Solis Lacus: The Eye of Mars

As telescopes around planet Earth watch, Mars is growing brighter in night skies, approaching its 2020 opposition on October 13. Mars looks like its watching too in this view of the Red Planet from September 22. Mars’ disk is already near its maximum apparent size for earthbound telescopes, less than 1/80th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon. The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom and hazy northern clouds are at the top. A circular, dark albedo feature, Solis Lacus (Lake of the Sun), is just below and left of disk center. Surrounded by a light area south of Valles Marineris, Solis Lacus looks like a planet-sized pupil, famously known as The Eye of Mars . Near the turn of the 20th century, astronomer and avid Mars watcher Percival Lowell associated the Eye of Mars with a conjunction of canals he charted in his drawings of the Red Planet. Broad, visible changes in the size and shape of the Eye of Mars are now understood from high resolution surface images to be due to dust transported by winds in the thin Martian atmosphere. via NASA https://ift.tt/33jtLUp

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North Korea admits ‘faults’ in its fight against Covid-19. by Choe Sang-Hun

By Choe Sang-Hun

Published: September 30, 2020 at 06:17AM

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House Hunting in Chile: A Bright, Modern Villa in the Andes for $1.3 Million by Roxana Popescu

By Roxana Popescu

In and around the capital of Santiago, social unrest and the coronavirus pandemic have created a buyer’s market, with developers competing for clients.

Published: September 30, 2020 at 09:30AM

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Trump and Biden’s First Debate: ‘A Bonfire of Hate and Grievance’ by The New York Times Opinion

By The New York Times Opinion

How Round 1 looked to Times Opinion writers.

Published: September 30, 2020 at 05:01AM

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How the Show ‘Alone’ Sparked a Solo Trip and a Tough Realization by Isaac Fitzgerald

By Isaac Fitzgerald

Had my fiancée and I, like so many of the contestants on the series, reached the end of our endurance?

Published: September 30, 2020 at 05:00AM

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Sonified: Eagle Nebula Pillars

Yes, but have you ever experienced the Eagle Nebula with your ears ? The famous nebula, M16, is best known for the feast it gives your eyes, highlighting bright young stars forming deep inside dark towering structures. These light-years long columns of cold gas and dust are some 6,500 light-years distant toward the constellation of the Serpent (Serpens). Sculpted and eroded by the energetic ultraviolet light and powerful winds from M16’s cluster of massive stars, the cosmic pillars themselves are destined for destruction. But the turbulent environment of star formation within M16, whose spectacular details are captured in this combined Hubble (visible) and Chandra (X-ray) image, is likely similar to the environment that formed our own Sun. In the featured video, listen for stars and dust sounding off as the line of sonification moves left to right, with vertical position determining pitch. via NASA https://ift.tt/2EOq2Vw

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Strange Bacteria Are Attacking the State’s Trout Supply by Will McCarthy

By Will McCarthy

Tuesday: When an infection was detected at a hatchery, officials, already under statewide shelter-in-place orders, moved to institute a lockdown of their own.

Published: September 29, 2020 at 08:41AM

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For Hong Kong Protesters Caught at Sea, Trial in China Is Likely by Austin Ramzy and Elaine Yu

By Austin Ramzy and Elaine Yu

Detained by the Chinese Coast Guard as they tried to flee the city, the activists are now in the hands of the mainland’s opaque criminal justice system.

Published: September 29, 2020 at 06:45AM

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GW Orionis: A Star System with Titled Rings

Triple star system GW Orionis appears to demonstrate that planets can form and orbit in multiple planes. In contrast, all the planets and moons in our Solar System orbit in nearly the same plane. The picturesque system has three prominent stars, a warped disk, and inner tilted rings of gas and grit. The featured animation characterizes the GW Ori system from observations with the European Southern Observatory’s VLT and ALMA telescopes in Chile. The first part of the illustrative video shows a grand vista of the entire system from a distant orbit, while the second sequence takes you inside the tilted rings to resolve the three central co-orbiting stars. Computer simulations indicate that multiple stars in systems like GW Ori could warp and break-up disks into unaligned, exoplanet-forming rings. via NASA https://ift.tt/3n8oCqj

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Filaments of the Cygnus Loop

