GlacierDogMapMe

In front of Ptarmigan mountain in Alaska. Do you see the 2 Rock...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:27:56 -0800

In front of Ptarmigan mountain in Alaska. Do you see the 2 Rock Ptarmigan birds near the bottom center of the picture?

Looking east from Peak 2, Alaska, a month ago. source:...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:12:00 -0800

Looking east from Peak 2, Alaska, a month ago.

source: http://glacierdogpublishing.com/

Standing atop McHugh peak looking over Turnagain Arm, Alaska a...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:03:22 -0800

Standing atop McHugh peak looking over Turnagain Arm, Alaska a week ago.

dessicate: At the edge of the Namib Desert the ocean waves...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 09:45:28 -0800

dessicate:

At the edge of the Namib Desert the ocean waves collide with the sand dunes

astrodidact: Milky Way over Mount Rainier, Washington.

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 09:40:37 -0800

astrodidact:

Milky Way over Mount Rainier, Washington.

astrodidact: Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada.

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 09:39:58 -0800

astrodidact:

Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada.

n-a-s-a: A Solar Filament Erupts Image Credit: NASA’s GSFC, SDO...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 09:36:37 -0800

n-a-s-a:

A Solar Filament Erupts

Image Credit: NASA’s GSFC, SDO AIA Team

n-a-s-a: NGC 1499: The California Nebula Credit &...

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:59:14 -0800

n-a-s-a:

NGC 1499: The California Nebula

Credit & Copyright: Markus Noller

aworthyendeavor: Curiosity Drives on Mars for the First Time

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:58:23 -0800

aworthyendeavor:

Curiosity Drives on Mars for the First Time

discoverynews: Breathtaking was the right word. I think my eyes...

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:56:37 -0800

discoverynews:

Breathtaking was the right word.

I think my eyes went to the size of bread plates.

theatlanticvideo:

Wheee! Curiosity’s Descent to Mars, in Enhanced 1080 HD

Thanks to some image editing, Daniel Luke Fitch’s version of the rover’s Mars approach is extra crisp and breathtaking.

n-a-s-a: Lunar Nearside Credit: NASA / GSFC / Arizona State...

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 15:55:05 -0800

n-a-s-a:

Lunar Nearside

Credit: NASA / GSFC / Arizona State Univ. / Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

science: China’s rare earth monopoly If you’ve glanced over the...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:14:54 -0800

science:

China’s rare earth monopoly

If you’ve glanced over the periodic table, you’ve probably noticed the two series of elements that are placed outside the main table. These are the lanthanides and the actinides. The lanthanide series, along with two chemically similar elements, Scandium and Yttrium, together make up the rare earth elements. The first rare earth minerals, which contain rare earth elements, were found in 1787 near the Swedish village Ytterby. Their discovery is evident in the names: Yttrium, Ytterbium, Terbium, Erbium (all named for Ytterby); Scandium (Scandinavia); Europium (Europe); Holmium (Stockholm); Thulium (Thule, the mythical northern land); Lutetium (Lutetia, present day Paris); Gadolinium (after Johan Gadolin, a Finnish chemist who studied rare earths). But these days, it’s not the Swedes who mine rare earth elements, it’s the Chinese.

Rare earth elements aren’t rare in absolute terms. What’s rare is to find them in sufficient concentrations that mining them is economically viable. If you do find them, they will be in mineral form, and separating the different rare earth elements from each other is hard because of their chemical similarities. So why bother at all? Because rare earth elements have become indispensible to a host of modern technologies, from LED screens and hybrid cars to missiles, magnets and lasers. It used to be that the United States supplied most of the rare earth elements to world markets, but during the 1980s, China burst onto the scene, undercutting prices and quickly gathering a near-monopoly—more than 95% of the world’s supply of rare earth elements comes from China.

Naturally, this absolute dependence on China for materials crucial to modern technology makes the West, and the United States in particular, uneasy. The fear is that China will use their monopoly to political ends, as they did in 2010 when they stopped all shipments of rare earth elements to Japan during a diplomatic dispute. More recently, China announced new restrictions on exports, a move presumably made in order to favor China’s own developing industry. A number of projects attempting to supply rare earths outside China are underway.

There are environmental concerns, as well. China took many shortcuts in order to undercut US prices so heavily, and one of them was ignoring the environmental hazard their mining and processing of rare earths presented. Although the Chinese claim to have cleaned up their act environmentally, their mines may still not be up to international standards. This especially concerns the large number of illegal mines that operate—large profit margins attract businessmen on either side of the law.

