Space Pictures This Week: Venus Transit, Shuttle Trek, More
By National Geographic News, 7 June 2012.
1. Transit Distortion
A distorted sun with a "blemish" on its face rises over the Caspian Sea in a picture of the 2012 transit of Venus taken from the shores of Azerbaijan on Wednesday.
During the transit - the last one until 2117 - Venus crossed between Earth and the sun, so that observers could see a black dot gliding over the solar disk. The sun appears squashed in this frame because more of its light is being bent by the thick layers of Earth's atmosphere.
Photo credit link: Tunç Tezel, TWAN.
2. International Dust Up
Long tendrils of dust flow over Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia in a recent satellite picture of the Persian Gulf snapped by NASA's Aqua orbiter.
According to NASA, the Kuwait Times newspaper reported on Monday that the huge dust storm had paralyzed the country, with visibility reduced to less than 1,600 feet (500 meters).
3. Battered Moon
A line of impact craters sits along the border between night and day in a newly released picture of Saturn's moon Tethys.
Snapped by NASA's Cassini orbiter, the shot shows Tethys's largest crater - the shallow impact basin called Odysseus - in profile as a bright white region on the right edge of the icy orb.
4. To Boldly Tow
The space shuttle Enterprise is seen being towed by a barge down the Hudson River on Wednesday, with the lower Manhattan skyline as a backdrop.
The retired shuttle, which landed in New York City in late April, was on its way to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum, where it will soon go on display.
5. Planetary Flyby
The black ball of Venus seems to hover in the sun's atmosphere in a picture of the 2012 transit taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Scientifically, the most important parts of a Venus transit are the moments when the planet appears to enter and leave the sun's disk, according to astronomer Jay Pasachoff of Williams College in Massachusetts.
Timing exactly when the planet crossed the solar limb from different locations helped 18th-century astronomers more precisely measure the distance between Earth and the sun. Scientists hope to use data collected during the 2012 Venus transit to study the planet's upper atmosphere.
6. Great Blob
The star cluster M13, also known as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, shines in a picture snapped by a backyard astronomer and recently submitted to National Geographic's My Shot photography community.
Located 25,000 light-years from Earth, the spherical collection of hundreds of thousands of old stars is one of the brightest globular clusters in the northern sky.
7. Coastal Bow Ties
Likely left by commercial jets, contrails crisscross the skies near the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in a recently released picture from NASA's Terra satellite.
Contrails tend to appear in the wakes of passing aircraft, when extra particles and water vapour in their exhaust serve as the seeds for cloud formation.
8. Clash of the Titans
An illustration shows the possible view from Earth when the Andromeda Galaxy (left), our largest galactic neighbour, collides with the Milky Way.
Astronomers using the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope announced last week that they can more accurately predict what the galactic collision will look like - even though it won't happen for another four billion years.
Top image: M13: The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (left) and Milky Way destined head-on collision with Andromeda Galaxy (right).
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