A dust storm in Hellas Planitia on Mars, photographed by Mars Express on February 13, 2016.

The Hellas basin is Mars' deepest region, with Badwater Crater in the Peneus Palus (part of Hellas off the bottom left of this image) 8200 meters below the areoid—Mars' "sea level". When the poles' dry ice sublimates in summer, the atmospheric pressure on its floor is 1.5% of Earth's, approaching three times the norm.

#Mars #Space

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/35573529390/

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/J. Cowart

On July 21st, 2011 the orbiter Atlantis returned to Earth after visiting the ISS and delivering two cargo modules, the Rafaello MPLM and an LMC.

This picture was taken from the station by astronaut Mike Fossum as Atlantis left a trail of glowing plasma high up in the Earth's atmosphere. It was the final flight of the Space Shuttle program.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/5964456530

#space #spaceflight #iss #SpaceShuttle

NGC 541 is a lenticular galaxy about 230 million light years away, with wide error bars. To its northeast, bottom left in this picture, is Minkowski's Object.

The blue-ish Object is a region of recent star formation, ~7.5 million years old. One theory is that it's an irregular galaxy but the more-commonly held one is that it's a former cloud of gas that strayed into an invisible-to-the eye jet from NGC 541. The second and third pictures show the smoking gun in radio frequencies. 1/2

#Space

March 1947 brought us the first photo showing the Earth from space (~160km high), taken by a V-2 launched from White Sands, NM by the US's Small Steps Program.

The space race of the '50s and '60s was prefigured by the USA and USSR dueling with high-altitude balloons in the '20s and 30s. In 1930 the equivalent of the 1947 picture was taken, the first known image to show the curvature of the Earth. The one here is from five years later but shows the same thing. (1/3)

#space #stratosphere #1930s

About 420 million light years away is the galaxy group Matessian 7. Two of its members are collectively known as Arp 282 (individually it's NGC 169 dominating the image and IC 1559 barreling into it from the bottom).

They're interacting strongly and you can see streams of dark dust between them, dotted with highly luminous stars or star clusters initiated by tidal forces.

Credit: Judy Schmidt, from HST and Legacy Survey data

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/51591641345/

#space #astrophotography

Since 2013 we've seen several photos and videos of meteoroids hitting the Moon. All impactors were small, the era of huge craters being far-passed, but a rise in transient astronomy and instrument sensitivity has made detection common.

There are reports older than this, but the trouble has been getting two widely separated observations of the same event, to rule out something in our atmosphere mimicking a Lunar impact.

This is the problem with the photo of "Stuart's Event". 1/3

#Moon #Meteor

Chuck Yeager was famously first to fly over Mach 1. Less well-known are Scott Crossfield being the first to Mach 2 & Mel Apt to Mach 3.

Yuri Gagarin was first to Mach 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 & 22—Vostok 1 hit 28,260 kph, or Mach 22.9.

This pic shows the ship's control panel with the the Globus device that is its core at upper left. It's a mechanical computer that bucked the digital trend until *2002*. (1/2)

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/vostok-1-control-panel/

#spaceflight

This picture is not about the star-forming region in Cepheus on the left but rather the G3V star marked by a green cross at middle right. Gaia has given us precise position and velocity data that allows us to calculate the paths of stars relative to us both backward and forward over millions of years. One such is HD 7977, which is the one shown here. The result is uncertain, but it's possible that it passed the Sun as close as 0.016 light years 2.8 million years ago (1/2)

#space #CloseEncounter

NGC 3489 is a lenticular galaxy 29 ± 8.4 million light years away. Assuming the middle of that wide range, it's about 30,000 light years across and so a third the size of our own galaxy.

Lenticular galaxies are a bit of a puzzle as they show obvious disks and cores but no spiral arms. They also tend to be brighter than spirals, which makes them more like ellipticals that way. (1/2)

#space #galaxy #astrophotography