alanfriedman:

Nephelococcygia

It’s the long way of describing our love for seeing likenesses in the shapes of clouds. If you are bitten by this bug and find yourself with a solar telescope, watch out. The fantastic plumes of hydrogen plasma we call solar prominences seen at the edge of sun will tempt you to identify them in earthly forms. I once set out to classify a bunch and this was the result. A Yeti, a bonsai, Don Quixote, the angel that fell to earth… there’s even one that looks like me or did, when I wore a goatee. Click on the picture to see the big version from my website. Each image there is a hot link to a little bit of averted imagination. Enjoy!

approachingsignificance:

This is a real image taken by the robotic spacecraft Cassini of Saturn eclipsing the sun (via).

Amazing.  There is a little blue dot on the left side of the image just above the bright main rings.  That is Earth, approximately a billion miles away.

Not psychology related, just an incredible image.  Click for high resolution to see Earth.

jtotheizzoe:

Humans fire laser to sky, sky laughs, responds with lightning

(They were actually firing a kind of “guide star” that is used to target and correct ground-based telescopes when this shot happened. Nature is still not impressed)

(via Short Sharp Science)

(via jtotheizzoe)

14-billion-years-later:

A newly discovered alien planet that formed from a dead star is a real diamond in the rough.

The super-high pressure of the planet, which orbits a rapidly pulsing neutron star, has likely caused the carbon within it to crystallize into an actual diamond, a new study suggests.

The composition of the planet, which is about five times the size of Earth, is not its only outstanding feature.

Read more.