What lies at the edge of an expanding supernova? Subtle and delicate in appearance, these ribbons of shocked interstellar gas are part of a blast wave at the expanding edge of a violent stellar explosion that would have been easily visible to humans during the late stone age, about 20,000 years ago. The featured image was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope and is a closeup of the outer edge of a supernova remnant known as the Cygnus Loop or Veil Nebula. The filamentary shock front is moving toward the top of the frame at about 170 kilometers per second, while glowing in light emitted by atoms of excited hydrogen gas. The distances to stars thought to be interacting with the Cygnus Loop have recently been found by the Gaia mission to be about 2400 light years distant. The whole Cygnus Loop spans six full Moons across the sky, corresponding to about 130 light years, and parts can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus). via NASA https://ift.tt/2S73H8F

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Wet, Windy First Day at French Open Pushes Players to Win Ugly by Christopher Clarey and Karen Crouse

By Christopher Clarey and Karen Crouse

Coco Gauff and Simona Halep won their first-round matches. Victoria Azarenka did, too, but not before a rain delay. “I’m going to get frozen,” she said.

Published: September 27, 2020 at 05:43PM

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Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance by Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire

By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire

The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

Published: September 27, 2020 at 05:07PM

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What to Cook This Week by Sam Sifton

By Sam Sifton

An heirloom tomato tart, a Sri Lankan dal and a crab and shrimp boil pasta: Set yourself up for success in the kitchen.

Published: September 27, 2020 at 10:30AM

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South Korea Urges Joint Inquiry Into Official’s Killing at Sea by Choe Sang-Hun

By Choe Sang-Hun

North Korea has apologized for the death of a South Korean government official, but the two countries differ on the circumstances that led to the shooting.

Published: September 27, 2020 at 08:20AM

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Lightning over Colorado

Have you ever watched a lightning storm in awe? Join the crowd. Oddly, details about how lightning is produced remains a topic of research. What is known is that updrafts carry light ice crystals into collisions with larger and softer ice balls, causing the smaller crystals to become positively charged. After enough charge becomes separated, the rapid electrical discharge that is lightning occurs. Lightning usually takes a jagged course, rapidly heating a thin column of air to about three times the surface temperature of the Sun. The resulting shock wave starts supersonically and decays into the loud sound known as thunder. Lightning bolts are common in clouds during rainstorms, and on average 44 lightning bolts occur on the Earth every second. Pictured, over 60 images were stacked to capture the flow of lightning-producing storm clouds in July over Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. via NASA https://ift.tt/36bxzJ2

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‘Schitt’s Creek’ Star, and His Fans, Are Taking Indigenous Studies by Catherine Porter

By Catherine Porter

Dan Levy suggested in an Instagram post that his fans study Canadian Indigenous history along with him. About 64,000 people signed up.

Published: September 26, 2020 at 08:39AM

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Inside eBay’s Cockroach Cult: The Ghastly Story of a Stalking Scandal by David Streitfeld

By David Streitfeld

“People are basically good” was eBay’s founding principle. But in the deranged summer of 2019, prosecutors say, a campaign to terrorize a blogger crawled out of a dark place in the corporate soul.

Published: September 26, 2020 at 05:00AM

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Moon Pairs and the Synodic Month

Observe the Moon each night and its visible sunlit portion will gradually change. In phases progressing from New Moon to Full Moon to New Moon again, a lunar cycle or synodic month is completed in about 29.5 days. They look full, but top left to bottom right these panels do show the range of lunar phases for a complete synodic month during August 2019 from Ragusa, Sicily, Italy, planet Earth. For this lunar cycle project the panels organize images of the lunar phases in pairs. Each individual image is paired with another image separated by about 15 days, or approximately half a synodic month. As a result the opposite sunlit portions complete the lunar disk and the shadow line at the boundary of lunar night and day, the terminator, steadily marches across the Moon’s familiar nearside. For extra credit, what lunar phase would you pair with the Moon tonight? via NASA https://ift.tt/2EEYzFK

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What to Watch This Weekend by Melissa Kirsch

By Melissa Kirsch

At Home readers have recommendations.

Published: September 25, 2020 at 04:30PM

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Judges Express Skepticism Over Trump’s Bid to Block Tax Return Subpoena by Unknown Author

By Unknown Author

A three-judge appeals panel is expected to rule soon in the legal battle to obtain eight years of the president’s tax returns.

