NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

September 3, 2024

Quarter Moon and Sister Stars

Nine days ago, two quite different sky icons were imaged rising together. Specifically, Earth's Moon shared the eastern sky with the sister stars of the Pleiades cluster, as viewed from Alberta, Canada. Astronomical images of the well-known Pleiades often show the star cluster's alluring blue reflection nebulas, but here they are washed-out by the orange moonrise sky. The half-lit Moon, known as a quarter moon, is overexposed, although the outline of the dim lunar night side can be seen by illuminating earthshine, light first reflected from the Earth. The featured image is a composite of eight successive exposures with brightnesses adjusted to match what the human eye would see. The Moon passes nearly or directly in front of the Pleaides once a month.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

James Darren, Veteran of T.J. Hooker and Deep Space Nine, Dead at 88

September 2, 2024 7:14 pm

Actor and singer James Darren, whose long showbiz career included memorable roles on T.J. Hooker and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, has died at the age of 88, our sister site Variety reports.

He passed away on Monday at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, with his son Jim Moret saying of Darren: “He was a good man.

He was very talented. He was forever young.”

Darren first rose to fame as leading man Moondoggie in the 1959 surf movie Gidget and climbed the charts with the 1961 hit “Goodbye Cruel World.”

He later co-starred in movies like The Guns of Navarone and in the short-lived ABC sci-fi series The Time Tunnel.

He was also a regular guest star on shows like The Love Boat and Fantasy Island before joining the cast of the William Shatner cop drama T.J. Hooker in Season 2.

Darren played Officer Jim Corrigan, remaining a series regular until the show ended its run in 1986.

Heather Locklear, who co-starred with Darren on T.J. Hooker, posted a tribute following his death: “One of my favorite people.

We would always laugh so hard together. Rest in peace my dear friend.”

In 1996, Darren debuted as holographic lounge singer Vic Fontaine on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, providing Rat Pack-style entertainment in the holosuites of Quark’s bar.

The character of Vic Fontaine became a fan favorite, with Darren appearing in a total of eight episodes, including the 1999 series finale

https://tvline.com/news/james-darren-dead-star-trek-deep-space-nine-vic-fontaine-tj-hooker-1235325551/

Earth from space: Warped 'double rainbow' glory appears next to rare cloud swirls over Mexican island

September 3, 2024

This 2012 satellite photo shows a unique perspective of a rare, rainbow-like phenomenon, known as a glory, that appeared next to a Mexican island just as the landmass spawned a separate series of equally uncommon cloud vortices.

Glories are multicolor light shows similar to rainbows, with one key difference: While rainbows form via a combination of reflection and refraction when sunlight bounces off falling rain droplets and splits into different wavelengths, glories are created by backward diffraction — when light bounces directly off even smaller water droplets in clouds or mist, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Because of this, glories only appear exactly opposite the sun, known as the anti-solar point.

This glory appeared adjacent to Guadalupe Island in the Pacific Ocean, around 150 miles (240 km) off the western coast of Mexico, and seemed to stretch for more than 300 miles (480 kilometers).

Although there appear to be two distinct glories running parallel to one another, it is a single entity.

In the image, a line of eerily perfect cloud swirls, known as Von Kármán vortices, trail off the island's southernmost point.

These swirling structures are formed when clouds get caught up in an airflow that has been disrupted by a tall landmass, most often above an ocean.

In this case, the disruption is caused by a volcanic mountain ridge in the north of Guadalupe Island, which rises more than 4,200 feet (1,300 meters) above sea level.

While the glory and vortices are both only visible because of the thick stratocumulus clouds covering this part of the Pacific, their appearances are not connected to one another.

Normally, glories appear as concentric multicolor circles when viewed from the ground or in the air because the diffracted light radiates outward as it bounces back toward the observer.

Even from space, the rainbow-like phenomena often look circular, as was the case when NASA's Columbia space shuttle viewed the first glory from orbit in 2003.

However, in this case, the Terra satellite that captured the photo "scans the Earth’s surface in swaths perpendicular to the path followed by the satellite," Earth Observatory representatives wrote.

So in the image, the rainbow streaks are cross-sections of the same circular glory that has been scanned twice by the satellite.

As a result, the rainbow streaks run parallel on either side of the satellite's trajectory above our planet.

The colors in each streak are perfectly inverted compared to the other: From left to right, the rainbow on the left of the image runs from red to blue and the rainbow on the right runs from blue to red.

Until recently, scientists had only ever seen glories on Earth or within the dense clouds of Venus.

However, in April, astronomers detected what they believe to be the first extrasolar glory on the distant "hell planet" WASP-76 b, around 637 light-years from our planet, suggesting they might be more common than we realized.

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/weather/earth-from-space-warped-double-rainbow-glory-appears-next-to-rare-cloud-swirls-over-mexican-island