ｗｈａｔ ａｍ Ｉ

The faint rings of Uranus, shot in 1986, are made of countless fragments of water ice containing radiation-altered organic material.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures

Galileo Galilei 1564-1642 the father of observational astronomy

↳ in the profound darkness of certain nights i have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens (antoine de saint-exupery)

(insp.)

Where cold and warm air meet, our atmosphere churns with energy. From the turbulence of supercell thunderclouds to the immense electrical discharge of lightning, there’s much that’s breathtaking about stormy skies. Photographer Dustin Farrell explores them, with a special emphasis on lightning, in his short film, “Transient 2″. 

As seen in high-speed video, lightning strikes begin with tree-like leaders that split and spread, searching out the path of least resistance. Once that line from cloud to ground is discovered, electrons flow along a plasma channel that arcs from sky to earth. The estimated temperatures in the core of this plasma reach 50,000 Kelvin, far hotter than the Sun’s surface. It’s this heating that generates the blue-white glow of a lightning bolt. The heating also expands the air nearby explosively, producing the shock wave we hear as a crash of thunder. (Images and video credit: D. Farrell et al.; via Colossal)

New from Tornado Titans!

@brettwrightphoto captured this cosmic looking supercell yesterday south of Andrews, TX. What would you do if this was coming at you? #txwx #UFO #weather #rain #rainyweather #storms #cloud #cloudporn #clouds #nature_lover #nature #nature_photo #nature_seeker #natgeoadventure #natgeoyourshot #natgeotravelpic #landscapes #landscapelover #epicsky #sky #skyporn #supercell #thunderstorm #storm #stormchasing #instaclouds #tv_clouds #ig_stormclouds #extremeweather https://instagr.am/p/CPnxoyzrnHJ/

A rendering (Motion Edit) of a thunderstorm, based on a single photograph of a cumulonimbus cloud lit by a lighting, captured by night from an airliner at 40,000ft (12,000m), visualize a towering cumulus convection emerging from an altocumulus cloud cover.

An altocumulus cloud cover from below.

A near-infrared view of the giant planet Uranus with rings and some of its moons, obtained on November 19, 2002, with the ISAAC multi-mode instrument on the 8.2-m VLT ANTU telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile). The moons are identified; the unidentified, round object to the left is a background star. The image scale in indicated by the bar.

Credit: ESO

URANUS IN AQUARIUS

we are golden stars above silver seas

we hear echoes from another galaxy

(artist of top & bottom painting: tincanforest)