Taking a cue from the music industry and those incessant Now That’s What I Call Music! albums, NASA has released its own “best-of” compilation of the most compelling imagery its satellites collected this past year. A mixture of true color, computer models, visualizations, and time-lapses from the ISS, the video gives us yet another stunning view of our little blue planet. Read more…

By using Photoshop on photos taken by NASA at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, London-based illustrator Chris Keegan is able to create beautiful images of people and creatures out of deep space nebulae.

The process begins a lot like those summer days as a kid lying in the grass and picking shapes out of the clouds — just replace clouds with celestial imagery. Once Keegan has picked out a shape, he takes the image into Photoshop and strengthens that shape until it will be recognizable to everyone. Read more…

We’ve seen photography of the Moon, and photography taken on the Moon; people have even left photography gear up there. But this is the first we’ve heard of a photo from Earth, not only making it to the Moon, but staying there.

Fortunately, it was left there on purpose (Can you imagine? “Uhhh … John … we need to turn around, I forgot something…”), and the story behind the picture goes something like this. Read more…

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is a bit of a space celebrity. Some of his hobbies include tweeting back and forth with William Shatner, posting recordings from space on SoundCloud, and even beaming down the occasional video of himself playing the guitar.

But the best of his messages from space (at least in our humble opinion) have got to be the photos of Earth he tweets daily from the ISS. Read more…

Many of the photos we get back from space come either via powerful telescopes in orbit or talented astronauts in the ISS. Another way to explore the cosmos in pictures, however, is to mount a high-powered telescope to a sub-orbital rocket, and fire away. During the trip, the telescope is allotted about 10 minutes to get the photos it’s looking for. And lest you think 10 minutes isn’t enough, a couple of weeks ago NASA used this exact method to capture the clearest ever images of the Sun’s corona. Read more…

In a couple of short days, Don Pettit intends to do something that has never been done before: photograph the transit of Venus from space. The transit of Venus, a phenomenon where Venus appears as a small black dot crossing the plane of the sun, is a rare event that happens in pairs 8 years apart. The first of the current pair happen in 2004, and after June 5th we won’t be seeing Venus cross the sun again until the year 2117.

Pettit — who is preparing to shoot the event with his trusty Nikon D2Xs rig complete with 1200mm lens and white light solar filter — is a well-known astronaut/photographer and one whose work we’ve featured many times before on PetaPixel. So given the uniqueness of his upcoming photo op and the expertise of the photographer in question, we’re very interested in seeing the results. Be sure to check out the video for more info.

(via MSNBC)

It looks like not even space photography has managed to escape the pixel war, but in the case of the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Elektro-L weather satellite, we’re not complaining. The video you see above is a time lapse put together from 6 days worth of 121-megapixel images taken every 30 minutes by the satellite. The images themselves are not composites of several either, they are just incredibly detailed photos of the entire planet taken from some 22 thousand miles away.

They’re so detailed, in fact, that the resolution comes out to about 1 kilometer per pixel — or in laymen’s terms: this ain’t no camera phone. To add a little bit of color to the proceedings the images are also taken in 4 rather than just 3 wavelengths, yielding that orange color which is actually infrared imaging of vegetation. You can click here to see some higher resolution photos from the Elektro-L, or here if you want to see some photos of the satellite itself.

(via Planet Earth via Engadget)

There’s been a lot of nostalgia over the space program lately; as NASA is relegated to memories and museums, the general public is rediscovering why space once had us at such rapt attention. And the most recent relic to surface from the space program is a collection of never-before-seen photos from NASA’s project Gemini. Read more…