Thursday, June 25, 2009

Fire in the Sky

We're going off on a science jaunt today.


Courtesy of the London Daily Mail Online come these pictures (only one shown here; more at the link) of a volcanic eruption as viewed by the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Scientists are theorizing that the hole in the clouds was caused by the shockwave of the initial eruption, but I'll opine that the real cause is the heat of the volcanic plume evaporating the clouds as it passes through -- quite literally fire in the sky.







In other space news, the Japanese lunar probe Kayuga was crashed into the Moon June 11, ending its two-year mission of making high definition maps of the lunar surface. One of its last photos is below. Video of the crash, as well as a video of a high-def Earthrise, is available here. Amazingly, Australian astronomers actually got pictures of the flash of the crash on the moon, also at the link above.







Addendum 6/27/09 -- Here is a link to a NASA video of the volcanic eruption above. It almost has a 3-D effect to it.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/38000/38985/sarychev_oblique_final_H264.mov

It runs in Quicktime and takes a little while to load.

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