Planck was formerly called COBRAS/SAMBA. After the mission was selected and approved (in late 1996), it was renamed in honor of the German scientist Max Planck (1858-1947), Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918.

The Mission
Planck was launched on 14 May 2009 together with the Herschel satellite. After 50 days, as foreseen, Planck entered its final orbit around the Second Lagrangian point of the Sun–Earth system (L2), at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Since the end of the commissioning and performance verification phases in mid-August 2009, Planck has been performing its planned mission. On 15th January 2010, ESA’s advisory bodies approved an extension of Planck operations by 12 months. Planck is now scheduled to continuously acquire high-quality science data until the end of 2011.

The first one is a time lapse video of the sky over the 2009 Nova Sedis Fall Star Party at Chiefland Astronomy Village in Florida. The time lapse was recorded from the evening of November 13 to the morning of November 14. The video shows the Summer Milky Way and Jupiter setting in the West and the Pleides and Orion with the Winter Milky Way rising in the East followed by Mars, Leo and Saturn.

from William Castleman.

The second time lapse video of night sky as it passes over the 2009 Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, Texas. The galactic core of Milky Way is brightly displayed. Images taken with 15mm fisheye lens.

from William Castleman.

In the following satellite images you can see how the oil slick has evolved since April 21.

Daniel’s astro-timelapse Viaje alucinante (“Amazing trip”) is already a classic.

And his work has been shown several times at NASA APOD and National Geographic (Nov 2008).

The following photos of Daniel, who has kindly granted TBF the use of his images, are part of his career in several institutions like the IAC, SHELIOS, tierrayestrellas.com or cielosdelteide.com.

In this set you can see the evolution of the International Space Station through some of the best shuttle mission imagery that point out significant changes in the configuration of the station.

You can enjoy it with some music from Project Divinity. Play > Ethereal Awakening

Note. Credits in this post link to orginal posts of this blog. Photo credits are placed on the landing pages.

More about  mars

The light show comes to us courtesy of our Sun.  Electrically charged particles produced on the Sun are ejected in all directions and a great amount of them head toward Earth.  As these particles (called solar wind) encounter the Earth’s outer regions, the magnetic field of the Earth begins to interact with the particles.

What results is a change in energy and direction of the particles: they head along magnetic field lines toward the poles of Earth.  Just like a bar magnet has its field lines returning at the opposite ends so the Earth’s magnetic lines come together around the poles.  This is why the aurora borealis is brightest and most easily seen in the northern regions of our planet.

Most auroras are green and red emissions from atomic oxygen. Molecular nitrogen and nitrogen ions produce some low level red (pink) and very high blue/violet auroras. The light blue and green colors are produced by ionic nitrogen and the neutral helium gives off the purple colour whereas neon is responsible for the rare orange flares with the rippled edges. Different gasses interacting with the upper atmosphere will produce different colors, caused by the different compounds of oxygen and nitrogen. The level of solar wind activity from the Sun can also influence the color and intensity of the auroras.

These are some results of its work.

The total eclipse
The solar eclipse that will take place on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 will be a total eclipse of the Sun with a magnitude of 1.080 that will be visible from a narrow corridor through northern India, eastern Nepal, northern Bangladesh, Bhutan, the northern tip of Myanmar, central China and the Pacific Ocean, including the Ryukyu Islands, Marshall Islands and Kiribati. The longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century has sparked tourist fever in eastern China, which according to experts is the best place to view the event.

Gravity and the Earth’s Shape
Gravity is the force that is responsible for the weight of an object and is determined by how the material that makes up the Earth is distributed throughout the Earth. Because gravity changes over the surface of the Earth, the weight of an object changes along with it.

The colors in these images represent the gravity anomalies measured by Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). One can define standard gravity as the value of gravity for a perfectly smooth ‘idealized’ Earth, and the gravity ‘anomaly’ is a measure of how actual gravity deviates from this standard. Red shows the areas where gravity is stronger than the smooth, standard value and blue reveals areas where gravity is weaker.

GRACE is a collaborative endeavor involving the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas, Austin; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; the German Space Agency and the German Research Center for Geosciences, Potsdam. GRACE, twin satellites were launched in March 2002 and they are making detailed measurements of Earth’s gravity field which will lead to discoveries about gravity and Earth’s natural systems.