Aurora

Auroras, sometimes called the northern and southern (polar) lights or aurorae (singular: aurora), are natural light displays in the sky, usually observed at night, particularly in the polar regions. They typically occur in the ionosphere. They are also referred to as polar auroras.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Timelapse.ogv

In northern latitudes, the effect is known as the aurora borealis, named after the Roman goddess of dawn,Aurora, and the Greek name for north wind, Boreas, by Pierre Gassendi in 1621.^[1] The aurora borealis is also called the northern polar lights, as it is only visible in the sky from the Northern Hemisphere, with the chance of visibility increasing with proximity to the North Magnetic Pole. (Earth's is currently in the arctic islands of northern Canada.) Auroras seen near the magnetic pole may be high overhead, but from further away, they illuminate the northern horizon as a greenish glow or sometimes a faint red, as if the sun were rising from an unusual direction. The aurora borealis most often occurs near the equinoxes. The northern lights have had a number of names throughout history. The Cree people call this phenomenon the "Dance of the Spirits." In the middle ages the auroras have been called a sign from God (see Wilfried Schröder, Das Phänomen des Polarlichts, Darmstadt 1984).

http://images.astronet.ru/pubd/2007/10/09/0001223776/aurora_kuenzli_big.jpg

Its southern counterpart, the aurora australis or the southern polar lights, has similar properties, but is only visible from high southern latitudes in Antarctica, South America, or Australasia. Australis is the Latinword for "of the South."

Blue Moon

A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a "blue moon." Different definitions place the "extra" moon at different times

The name has nothing to do with its color (although a moon can sometimes appear bluish from the smoke of a forest fire or the ash of a volcano). The old expression, "once in a blue moon," has more to do with something that is rare, special, uncommon, even absurd--but not impossible.

The New Year of 2010 was a blue moon… some pictures

The most popular current definition of a blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month. A full moon occurred on December 2 and tonight's will be the second, a phenomenon that occurs every 2.5 years (the next will be in August, 2012). But the New Year's Eve blue moon is more exceptional. The next won't occur until 2028. There's no way of knowing where I'll be then, but it is reassuring that, just like clockwork, the blue moon will be there.

There's another way of counting blue moons that dates back to medieval times. Since 1819, the Maine Farmers Almanac has listed the dates for blue moons based on a seasonal counting system:  in a season which has four full moons instead of the usual three, the third full moon is the special one, the "blue moon." By that method, tonight's full moon is the first of the winter season but doesn't actually qualify as "blue." The twice-in-a-month definition of blue moon is a more modern interpretation that is credited to a 1946 article in Sky & Telescope Magazine (some say the writer just made a mistake, but I'm sticking with his version).

The 'blue moon' expression itself dates back to old England. A 1528 work by William Barlow, the Bishop of Chichester, the Treatyse of the Buryall of the Masse, included a reference to a blue moon:

"Yf they saye the mone is belewe, We must beleve that it is true."

   I believe in blue moons. But not that the moon is made of green cheese.

PICTURES: "Night Shining" Clouds Getting Brighter

 

Shimmering noctilucent, or "night shining,"clouds (seen above in Finland in an undated photograph) have long graced high-latitude sunsets around the globe.

Scientists suspect that the increase in night-shining clouds may be due to climate change: Even as surface temperatures rise, the upper atmosphere is getting colder due to the buildup of carbon dioxide, creating perfect conditions for cloud formation, experts say.

Too thin and wispy to be seen during the day, night-shining clouds appear after sunset (above, the clouds brighten a Swedishsummer night in an undated photograph). Night-shining clouds are high enough in the atmosphere that the sun still hits them, even though it's dark on the ground.
"These clouds exist literally on the edge of space," AIM's Russell said, adding that the clouds form only in a very narrow band a little more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

 

Once seen mostly in the Arctic, night-shining clouds are now appearing more frequently at lower latitudes, including the above clouds photographed in Hungary on June 15, 2007.
The wispy clouds form in cold, dry conditions: Temperatures high in the atmosphere are well below -200 degrees Fahrenheit (-129 degrees Celsius), and the air is a million times drier than the Sahara, AIM's Russell said.