Published: September 25, 2020 at 04:26PM

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Moon over Andromeda

The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (also known as M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual skygazers can’t appreciate the galaxy’s impressive extent in planet Earth’s sky. This entertaining composite image compares the angular size of the nearby galaxy to a brighter, more familiar celestial sight. In it, a deep exposure of Andromeda, tracing beautiful blue star clusters in spiral arms far beyond the bright yellow core, is combined with a typical view of a nearly full Moon. Shown at the same angular scale, the Moon covers about 1/2 degree on the sky, while the galaxy is clearly several times that size. The deep Andromeda exposure also includes two bright satellite galaxies, M32 and M110 (below and right). via NASA https://ift.tt/365QNQw

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Your Friday Briefing by Melina Delkic

By Melina Delkic

Xinjiang detentions, Europe second wave, North Korea: Here’s what you need to know.

Published: September 24, 2020 at 03:34PM

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Trump Says D.A. Is Using ‘Speculation and Innuendo’ to Get His Tax Returns by Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum

By Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum

Prosecutors have suggested in court papers that an investigation into the president could focus on a range of possible crimes.

Published: September 24, 2020 at 01:58PM

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What’s the Deal With Google Now? by Shira Ovide

By Shira Ovide

Google is facing the possibility of multiple antitrust lawsuits. Here’s why and what’s ahead.

Published: September 24, 2020 at 12:47PM

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Trump Administration Adds to American Travel Restrictions in Cuba by Ceylan Yeginsu

By Ceylan Yeginsu

Among other measures, Americans will no longer be able to import Cuban cigars or stay in hotels owned by the Cuban government.

Published: September 24, 2020 at 10:53AM

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Covid-19 Live Updates: Trump Suggests Vaccine Approval Plans Are Driven by Politics by Unknown Author

By Unknown Author

President Trump said the White House “may or may not” approve new F.D.A. guidelines that would toughen the process for approving a coronavirus vaccine.

Published: September 24, 2020 at 05:23AM

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The Ugly (and Glorious) Truth About American Supermarkets by Alex Williams

By Alex Williams

In his new book, “The Secret Life of Groceries,” Benjamin Lorr argues that the kale chips and shade-grown coffee sold at supermarkets define who we are.

Published: September 24, 2020 at 05:00AM

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Undercutting Scientists, Trump Says Tightening Covid-19 Vaccine Guidelines ‘Sounds Like a Political Move’ by Unknown Author

By Unknown Author

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and three other top U.S. health officials told lawmakers they would take a vaccine approved by the F.D.A. Johnson & Johnson announced plans to enroll 60,000 people in a major vaccine trial. Israel will tighten its coronavirus …

Published: September 23, 2020 at 05:10AM

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North Korea Accused of Shooting and Burning South Korean Defector by Choe Sang-Hun

By Choe Sang-Hun

The body of the fisheries official was set ablaze in the North’s waters for fear he was carrying the coronavirus, South Korean officials said.

Published: September 24, 2020 at 01:53AM

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Enceladus in Infrared

One of our Solar System’s most tantalizing worlds, icy Saturnian moon Enceladus appears in these detailed hemisphere views from the Cassini spacecraft. In false color, the five panels present 13 years of infrared image data from Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer and Imaging Science Subsystem. Fresh ice is colored red, and the most dramatic features look like long gashes in the 500 kilometer diameter moon’s south polar region. They correspond to the location of tiger stripes, surface fractures that likely connect to an ocean beneath the Enceladus ice shell. The fractures are the source of the moon’s icy plumes that continuously spew into space. The plumes were discovered by by Cassini in 2005. Now, reddish hues in the northern half of the leading hemisphere view also indicate a recent resurfacing of other regions of the geologically active moon, a world that may hold conditions suitable for life. via NASA https://ift.tt/32TPYZ0

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Two Utah Men Bring Scandal to a Fishing Contest After Admitting to Cheating by Derrick Bryson Taylor

By Derrick Bryson Taylor

The men pleaded guilty to tampering to influence a contest, a third-degree felony, almost two years after the state started investigating where they caught their fish.

Published: September 23, 2020 at 10:43AM

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How Trump Can Win by David Leonhardt

By David Leonhardt

And what else you need to know today.

Published: September 23, 2020 at 06:39AM

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When the Classroom Comes With Room Service and Poolside Cabanas by Julie Weed

By Julie Weed

With the pandemic ongoing and millions of school-age children learning remotely, the travel industry is beckoning families with lures of “schoolcation.”

