Space Pictures This Week: Supermoon, Solar Flare, More

Supermoon Over New York

Photograph by Gale VerHague, My Shot

A "supermoon" glows over Arkwright, New York, on May 5.

Due to the moon's egg-shaped orbit, there are times when the moon is at perigee—its closest approach to Earth—and at apogee, its farthest. The term "supermoon" was coined in 1979 to describe a full moon that coincides with perigee, a confluence that occurs about once a year, on average.

(See "Supermoon Pictures: Best Shots of Year's Biggest Full Moon.")

Published May 11, 2012

Eruption From Above

Image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS/NASA

A plume arises from a volcano on Zavodoski—one of the U.K.'s South Sandwich Islands (map), located off Argentina—in a false-color satellite image taken on April 27.

A false-color image is a combination of non-visible (such as infrared) light and visible light. Here the technique is used to distinguish clouds from snow and ice, according to NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) website.

In the above picture, ice-covered islands appear bright turquoise, clouds appear light turquoise, and the ocean appears black.

(See "Volcanoes Erupt Side by Side in New Satellite Picture.")

Published May 11, 2012

Night-Shining Clouds

Photograph by Chris Martin, Your Shot

Noctilucent clouds glow over Alberta, Canada, in a picture submitted May 4 to National Geographic's Your Shot. The so-called night-shining clouds, shimmer even after dark, because they're so high in the atmosphere that sunlight reaches them even after the sun has dipped below the horizon.

The rare clouds are showing up at ever more southerly latitudes, and astronomers aren't sure why, according to NASA. Scientists suspect the increase 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.

(See pictures: "'Night Shining' Clouds Getting Brighter.")

Published May 11, 2012

Solar Hiccup

Image courtesy SDO/NASA

A solar flare explodes on May 9 in an image captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

The phenomenon was short-lived and didn't spark any coronal mass ejections, huge clouds of charged solar particles that erupt from the sun's upper atmosphere.

The flare is shown in the 131 Angstrom wavelength of light—typically colored teal—which gave scientists the most detailed picture of the flare.

(See "New 'Sunquake' Trigger Found: Huge Solar Belches.")

Published May 11, 2012

Coming Home

Photograph courtesy NASA

The Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft departs the International Space Station on April 27.

Four hours later the Russian craft landed outside Arkalyk, Kazakhstan—carrying NASA astronaut Dan Burbank as well as Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, who had spent more than five months on the space station.

(See "Yuri Gagarin: First Human Space Flight in Pictures.")

Published May 11, 2012

Pinball Wizard

Photograph courtesy NASA

NASA astronaut Don Pettit is reflected in a metal sphere on the International Space Station in an image released May 4.

Pettit has taught more than 500,000 Internet users how microgravity works via everyday objects aboard the space station. (To see Pettit's demonstrations, visit Science Off the Sphere.)

Published May 11, 2012

Stars Are Born

Image courtesy ESA/PACS/SPIRE, CEA/CNRS/INSU

The Cygnus-X stellar nursery stars in a "stunning" infrared picture released May 10 by the European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory.

The chaotic jumble of dust and gas is an extremely active region of giant-star birth in the Cygnus constellation, some 4,500 light-years from Earth. (See another infrared picture of the Cygnus constellation.)

Published May 11, 2012

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Image courtesy SSRO/PROMPT/CTIO

Published May 11, 2012