APOD 4.3

A Dust Devil of Mars
2012 April 13

Dust Devils, a metological phenomena that we never see in Florida, occurs regularly on Mars! The HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught this dust devil; it has a diameter of 30 meters and the plume towers 800 meters into the martian atmosphere. This is caused by the sun's warming of Mars' surface, causing winds that pick up dust particles and cause a tornado-like effect. As hot low-pressure air is picked up it circulates and then cools as the air moves upward; the wind speed is usually around 110 km or 68 mph. The dust it displaces leaves tracks in the surface of Mars. The picture taken was of the Amazonis Planitia reigon of Mars, named for the "Land of the Amazons.






Additionally, time on Mars is easily divided into days based on its rotation rate and years based on its orbit.  Sols, or Martian solar days, are only 37 minutes and 22 seconds longer than Earth days. I guess that means there is a unique martian solar year!

APOD 3.6

2012 February 22  
A Sailing Stone in Death Valley 

Death Valley is a desert valley located in California and oddly enough has a very low fatality rate. After doing some research, I found Yellowstone National Park has had 14 more fatalities than Death Valley. In fact, its name stems from the lack of vegetation and life that the oppressive heat causes.


The dried lake-bed known as Racetrack Playa is a completely flat salt flat that features a few large stones (featured above). The "sail stones" are not easily movable by normal, human means; however, Earth uses its natural forces to scoot these 300 kilogram rocks along. Through a combination of wind and a slippery surface, caused by recent rainfall, can shift these rocks on a scale that no human eye can discern. Much like man celestial objects in our nighttime sky, these rocks need additional, non-human equipment to track their motion.

APOD 3.3

The Helix Nebula from the VISTA Telescope
2012 January 31

My main reason for selecting this article was to better remember the Helix Nebula in Aquarius' miscellaneous section in COTW quizzes; details about the nebula will prevent me from forgetting to write it in. Details like the Helix Nebula's being the closest planetary nebula to Earth or that it actually looks like a helix (who would have guessed)! The nebula was created when the original star ,that produced the nebula, exhausted its nuclear fuel and expelled its gases to create a planetary nebula. The Helix Nebula is destined to be a White Dwarf Star one day, but for today we know the nebula as the Eye of God that resides in space. The name was popularized on the Internet when a May 2003 APOD took of picture of the nebula that ended up looking like a giant eye. Even though NASA never referred to it as the Eye of God, many websites titled the image on their respective sites as the Eye of God. On May. 4th, 2008 another "eye" was discovered, Kohoutek 4-55 planetary nebula, located in the constellation Cygnus. The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile took the above image and the following image is the Kohoutek "eye" photograph.

APOD 3.2

Days in the Sun
2012 January 21

The above image was taken over a six month period at University of Hertfordshire's Bayfordbury Observatory; the camera that captured the movement of the sun was composed of a tin can, photographic paper, and a tiny pinhole. What I found most remarkable was the amount of information that could be deduced from the image. From June to December, as the sun traveled across the sky it would get lower in the sky (thereby drawing lines further down the photographic paper) and trace its summer, winter, and fall routes. Also the brightness of each individual line or "day" tells us the everyday weather, a bright line would indicate a clear, sunny day where as a obscured or dim line would mean the day was cloudy. The most remarkable aspect of this article is that the cameras for solargraphy and the development of the images can all be done cheaply at home!

APOD 1.7

MAGIC Star Trails
2011 October 14
On the Canary island of La Palma there are a pair of MAGIC telescopes that capture air showers of high-energy particles that results from high energy gamma radiation/photons impacting the atmosphere! Of course these telescopes are not truely "magic", they are really quite scientific.These Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescopes were the collaborative effort of about 150 researchers from Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Finland, Bulgaria, Armenia and the United States. Today only MAGIC-I is the only one that is operational, but it stands as the largest gamma ray telescope we have! Most gamma ray detectors require the use of a ballon or satelite to get above the Earth's gamma-ray-absorbing-atmosphere; however, the MAGIC telescope uses this problem to its advantage, by making the atmosphere part of the detector! The radiation shower is picked up by the satelite by means of using Cerenkov light reflected from its mirror, detected in the focal plane by one or many photomultipliers, and then converted from optical signal into an electronic signal to record the gamma-ray event.