Still A Little Bit Of Their Beauty Is Captured In The Man Made Technology

Map of Jupiter’s South

This map of Jupiter is the most detailed global color map of the planet ever produced. The round map is a polar stereographic projection that shows the south pole in the center of the map and the equator at the edge. It was constructed from images taken by Cassini on Dec. 11 and 12, 2000, as the spacecraft neared Jupiter during a flyby on its way to Saturn. The map shows a variety of colorful cloud features, including parallel reddish-brown and white bands, the Great Red Spot, multi-lobed chaotic regions, white ovals and many small vortices. Many clouds appear in streaks and waves due to continual stretching and folding by Jupiter’s winds and turbulence. The bluish-gray features along the north edge of the central bright band are equatorial “hot spots,” meteorological systems such as the one entered by NASA’s Galileo probe. Small bright spots within the orange band north of the equator are lightning-bearing thunderstorms. The polar region shown here is less clearly visible because Cassini viewed it at an angle and through thicker atmospheric haze. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

How I Discovered Halley’s Comet, by Edmond Halley

On Monday, June 10, in the Evening, the Sky being very serene and calm, I was desirous to take a view of the disk of Mars (then very near the Earth, and appearing very glorious) to see if I could distinguish in my 24 Foot Telescope, the Spots said to be seen on him. Directing my Tube for the purpose, I accidentally fell upon a small whitish Appearance near the Planet, resembling in all respects such a Nebula … The Reverend Mr. Miles Williams, Mr. Alban Thomas, and myself contemplated this Appearance for above an Hour … and we could not be deceiv’d as to its Reality; but the slowness of its Motion made us at that time conclude that it had none, and that it was rather a Nebula than a Comet.

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

This animation shows how fast a rocket must go to leave every planet

SpaceX Plans to Send 2 Tourists Around Moon in 2018

“While the trip appears to be within the technical capabilities of SpaceX, industry observers wondered whether the company could pull it off as quickly as Mr. Musk indicated. “Dates are not SpaceX’s strong suit,” said Mary Lynne Dittmar, executive director of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration. The Dragon 2 and Falcon Heavy are years behind schedule and have yet to fly.“It strikes me as risky,” Dr. Dittmar said, adding that autonomous systems are not infallible. “I find it extraordinary that these sorts of announcements are being made when SpaceX has yet to get crew from the ground to low-Earth orbit.””

Cometary Globules

The Great Red Spot

Saturn in Infrared from Cassini

NASA’s MAVEN Discovers How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere

“The good news for us, mind you, is that the magnetic field here on Earth shows no sign of ceasing anytime soon. The dynamo in the core may do things like flip and reverse, swapping north-and-south magnetic poles, but we should continue to stay protected from the solar wind far into the foreseeable future: for billions of years (at least) to be sure. We could, conceivably, one day suffer the same fate as Mars, but our mass, our rotation and our active, dynamic core should keep the Earth’s magnetic field in business for at least as long as the Sun shines!”

If you had taken a trip to our Solar System four billion years ago, you would have found two worlds with liquid water oceans, temperate atmospheres and all the conditions we believe are needed for life. Earth would have been one of them, but Mars would have met all those criteria, too. It was long suspected that something happened to Mars around a billion years into the Solar System’s history that caused it to lose its atmosphere, something that should still be going on today. Thanks to NASA’s Maven mission, we’ve measured this atmospheric stripping by the Sun for the first time, and we’ve reached a few incredible conclusions, including that in about two billion years, Mars will be completely airless, and that if we were to terraform Mars today, it would hang onto this new atmosphere for millions of years.

Come get the full story of how Mars lost its atmosphere, and learn what NASA’s Maven mission has taught us so far!

What Is The Zone System: A Practical Guide

If you want us to put it in the simplest words possible, the Zone System is a helps us get the right exposure in all our photos, every time, without fail, even in the strangest light settings, and without a trusty matrix meter. It is a magical system conceived of by none other than Ansel Adams himself, along with photographer Fred Archer in the late 1930s. As the father of landscape describes himself, the Zone System is “not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principles of sensitometry, worked out by Fred Archer and myself at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, around 1939-40.” These masters of photography created the Zone System to help us expose in tricky lighting situations where the dynamic range is out of whack, or the lighting is fooling your light meter into creating exposures that are too bright or too dark.

The Zone System was originally developed for black and white sheet film, which was the only type used in those days. Sheet film was individually developed on standard exposure papers, but today we have color roll film that can be mass developed on papers with varying exposures. The Zone system is as much applicable to these “modern” methods as they were to the film it was created for, and can even help digital photographers get perfect exposures. And guess what? Digital photographers, the Zone System can work for you too!

Why do you Need the Zone System

Technically you probably don’t. However, for those of you who are exposure perfectionists, the Zone System is extremely effective in measuring different tones and the dynamic range of a frame that you are about to shoot. It helps you make the perfect exposure with just a spot meter to work with. This gives you immense control over what you’re shooting. You don’t just make guesses at what the right exposure might be, or waste film bracketing “just in case”. Thus, you can easily figure out when you require extra lighting, and what kind and amount of lighting that might be, or whether there is need for a fill flash to get the right brightness. It can also help you figure out if you need graduated neutral density filters.

The zone system is highly beneficial in capturing accurate images when the camera is unable to set the exposure to an accurate reading, so that you get to decide what your image will turn out like, and you know exactly how it will look before you make the exposure. 

How does the Zone System Work?

A camera’s metering system measures accurate exposure readings by focusing on the middle grey tones, which is 18% grey. This grey is the average of black and white. So, when you are shooting in a bright area, your camera will try to dim the light by bringing it down to the average and making the image underexposed in the process. Similarly, when you are shooting in a dark area, your camera will try to increase the brightness of the image, making it over-exposed. Understanding this mechanism is crucial to understanding how the zone system can be used.

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