Since 2007, scientists using the AIM satellite have been documenting night-shining clouds as seen from space, such as the above clouds (seen in white and blue) over the Arctic regions of Europe and North America on June 11, 2007--four days before the previous photograph was taken.
Based on five polar seasons of data, the satellite has revealed that the clouds' seasonal appearances turn on and off as abruptly as a "geophysical light bulb," according to the AIM Web site.

High-altitude night-shining clouds (such as those seen above in an astronaut's photo) are similar in structure to lower-level clouds--a fact that is "startling," said AIM deputy principal investigator Scott Bailey, of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. That's because the two types of clouds form under such radically different conditions, Bailey said.
AIM's data on night-shining clouds have told scientists a lot about the upper atmosphere, he added: "The processes that control these clouds are very likely similar to the ones that control clouds down near the surface of Earth."

Other phenomena, such as rocket launches, can set the stage for night-shining clouds. Above, the space shuttle Endeavour's exhaust interacts with the cold atmosphere aboveFlorida's Kennedy Space Center to form the unusual clouds in an undated photograph.

Volcanoes also inject water vapor into the upper atmosphere, which can lead to night-shining clouds.
In 1883, the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Krakatau (Krakatoa) caused widespread reverberations in climate, including night-shining clouds like those seen from the United Kingdom in this 1885 sketch by William Ascroft, an artist who recorded phenomena thought to have been linked to the eruption.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/photogalleries/night-shining-clouds-noctilucent-pictures/index.html

Top Ten Space Pictures: Best of 2009

Space Shuttle Spied En Route to Hubble

Using a telescope with a special solar filter, photographer Thierry Legault captured the tiny silhouette of the space shuttle Atlantis crossing in front of the sun in May

Shock Wave Spits Out High-Speed Particles

In June scientists with the Chandra X-ray Observatory released this picture of a shock wave plowing through the supernova remnant RCW 86, seen above in both x-ray and visible light. Although the shock wave is moving rapidly, its energy is not heating the surrounding gas as much as it should, scientists say. The new image shows that the extra energy is instead powering up particles and firing them out into space at nearly the speed of light. Meet the Large Hadron Collider's role model: A shock wave that acts as a superefficient particle accelerator.

Saharan "Land of Terror" Revealed

White salt flats seem to melt over dark sandstone hills in the Tanezrouft Basin, as seen in a picture released in October by the European Space Agency. In partnership with the ESA, Japan's Advanced Land Observing Satellite captured this image in June with an instrument that charts land cover and vegetation in visible and near-infrared light.
The Tanezrouft Basin, in south-central Algeria, is one of the most desolate parts of the Sahara, and is sometimes called the land of terror. The bouquet of yellow seen in the upper right is Erg Mehedjibat, a small cluster of star-shaped sand dunes that grow upward rather than side to side.

Geminid Meteor Pierces the Night

Like a silver spear cast from the heavens, the bright streak of a Geminid meteor pierces the night sky over California's Mojave Desert during the annual meteor shower's December 2009 peak.
Geminids are slower than other shooting stars and are known to make beautiful long arcs across the sky. This could be because they're born of debris from a dormant comet and so are made mostly of hard, sun-baked rock that takes longer to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, experts suggest.

Hubble Catches Space "Butterfly"

A dying star on the verge of exploding creates a cosmic "butterfly" in a picture from the Wide Field Camera 3--a new camera installed in May during the Hubble Space Telescope's final servicing mission. The Hubble team released some of the first pictures taken by the upgraded telescope in September.
Known as a planetary nebula, this structure lies roughly 3,800 light-years away. Optical filters in the space telescope allowed astronomers to precisely determine the nebula's chemical makeup, temperature, and density, and to trace the stages of the star's demise.
The central star, now obscured by a dense band of dust, was once five times the mass of the sun. Over the past two thousand years the star has expelled most of its outer gas envelope to create the ghostly "wings," which together span about two light-years.

