The Planet Saturn, Brought To You By The Hubble Space Telescope.

new photos of jupiter from the juno spacecraft | (good to know that van gogh had a say in how jupiter was designed)

How beautifully our system works

Burst of Celestial Fireworks : Like a July 4 fireworks display a young, glittering collection of stars looks like an aerial burst. (via NASA)

Bright stars of Sagittarius and the center of our Milky Way Galaxy lie just off the wing of a Boeing 747

js

Sunset on Mars taken May 19. 2005 by the NASA Spirit Rover

is there a smell comparable to space ? i assume we dont know because we would die if we tried to smell it but thats so cool

yeah if humans tried to smell space just like that, we’d die, no doubt about it 

but the smell of space lingers on spacewalk suits, and docking hatches when astronauts open them!

apparently, space itself smells like burning hot metal, or a hot barbeque grill with a slight hint of spent gasoline. The moon, apparently, smells like a gun after its been shot!

The coolest thing about it all is that the smell is actually what are left of dying stars- it’s literally the smell of stardust, and the particles smell like that because they’re so rich in hydrocarbons- something so very essential to life, and speculated by a lot of astronomers and astrobiologists and such to be the very thing life on earth started from!

another neat fact is that no two solar systems smell the same- ours smells like that because our solar system in particular is extremely rich in carbon, and other solar systems and places in the universe will have extremely different smells depending on what elements are most abundant in their system! 

on the first day of class my astronomy professor asked us why the night sky was dark. if our universe is infinite, how can there be spaces between the stars? he didn’t answer the question until the last day– because our universe is relatively young, and is still growing. it is finite. not enough stars or galaxies have been formed to fill up the entire night sky.

but what that means to me is that somewhere, in an older universe, the night sky looks like a tapestry of diamonds. somewhere darkness is pale white and glittering. imagine being so surrounded. i haven’t gotten that image out of my head ever since– you could never navigate under such a sky but god it sounds lovely

PLUTO (bottom image: lower right) AND ITS MOON, CHARON (top image, bottom image: upper left)

enhanced color images via NEW HORIZONS

Two galaxies on a cosmic collision course.

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/S.Mineo et al, Optical: NASA/STScI, Infr

lesbians in space