Nebula Images: Http://nebulaimages.com/

This gigantic lens, built for NASA to record space launches, is up for sale:  http://bokeh.digitalrev.com/article/gigantic-1000mm-nasa-lens-up-for-sale

This is the fourth week of Red, White and Blue Stars Month!

This week’s entry: Types of Stars

http://typeslist.com/different-types-of-stars/

Original Photo by jrhfoto : [OC] Stars over the Blue Ridge Parkway [1333 × 2000] Photo from /r/SkyPorn: http://ift.tt/1ZJv7wW Courtesy of IFTTT.

Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn

js

Smoky-Citrine Quartz crystals with a Framing of Dolomite

Locality:  Dal'negorsk, Primorskiy Kray, Russia.

Vessel in the form of a hare

Neolithic Levant, probably Syria, about 6400–5900 B.C.

(MFA Boston)

Anticrepuscular rays are spectacular optical phenomena that are quite rare and they require the viewer to have his or her back to the sun or sunset point. They are columns of sunlit air streaming through gaps in clouds. Yet while the former seem to converge from the sun, anticrepuscular rays converge toward the antisolar point, the point in the sky directly opposite the sun, creating some stunning effects. (Source) 

Afraid of Global Warming? Well, now there’s Galactic Warming from our dear friends, those super-massive black holes lurking just about everywhere a galaxy has sprouted up.

These wacky systems are so extreme as to completely skip out of many generations of new stars, leaving a severe stellar age gap in these galaxies, given an entirely new class called “red geysers”.

[First two images are gifs from “Space Engine”, the second is a rendering of the red geyser Akira galaxy sapping off of Tetsuo, it’s neighbor ]

Quartz with Hydrocarbon Inclusions

Locality:  Buhirmas, Koraro, Lasbela District, Baluchistan, Pakistan

Cassini: Saturn, June 12th 2016

W00099641.jpg was taken on 2016-06-12 07:28 (UTC) and received on Earth 2016-06-12 14:57 (UTC). The camera was pointing toward SATURN, and the image was taken using the CL1 and IR1 filters. This image has not been validated or calibrated. A validated/calibrated image will be archived with the NASA Planetary Data System.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute