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Apollo 15 was the ninth manned mission in the United States Apollo space program, the fourth to land on the Moon and the eighth successful manned mission.
Image credit: CDC PHIL /James Gathany - Legionella sp. colonies, which had been cultivated on an agar cultured plate, and illuminated using ultraviolet light.
Illustrations by the giants of science.
1, 2 & 3: Isaac Newton
4 & 5: Galileo Galilei
6 & 7: Charles Messier
8: Caroline Herschel
9: Johannes Kepler
10: Nicolaus Copernicus.
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Hubble’s 20th anniversary image shows a mountain of dust and gas rising in the Carina Nebula. The top of a three-light-year tall pillar of cool hydrogen is being worn away by the radiation of nearby stars, while stars within the pillar unleash jets of gas that stream from the peaks.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
On the Lunar Surface
Apollo 11 astronauts trained on Earth to take individual photographs in succession in order to create a series of frames that could be assembled into panoramic images. This frame from Aldrin’s panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site is the only good picture of mission commander Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface.
Image Credit: NASA
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“To See Earth As It Truly Is”
The thin blue line of Earth’s atmosphere photographed from the International Space Station14:05 GMT August 19, 2012.
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1. The Orion Nebula is arguably the finest of all nebulae within the Milky Way visible from the Northern Hemisphere. With a gaseous repository of 10,000 suns, and illuminated by a cluster of hot young stars, the clouds of Messier 42 — as it is also known — glow with fantastic colors and shapes, giving us a bird’s eye view of one of the greatest star forming nurseries in our part of the Milky Way. Messier 42 is a complex of glowing gas, mostly hydrogen but also helium, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in decreasing amounts, located 1,500 light-years away. At its very heart, we find the Trapezium, a group of four very hot stars that illuminate the nebula. They are the brightest of an extended cluster of several thousand young stars many of which lie unseen within the opaque gas and dust. Amazingly, whilst the Orion Nebula is easy to identify with the unaided eye, there is apparently no written record of its existence before the 17th century. This image is based on data acquired with the 1.5 m Danish telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory in Chile, through three filters (B: 60 s, V: 30 s, R: 21 s). East is at the upper right corner and North is at the lower right. Credit: ESO/IDA/Danish 1.5 m/R.Gendler, J.-E. Ovaldsen, and A. Hornstrup.
2. This photo was taken on the plain of Castelluccio by Maurizio Pignotti. Shooting data: 12 shots with Canon 5d old - sigma 12/24 - ISO 800 to 470 Second Heaven - 30 seconds static subject - Star Tracker DIY - tripod - remote control. Double exposure. Credit: Maurizio Pignotti.
3. A prominence is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun’s surface, often in a loop shape. Prominences are anchored to the Sun’s surface in the photosphere, and extend outwards into the Sun’s corona. While the corona consists of extremely hot ionized gases, known as plasma, which do not emit much visible light, prominences contain much cooler plasma, similar in composition to that of the chromosphere. A prominence forms over timescales of about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months. Credit: Alan Friedman