(Image credit: original photo by Nick Mann for National Geographic, showing Samarium, a lanthanide metal and rare earth element.)

n-a-s-a: A shower of auroras seems to be pouring down onto the...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:11:53 -0800

n-a-s-a:

A shower of auroras seems to be pouring down onto the South Pole Telescope (SPT) at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

Photograph by: Sven Lidstrom

National Science Foundation

jtotheizzoe: Martian Sol 2: Curiosity Panorama One of the...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:10:36 -0800

jtotheizzoe:

Martian Sol 2: Curiosity Panorama

One of the newly-released panoramic images from the Mars Curiosity rover was stitched together into an interactive version by Andrew Bodrov. Check out the interactive version here, and go hang out in Gale Crater for a while. Full screen is quite a pleasing experience.

lickystickypickywe: “The upward branching in this photo shows...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:05:10 -0800

lickystickypickywe:

“The upward branching in this photo shows that the Eiffel Tower actually initiated the discharge,” says lightning researcher Richard Blakeslee of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “In other words, instead of starting in the cloud and coming to ground, this flash started when the tower ‘launched’ a leader that propagated upward toward the cloud (which still served as the source of the electric field needed to get the process going). As the leader ascended, it branched out. Eventually one of the branches reached a region of sufficient charge to ‘short out the cloud’ and produce the return stroke pictured above.”

According to Martin Uman’s classic text The Lightning Discharge, upward-initiated discharges are “relatively rare,” accounting for less than 1% of all lightning, “and generally occur from mountain tops and tall man-made structures.”

Picture by Hakim Atek

leviathan8: Galactic Center: NASA’s Great Observatories examine...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:58:03 -0800

leviathan8:

Galactic Center: NASA’s Great Observatories examine the Galactic center region

In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA’s Great Observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory — have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy.

In this spectacular image, observations using infrared light and X-ray light see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core. Note that the center of the galaxy is located within the bright white region to the right of and just below the middle of the image. The entire image width covers about one-half a degree, about the same angular width as the full moon.

Each telescope’s contribution is presented in a different color:

- Yellow represents the near-infrared observations of Hubble. They outline the energetic regions where stars are being born as well as reveal hundreds of thousands of stars.

- Red represents the infrared observations of Spitzer. The radiation and winds from stars create glowing dust clouds that exhibit complex structures from compact, spherical globules to long, stringy filaments.

- Blue and violet represents the X-ray observations of Chandra. X-rays are emitted by gas heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and by outflows from the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s center. The bright blue blob on the left side of the full field image is emission from a double star system containing either a neutron star or a black hole.

When these views are brought together, this composite image provides one of the most detailed views ever of our galaxy’s mysterious core.

Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/D.Wang et al.; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSC/S.Stolovy

leviathan8: Centaurus A: Jet power and black hole assortment...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:56:58 -0800

leviathan8:

Centaurus A: Jet power and black hole assortment revealed in new Chandra image

A dramatic new Chandra image of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A provides one of the best views to date of the effects of an active supermassive black hole. Opposing jets of high-energy particles can be seen extending to the outer reaches of the galaxy, and numerous smaller black holes in binary star systems are also visible.

The image was made from an ultra-deep look at the galaxy Centaurus A, equivalent to more than seven days of continuous observations. Centaurus A is the nearest galaxy to Earth that contains a supermassive black hole actively powering a jet.

A prominent X-ray jet extending for 13,000 light years points to the upper left in the image, with a shorter “counterjet” aimed in the opposite direction. Astronomers think that such jets are important vehicles for transporting energy from the black hole to the much larger dimensions of a galaxy, and affecting the rate at which stars form there.

High-energy electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines produce the X-ray emission from the jet and counterjet. This emission quickly saps the energy from the electrons, so they must be continually reaccelerated or the X-rays will fade out. Knot-like features in the jets detected in the Chandra image show where the acceleration of particles to high energies is currently occurring, and provides important clues to understanding the process that accelerates the electrons to near-light speeds.

The inner part of the X-ray jet close to the black hole is dominated by these knots of X-ray emission, which probably come from shock waves — akin to sonic booms — caused by the jet. Farther from the black hole there is more diffuse X-ray emission in the jet. The cause of particle acceleration in this part of the jet is unknown.

Hundreds of point-like sources are also seen in the Chandra image. Many of these are X-ray binaries that contain a stellar-mass black hole and a companion star in orbit around one another. Determining the population and properties of these black holes should help scientists better understand the evolution of massive stars and the formation of black holes.

Another surprise was the detection of two particularly bright X-ray binaries. These sources may contain stellar mass black holes that are unusually massive, and this Chandra observation might have caught them gobbling up material at a high rate.

Credit NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al

ikenbot: Our Sun amongst Friends Solar disk in Hydrogen Alpha...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:54:17 -0800

ikenbot:

Our Sun amongst Friends

Solar disk in Hydrogen Alpha against a starry background. Imaged with a Lunt 100 Ha telescope, Takahashi FSQ106N refractor, STL11000 and DMK 41 USB cameras on August 9, 2012, from Redlands, California

n-a-s-a: The IceCube laboratory at Amundsen-Scott South Pole...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:53:24 -0800

n-a-s-a:

The IceCube laboratory at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station with the aurora australis lighting the night sky

Photograph by: Sven Lidstrom

National Science Foundation

visitheworld: Cathedral Group from Teton Park Road, Grand Teton...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:52:59 -0800

visitheworld:

Cathedral Group from Teton Park Road, Grand Teton National Park, USA (by ThorsHammer94539).