Published: September 23, 2020 at 05:00AM

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ISS Transits Mars

Yes, but have you ever seen the space station do this? If you know when and where to look, watching the bright International Space Station (ISS) drift across your night sky is a fascinating sight — but not very unusual. Images of the ISS crossing in front of the half-degree Moon or Sun do exist, but are somewhat rare as they take planning, timing, and patience to acquire. Catching the ISS crossing in front of minuscule Mars, though, is on another level. Using online software, the featured photographer learned that the unusual transit would be visible only momentarily along a very narrow stretch of nearby land spanning just 90 meters. Within this stretch, the equivalent ground velocity of the passing ISS image would be a quick 7.4 kilometers per second. However, with a standard camera, a small telescope, an exact location to set up his equipment, an exact direction to point the telescope, and sub-millisecond timing — he created a video from which the featured 0.00035 second exposure was extracted. In the resulting image capture, details on both Mars and the ISS are visible simultaneously. The featured image was acquired last Monday at 05:15:47 local time from just northeast of San Diego, California, USA. Although typically much smaller, angularly, than the ISS, Mars is approaching its maximum angular size in the next few weeks, because the blue planet (Earth) is set to pass its closest to the red planet (Mars) in their respective orbits around the Sun. via NASA https://ift.tt/33S59RF

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The Biggest Wave Surfed This Year by Adam Skolnick

By Adam Skolnick

Maya Gabeira didn’t just ride the biggest wave ever ridden by a woman. It was the biggest wave surfed by anyone in the 2019-20 winter season, a first for women in professional surfing.

Published: September 22, 2020 at 11:19AM

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Bringing the Ocean’s Midnight Zone Into the Light by Annie Roth

By Annie Roth

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has learned how to raise the deepest sea life to the surface and keep it alive for display.

Published: September 22, 2020 at 02:59AM

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Equinox in the Sky

Does the Sun set in the same direction every day? No, the direction of sunset depends on the time of the year. Although the Sun always sets approximately toward the west, on an equinox like today the Sun sets directly toward the west. After today’s September equinox, the Sun will set increasingly toward the southwest, reaching its maximum displacement at the December solstice. Before today’s September equinox, the Sun had set toward the northwest, reaching its maximum displacement at the June solstice. The featured time-lapse image shows seven bands of the Sun setting one day each month from 2019 December through 2020 June. These image sequences were taken from Alberta, Canada — well north of the Earth’s equator — and feature the city of Edmonton in the foreground. The middle band shows the Sun setting during the last equinox — in March. From this location, the Sun will set along this same equinox band again today. via NASA https://ift.tt/33Smb2h

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An Alaska Mine Project Might Be Bigger Than Acknowledged by Henry Fountain

By Henry Fountain

In secretly recorded meetings, executives with the Pebble Mine project said the operation could run nine times longer than outlined in their permit filings.

Published: September 21, 2020 at 05:09PM

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Trump Could Be Investigated for Tax Fraud, D.A. Says for First Time by Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum

By Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum

The assertion by the Manhattan district attorney offered rare insight into the office’s investigation of the president and his businesses.

Published: September 21, 2020 at 04:26PM

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2 Men Working to Map World War II Bombs Are Killed by One by Livia Albeck-Ripka

By Livia Albeck-Ripka

The aid workers had taken the device to the home they were sharing in the Solomon Islands, a country littered with unexploded ordnance.

Published: September 21, 2020 at 09:36AM

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In Montana, the Art of Crafting Fly-Fishing Rods by Janie Osborne

By Janie Osborne

“One thing about Montana,” says Matt Barber, an owner of Tom Morgan Rodsmiths, a custom fly rod shop in Bozeman, “is if there’s a moving body of water, there is probably a trout in it.”

Published: September 21, 2020 at 05:00AM

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Omega Sunrise

Capturing this sunrise required both luck and timing. First and foremost, precise timing was needed to capture a sailboat crossing right in front of a rising Sun. Additionally, by a lucky coincidence, the background Sun itself appears unusual — it looks like the Greek letter Omega (Ω). In reality, the Sun remained its circular self — the Omega illusion was created by sunlight refracting through warm air just above the water. Optically, the feet of the capital Omega are actually an inverted image of the Sun region just above it. Although somewhat rare, optical effects caused by the Earth’s atmosphere can make distant objects near the horizon — including the Sun and Moon — look quite unusual. This single exposure image was taken over the Mediterranean Sea just over two weeks ago near Valencia, Spain. via NASA https://ift.tt/35SpHMD

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‘White Australia’ Policy Lives On in Immigrant Detention by Behrouz Boochani

By Behrouz Boochani

The government’s abuse of refugees in offshore facilities on Nauru and Papua New Guinea has its roots in the country’s racist, colonial history.

