Picture of the day

[aspundir]

WHAT LURKS BENEATH

In this amazing over/under photograph we see a southern right whale underneath the boat of whale watchers off the coast of Argentina in the Peninsula Valdez. The whales come to these waters to birth their calves and mate.

[aspundir]

AURORA BOREALIS

Seen here is a rare red aurora beautifully complementing the green band of colour below. The image was taken at Hakoya island, just outside of Tromsoe, Norway on October 25th, 2011

[aspundir]

The World's Tallest Mountain

Fourteen mountain peaks on Earth stand taller than 8,000 meters (26,247 feet). The tallest of these “eight-thousanders” is Mount Everest, the standard to which all other mountains are compared. The Nepalese name for the mountain is Sagarmatha: “mother of the universe.” Everest’s geological story began 40 million years ago when the Indian subcontinent began a slow-motion collision with Asia. The edges of two continents jammed together and pushed up the massive ridges that make up the Himalayas today. Pulitzer-winning journalist John McPhee summed up the wonder of the mountain’s history when he wrote Annals of the Former World: “The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the Earth. If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose.” In other words, when climbers reach the top of Mount Everest, they are not standing on hard igneous rock produced by volcanoes. Rather, they are perched on softer sedimentary rock formed by the skeletons of creatures that lived in a warm ocean off the northern coast of India tens of millions of years ago. Meanwhile, glaciers have chiseled Mount Everest’s summit into a huge, triangular pyramid, defined by three faces and three ridges that extend to the northeast, southeast, and northwest. The southeastern ridge is the most widely used climbing route. It is the one that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay followed in May 1953 when they became the first climbers to reach the summit and return safely. Climbers who follow this route begin by trekking past Khumbu glacier and through the Khumbu ice fall, an extremely dangerous area where ice tumbles off the mountain into a chaotic waterfall of ice towers and crevasses. Next, climbers reach a bowl-shaped valley—a cirque—called the Western Cwm (pronounced coom) and then the foot of the Lhotse Face, a 1,125-meter (3,691-foot) wall of ice. Climbing up the Lhotse face leads to the South Col, the low point in the ridge that connects Everest to Lhotse. It is from the South Col that most expeditions launch their final assault on the summit, following a route up the southeastern ridge. Some climbers opt for the northern ridge, which is known for having harsher winds and colder temperatures. That is the path that British climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine used in 1924 during what may, in fact, have been the first ascent. Whether the pair made it to the summit remains a topic of controversy, but what is known for certain is that the men were spotted pushing toward the peak just before the arrival of a storm. Mallory’s corpse was discovered near the northeast ridge at 8,160 meters (26,772 feet) by an American climber in 1999, but it still isn’t clear whether he reached the summit. Despite its reputation as an extremely dangerous mountain, commercial guiding has done much to tame Everest in the last few decades. As of March 2012, there had been 5,656 successful ascents of Everest, while 223 people had died—a fatality rate of 4 percent

[Dr.Shree Vijay]

Beautiful.........

[aspundir]

THE GARGOYLES OF PAISLEY ABBEY

The 850-year-old Paisley Abbey is a former Cluniac monastery, and current Church of Scotland parish kirk, located on the east bank of the White Cart Water in the centre of the town of Paisley, Renfrewshire, in west central Scotland.

In 1991, 12 of the 13 medieval gargoyles (which had been on the abbey for hundreds of years) had to be taken down because they had crumbled and were in a state of disrepair. Now just one of the originals remains (not pictured above) and the other 12 were replaced by a stonemason from a firm in Edinburgh.

[aspundir]

NASA Center Renamed in Honor of Neil A. Armstrong



President Barack Obama has signed HR 667, the congressional resolution that redesignates NASA's Hugh L. Dryden Flight Research Center as the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center, into law. The resolution also names Dryden's Western Aeronautical Test Range as the Hugh L. Dryden Aeronautical Test Range. Both Hugh Dryden and Neil Armstrong are aerospace pioneers whose contributions are historic to NASA and the nation as a whole. NASA is developing a timeline to implement the name change. Neil A. Armstrong was born Aug. 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Purdue University and a master's in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California. He was a naval aviator from 1949 to 1952. During the Korean War he flew 78 combat missions. In 1955 he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA's predecessor, as a research pilot at Lewis Laboratory in Cleveland. Armstrong later transferred to NACA's High Speed Flight Research Station at Edwards AFB, Calif., later named NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. As a research project test pilot over the course of seven years at the center from 1955 through 1962, he was in the forefront of the development of many high-speed aircraft. This photograph shows Neil Armstrong next to the X-15 rocket-powered aircraft after a research flight. He was one of only 12 pilots to fly the hypersonic X-15 as well as the first of 12 men to later walk on the moon. In all, he flew more than 200 different types of aircraft.

[aspundir]

SPLIT APPLE ROCK
Split Apple Rock is a geological rock formation in The Tasman Bay off the northern coast of the South Island of New Zealand. The rock, made of granite, looks like an apple split in half. The popular tourist attraction is located in the Tasman Sea approximately 50 metres off the coast between Kaiteriteri and Marahau.

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Tracking and Data Relay Satellite Ready For Launch From Cape Canaveral


A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-L) spacecraft on board arrives at the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 41. Liftoff is scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 23 at 9:05 p.m. EST, the opening of a 40-minute launch window. Live coverage on NASA TV begins at 6:30 p.m. The TDRS-L spacecraft is the second of three new satellites designed to ensure vital operational continuity for NASA by expanding the lifespan of the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) fleet, which consists of eight satellites in geosynchronous orbit. The spacecraft provide tracking, telemetry, command and high bandwidth data return services for numerous science and human exploration missions orbiting Earth. These include NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. TDRS-L has a high-performance solar panel designed for more spacecraft power to meet the growing S-band communications requirements. TDRSS is one of NASA's three Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) networks providing space communications to NASA missions.

[aspundir]

THIS LAKE IS PURE LAVA




In this amazing photo we see the lava lake at Mount Nyiragongo, an active stratovolcano inside Virunga National Park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The volcano has erupted at least 34 times since 1882, creating various-sized lava lakes that have formed, cratered, drained and reformed. The image above (taken in 2011) shows the most recent iteration of the mountain’s lava lake. It was formed from a 2002 eruption.

[aspundir]

LOOKING UP TO GIANT SEQUOIAS


The photograph was taken at Sequoia National Park which is located in the United States in the southern Sierra Nevada east of Visalia, California. Established on September 25, 1890, the park spans 404,063 acres and is famous for its giant sequoia trees, including General Sherman, one of the largest trees on Earth.

Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are one of three species of coniferous trees known as redwoods. They are the world’s largest single trees by volume, growing to an average height of 50–85 m (160–279 ft) and 6–8 m (20–26 ft) in diameter. Record trees have been measured to be 94.8 m (311 ft) in height and over 17 m (56 ft) in diameter. The oldest known giant sequoia based on ring count is 3,500 years old.