth for analysis. In the meantime, scientists’ freshest views of Mars are from the sky. The MAVEN spacecraft, flying high through the Martian air, has spotted glowing auroras and puzzling dust clouds (SN: 4/18/15, p. 15). And it has measured, more precisely than ever, how powerful solar storms eroded away Mars’ atmosphere (SN: 12/12/15, p. 32), a process that, over billions of years, has caused the Red Planet to lose most of its air.