by matt_elk
It’s been a while since I posted anything, and it’s early in the morning, so something nice and easy for everyone.
Moonset from the ISS.
“On January 9, 2012, astronauts on the International Space Station took this amazing footage of the moon setting behind the Earth’s limb. Air near the horizon is thicker, and acts like a lens. That bends the light from the bottom of the Moon up, squashing the Moon’s shape as you watch! “
source: Bad Astronomy
by matt_elk
Here’s another amazing picture from the Cassini probe.
A quintet of Saturn's moons come together in Cassini's field of view for this portrait - Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
From left to right; Janus (179 km diameter), Pandora (81 kilometres diameter), Enceladus (504 kilometres diameter), Mimas (396 kilometres diameter) and finally Rhea (1528 kilometres diameter).
This picture was taken by Cassini’s narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011 at an approximate distance of 1.1 million kilometers from Rhea and 1.8 million kilometres from Enceladus.
And people say that NASA is a waste of money. Pah.
by matt_elk
The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research has started a new project, theSkyNet. It is a distributed/cloud computing project taking data from radio telescopes and using the spare processing power of your PC to help process the data from the scopes.
If you want to help out, first of all you need to register an account, once you’ve done this, you have two choices of how you contribute your spare CPU cycles. Either you can manually start it by going to your account dashboard and click “Start”, or you can download the automatic client which will run automatically at start-up.
They currently have clients for Windows (32 & 64bit) and Macintosh (10.4 and up), and have a Linux one in the pipeline.
You can also band together in alliances to pool your computational resource. We have our own alliance at sky-watching.co.uk, it’s called “Sky-Watching“, it’s publicly join-able, so if you fancy giving some CPU resource from your computer to help map the universe, sign up and join our alliance.
by mattelk
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
This amazing picture was taken by the Cassini spacecraft while it drifted in the shadow of the planet, looking towards the eclipsed sun. The night side of the planet is illuminated by sunlight reflected from its own ring system, and the rings themselves are lit by sunlight scattering off of the particles in the ring system.
If you look closely on the left hand side just above the main bright rings, that tiny dot, that’s us. Well, the earth that is, not just this blog 
The outer visible ring is actually Saturn’s E ring. this is the ring that is formed from the ejections from the recently discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus.
Source: NASA
by matt_elk
Did you spot any Perseids? Well Ron Garan did. Ron Garan is an astronaut currently on the ISS, and he took this cool pic of a Perseid from the window of the ISS and posted it to Twitter.
@Astro_Ron Ron Garan August 14, 2011 What a "Shooting Star" looks like #FromSpace
Check out his Twitter account, @Astro_Ron, for more amazing pics from the window of the ISS.
Credit: NASA/Ron Garan