Saturn Moon Seen in the Raw

The tiny moon Rhea hangs like a pearl in front of Saturn's rings, as seen in a "raw" picture from the orbiting Cassini spacecraft. The image has been rotated, but otherwise the scene appears just as the orbiter saw things in early November.
The spacecraft's namesake, Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, discovered Rhea in 1672. In 2008 astronomers had announced that Rhea may be the first known moon with its own system of faint rings.

Hubble Makes a Holiday "Wreath"

Just in time for the December holidays, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope released their version of a colorful wreath: a new picture of the young stellar cluster R136. The festive grouping sits in a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy.
In the image, gassy garlands of red (hydrogen) and green (oxygen) surround icy blue "diamonds," which are actually some of the most massive stars known--several are more than a hundred times the mass of our sun.

Mars's "Labyrinth of the Night" Illuminated

Dunes ripple across Mars's Noctis Labyrinthus--a sprawling region of flatlands cut by canyons, troughs, and pits--in an August picture taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and released in October.
The snapshot, taken by the orbiter's HiRISE camera, shows light-colored layers of iron-bearing sulfates and clay minerals exposed near the dune field, which is close to the Martian equator.

Green Comet Makes Its Debut

Comet Lulin is framed by red-lit trees in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park in a picture taken February 23. The green, "two tailed" comet made its closest approach to Earth in February, swinging past at about 38 million miles (61 million kilometers). And considering the comet's nearly parabolic orbit, experts said, that first visit may have been its last.
Because of its angle of approach, Lulin appeared to have a second anti-tail pointing toward the sun as it neared Earth. Vaporizing ices from the comet included cyanogen and diatomic carbon, both gases that glow green in sunlight out in the vacuum of space.

NASA Rocket Gets Cloud Cover

A cone of moisture surrounds part of NASA's Ares I-X rocket during its suborbital test flightover Florida's Kennedy Space Center in October.
Such "sonic boom clouds" can occur when aircraft fly fast enough to cool the air around them, causing moisture in the air to condense. Shortly after launch, the Ares I-X rocket was traveling at more than four times the speed of sound.
The rocket's six-minute, U.S. $450-million flight was designed to help NASA refine its plans for Ares I, the next-generation craft that--combined with the Orion crew capsule--is slated to replace the aging space shuttle as the U.S.'s primary means of ferrying humans and cargo into space.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/photogalleries/best-space-news-pictures-2009/index.html

Southwest effect

Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines was originally incorporated to serve three cities in Texas as Air Southwest on March 15, 1967, by Rollin King and Herb Kelleher. According to frequently-cited story, King described the concept to Kelleher over dinner by drawing on a paper napkin a triangle symbolizing the routes (Dallas, Houston, San Antonio).

The key concept to the Southwest Effect is that when a low-fare carrier (or any aggressive and innovative company) enters a market, the market itself changes, and usually grows dramatically. For example, when fares drop by 50% from their historical averages, the number of new customers in that market may not just double, but actually quadruple, or more.

Atomium

Automium is one of the world’s most astonishing buildings.  It was  is a monument built for Expo '58, the 1958 Brussels World's Fair

Designed byAndré Waterkeyn, it is 102-metres (335 ft) tall, with nine steel spheres connected so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times

Tubes which connect the spheres along the 12 edges of the cube and all eight vertices to the centre enclose escalators connecting the spheres which contain exhibit halls and other public spaces. The top sphere provides a panoramic view of Brussels. Each sphere is 18 metres in diameter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomium

Few Images of this wonderful building…. enjoy

Inside Atomium

The Belgian collecting society, SABAM, via the United States Artists Rights Society (ARS), has claimed worldwide intellectual property rights on all reproductions of the Atomium image