Published: September 20, 2020 at 11:03AM

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Breaking Distant Light

In the distant universe, time appears to run slowly. Since time-dilated light appears shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (redshifted), astronomers are able to use cosmological time-slowing to help measure vast distances in the universe. Featured, the light from distant galaxies has been broken up into its constituent colors (spectra), allowing astronomers to measure the cosmological redshift of known spectral lines. The novelty of the featured image is that the distance to hundreds of galaxies can be measured from a single frame, in this case one taken by the Visible MultiObject Spectrograph (VIMOS) operating at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Chile. Analyzing the space distribution of distant objects will allow insight into when and how stars and galaxies formed, clustered, and evolved in the early universe. via NASA https://ift.tt/2RF1voA

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Lost World War II Submarine Is Found in Southeast Asia by Derrick Bryson Taylor

By Derrick Bryson Taylor

The U.S.S. Grenadier was scuttled in April 1943 after being attacked by Japanese bombers. Surviving crew members were tortured at a prison camp for more than two years, according to accounts.

Published: September 19, 2020 at 05:45AM

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Orion in Depth

Orion is a familiar constellation. The apparent positions of its stars in two dimensions create a well-known pattern on the bowl of planet Earth’s night sky. Orion may not look quite so familiar in this 3D view though. The illustration reconstructs the relative positions of Orion’s bright stars, including data from the Hipparcus catalog of parallax distances. The most distant star shown is Alnilam. The middle one in the projected line of three that make up Orion’s belt when viewed from planet Earth, Alnilam is nearly 2,000 light-years away, almost 3 times as far as fellow belt stars Alnitak and Mintaka. Though Rigel and Betelgeuse apparently shine brighter in planet Earth’s sky, that makes more distant Alnilam intrinsically (in absolute magnitude) the brightest of the familiar stars in Orion. In the Hipparcus catalog, errors in measured parallaxes for Orion’s stars can translate in to distance errors of a 100 light-years or so. via NASA https://ift.tt/32L2BFH

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Why a Green Recovery Is the Way Forward in a Post-Covid World by Unknown Author

By Unknown Author

Transitioning to renewable energy will not only lead to a cleaner planet — it’ll also be vital for economic growth.

Published: September 18, 2020 at 10:14AM

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Arp 78: Peculiar Galaxy in Aries

(xxxedit and linkxxx) Peculiar spiral galaxy Arp 78 is found within the boundaries of the head strong constellation Aries, some 100 million light-years beyond the stars and nebulae of our Milky Way galaxy. Also known as NGC 772, the island universe is over 100,000 light-years across and sports a single prominent outer spiral arm in this detailed cosmic portrait. Its brightest companion galaxy, compact NGC 770, is toward the upper right of the larger spiral. NGC 770’s fuzzy, elliptical appearance contrasts nicely with a spiky foreground Milky Way star in matching yellowish hues. Tracking along sweeping dust lanes and lined with young blue star clusters, Arp 78’s large spiral arm is likely due to gravitational tidal interactions. Faint streams of material seem to connect Arp 78 with its nearby companion galaxies. via NASA https://ift.tt/3mzKslW

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Princeton Admitted Past Racism. Now It Is Under Investigation. by Anemona Hartocollis

By Anemona Hartocollis

The Trump administration opened a civil rights investigation into the university after its president acknowledged the role of systemic racism at the school and in society.

Published: September 17, 2020 at 08:24PM

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Solar Cycle 25 Begins

The general trend of monthly sunspot data now confirms that the minimum of the approximately 11 year cycle of solar activity occurred in December 2019, marking the start of Solar Cycle 25. That quiet Sun, at minimum activity, appears on the right of this split hemispherical view. In contrast, the left side shows the active Sun at the recognized maximum of Solar Cycle 24, captured in April 2014. The extreme ultraviolet images from the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory highlight coronal loops and active regions in the light of highly ionized iron atoms. Driving the space weather around our fair planet, Solar Cycle 24 was a relatively calm one and predictions are that cycle 25 will be calm too. The cycle 25 activity maximum is expected in July 2025. Solar Cycle 1, the first solar cycle determined from early records of sunspot data, is considered to begin with a minimum in February 1755. via NASA https://ift.tt/35IRTRP

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