Space Pictures This Week: Supermoon, Solar Flare, More
By National Geographic News, 11 May 2012.
1. Seven Sisters
Also known as the Seven Sisters, the star cluster M45 - seen in a picture submitted May 7 to National Geographic's My Shot - contains more than 3,000 stars and is one of the brightest clusters known, according to NASA. At about 400 light-years away, M45 is also one of the closest star clusters to Earth.
2. Supermoon Over New York
Due to the moon's egg-shaped orbit, there are times when the moon is at perigee - its closest approach to Earth - and at apogee, its farthest. The term "supermoon" was coined in 1979 to describe a full moon that coincides with perigee, a confluence that occurs about once a year, on average.
3. Eruption From Above
A plume arises from a volcano on Zavodoski - one of the U.K.'s South Sandwich Islands (map), located off Argentina - in a false-colour satellite image taken on April 27.
A false-colour image is a combination of non-visible (such as infrared) light and visible light. Here the technique is used to distinguish clouds from snow and ice, according to NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) website.
In the above picture, ice-covered islands appear bright turquoise, clouds appear light turquoise, and the ocean appears black.
4. Night-Shining Clouds
Noctilucent clouds glow over Alberta, Canada, in a picture submitted May 4 to National Geographic's Your Shot. The so-called night-shining clouds, shimmer even after dark, because they're so high in the atmosphere that sunlight reaches them even after the sun has dipped below the horizon.
The rare clouds are showing up at ever more southerly latitudes, and astronomers aren't sure why, according to NASA. Scientists suspect the increase may be due to climate change: Even as surface temperatures rise, the upper atmosphere is getting colder due to the build-up of carbon dioxide, creating perfect conditions for cloud formation, experts say.
5. Solar Hiccup
The phenomenon was short-lived and didn't spark any coronal mass ejections, huge clouds of charged solar particles that erupt from the sun's upper atmosphere.
The flare is shown in the 131 Angstrom wavelength of light - typically coloured teal - which gave scientists the most detailed picture of the flare.
6. Coming Home
Four hours later the Russian craft landed outside Arkalyk, Kazakhstan - carrying NASA astronaut Dan Burbank as well as Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, who had spent more than five months on the space station.
7. Pinball Wizard
NASA astronaut Don Pettit is reflected in a metal sphere on the International Space Station in an image released May 4.
Pettit has taught more than 500,000 Internet users how microgravity works via everyday objects aboard the space station. (To see Pettit's demonstrations, visit Science Off the Sphere.)
8. Stars Are Born
The Cygnus-X stellar nursery stars in a "stunning" infrared picture released May 10 by the European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory.
The chaotic jumble of dust and gas is an extremely active region of giant-star birth in the Cygnus constellation, some 4,500 light-years from Earth. (See another infrared picture of the Cygnus constellation.)
Top image: Noctilucent clouds above Finland - Photograph by Pekka Parviainen, TWAN (left) and Cygnus constellation (left).
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