Results tagged “space”

The image above is a montage of eighty-six separate thirty-second exposures taken on Woodbine Beach in the early hours of Tuesday morning during the Leonid meteor shower. (Each image was loaded into Photoshop and blended with the images below it to build up the star trails and reveal the meteors.) Over the three-quarters of an hour it took to accumulate the photographs, the camera caught five meteors, enough to show how they radiate out from the constellation Leo—from which the shower gets its name. Away from the pollution of city lights, more meteors would have been visible.

The annual Leonid meteor shower will peak in intensity tonight and tomorrow night. This year's show promises to be an exceptionally spectacular one, by recent standards—but only for those who know how to hide from Toronto's countless jiggawatts of light pollution. Do you know where in the GTA to go in order to ensure that your night of neck-craning is not spent in vain? Torontoist does.

Image of DEXTRE courtesy of NASA.

In 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to visit space in his ship Vostok 1. Flying high above our blue planet, he remarked, "Circling the earth in my orbital spaceship I marvelled at its beauty. People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty, not destroy it!"