Posted on 08/11/2011 2:59:08 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Explanation: Recorded last week, this dawn portrait of snowy mountain and starry sky captures a very rare scenario. The view does feature a pristine sky above the 2,600 meter high mountain Cerro Paranal, but clear skies over Paranal are not at all unusual. That's one reason the mountain is home to the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. Considering the number of satellites now in orbit, the near sunrise streak of a satellite glinting at the upper left isn't rare either. And the long, bright trail of a meteor can often be spotted this time of year too. The one at the far right is associated with the annual Perseid meteor shower whose peak is expected tomorrow (Friday, August 12). In fact, the rarest aspect of the picture is just the snow. Cerro Paranal rises above South America's Atacama desert, known as the driest place on planet Earth.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
[Credit: Yuri Beletsky (ESO)]
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Beautiful as always!
So...I get up early for the Perseids... and whaddya know...there’s clouds...clouds! In Austin! Yeah, like we haven’t seen them for months...what are they doing here? Goin somewhere else..yeah.
Sigh.
There’s always tomorrow...
Lovely! Thank You, Civ!
Thanks for posting this.
I’d like to be THERE! Thanks.
All that celestial splendor, and snow in the desert to boot! Probably a very unusual picture because of the snow. Very nice.
And that’s probably the only Perseid meteor I’m likely to see in cloudy old Ohio. Sigh...
Unfortunately, all those clouds are empty.
“Clouds, clouds everywhere, but not a drop to drop”.
Pretty soon now, sooner than we’d like to think, we’ll be enjoying (ahem) a lot more snow than that. If we were all still kids, we’d get some enjoyment out of sliding down hills and whatnot. Hmm, that must be where the idea for that song came from, “four sleds in Oh Hi Oh.”
WOW
Are you saying that the predicted increased solar activity and subsequent bathing of the earth in coronal mass ejections that are aimed straight at the earth even though they have an enormous sphere in which to erupt is a bunch of BS?
Yeah, I agree.
It was my pleasure, and thanks for the kind remarks. Y’know, I haven’t laid out under the stars to watch for streaks in, well, decades probably. Might be a good thing to try tomorrow night.
Uh, wait, what?
:’) The APoD website seems pretty much wall-to-wall wallpaper for our computers, eh?
Agreed
The latest scare mongering from our illustrious government is that the activity of the sun is about to increase to the point that it’s going to interfere with communications and the weather here to the point of catastrophe. There was even a graphic depiction of CMEs headed straight for earth, even though the chances are small that any particular CME would be pointed straight at us.
This was all on http://spaceweather.com/ the other day.
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