Wednesday, May 26, 2010

New Interesting Stuff About Black Holes

(PhysOrg.com) -- Data from an ongoing survey by NASA's Swift satellite have helped astronomers solve a decades-long mystery about why a small percentage of black holes emit vast amounts of energy.
http://www.physorg.com/news194104301.html

Video included.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Terrific Space Shuttle/ISS photo

Courtesy of my friend Paul:

This photo shows the transit across the sun of both the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle 'Atlantis', taken by an amateur (!) photographer on May 16, 2010.

Atlantis was executing a pitch maneuver, designed to show its belly to the crew of the ISS, so that they could examine it for heat tile damage.
The photographer - Thierry Legault - is a well-known 'blogger' of his astronomy photos.
He travelled to outside of Madrid, Spain, to attempt to get this specific shot.
The actual transit of the two craft across the backdrop of the surface of the sun as seen from Earth, took only slightly more than half a second.

Shuttle mission STS-132 is the final scheduled flight for Atlantis.