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Joined: May 2010
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
Joined: May 2010
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.20 Have you ever seen an entire rainbow? From the ground, typically, only the top portion of a rainbow is visible because directions toward the ground have fewer raindrops. From the air, though, the entire 360-degree circle of a rainbow is more commonly visible. Pictured here, a full-circle rainbow was captured over the Lofoten Islands of Norway by a drone passing through a rain shower. [Image credit and copyright: Lukas Moesch][APOD]How you see it is primarily caused by the internal reflection of sunlight by raindrops. The Sun is in the exact opposite direction from the rainbow's center. As a bonus, a second rainbow that was more faint and color-reversed was visible outside the first. A Full Circle Rainbow over Norway
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Joined: May 2010
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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.21The astrophotographer was in Lovozero Lake, Murmansk, Russia. He intended to take a series of aurora images to make a time-lapse video. But it was the night after the Geminid Meteor Shower peak, and he was treated to something even more spectacular than an aurora. [Image credit & copyright: Yang Sutie][APOD] It was as if night turned to day when a brilliant Geminid fireball streaked through the sky. He had already set up the aurora camera and it captured the whole track of the Geminid. Fireball in the Arctic
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Joined: May 2010
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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.22 The December solstice is the first day of winter in the north and summer in the southern hemisphere. This solstice in 2015 occurred at 16:28 UTC when the Sun reached its maximum southern declination. [Composite image credit & copyright: Stefan Seip (TWAN)][APOD] Of course, we can't see the Solstice Sun against the faint background stars and nebulae in the Milky Way. If we could, it might look something like the composited panorama below. Images of the Milky Way taken under dark Namibian night skies were stitched together in a panoramic view. From a snapshot made on December 21, the Sun was digitally overlayed as a brilliant star at the northern winter solstice position. Solstice Sun and Milky Way
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Joined: May 2010
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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Posts: 12,055 Likes: 30 |
.23The group of stars in the image below is familiar to people around the world. But different cultures have associated the asterism with different icons and folklore. For example, it's known in the USA as the Big Dipper. The stars are part of a constellation designated as the Great Bear (Ursa Major). The recognized star names are labelled on the photo which was taken in 2017 above Pyramid Mountain in Alberta, Canada. [Image credit & copyright: Steve Cullen][APOD] Stars in any given constellation are unlikely to be physically related. But surprisingly, most of the Big Dipper stars do seem to be headed in the same direction as they plough through space, a property they share with other stars spread out over an even larger area across the sky. Their measured common motion suggests that they all belong to a loose, nearby star cluster, thought to be on average only about 75 light-years away and up to 30 light-years across. The cluster is more properly known as the Ursa Major Moving Group. Big Dipper over Pyramid Mountain
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Joined: May 2010
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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.24 December 18th. Extremely rare, rainbow-colored clouds emerged and floated high above parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Alaska, and as far south as Scotland and northern England. The clouds are known as polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs). Amazingly, the phenomenon lasted for three days. The PSCs were caused by a prolonged period of unusually cold upper atmosphere temperatures, according to Spaceweather.com. [Photographer: Ranune Sapailaite][Reporter: Henry Baker][livescience.com] Photographer Ramune Sapailaite captured fantastic photos of the rare phenomenon above Gran in southern Norway. Her photos revealed the rainbow hues of PSCs and their iridescent shimmer that has inspired the nickname nacreous clouds, due to their similarity with nacre — an iridescent material, also known as mother-of-pearl, that is found in the shells of some mollusks. Rainbow clouds lit up Arctic skies
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Joined: May 2010
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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.Christmas day NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory celebrated the holiday season with a new image of the "Christmas Tree Cluster" (NGC 2264).The image was rotated by 160 degrees from the astronomy standard. This puts the peak of the roughly conical tree shape near the top of the image. Though it doesn't address the slight bare patch in the tree's branches at our lower right. (In a living room, that would probably be turned to the corner.) See the Christmas Tree Cluster image.
And there's an animated version of the tree! In this, the blue and white lights are young stars that give off the X-ray detected by Chandra. Optical data from a telescope on Kitt Peak shows gas in the nebula as green - the pine needles. Infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars. The animated Christmas Tree
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