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Friday 12 July 2013

10 years to take a picture of the universe

This is a compiled image of 10 years worth of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs. NASA call this the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) which is a section of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field (previous holder of the title 'deepest image of the universe') and contains 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies you can see on the picture are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. You can go into more detail and watch a video on the NASA website.

(Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team)

Monday 1 July 2013

Lava over ice. Completely mesmerising.

You wouldn't think this video was 8 minutes long after sitting through it with your jaw slightly ajar and your eyes fixed at your screen in wonder. I love lava. It is an incredible thing that rocks can even get so hot that they can be poured but I had never considered how interesting and entertaining it would be to watch when in contact with something at the other end of the kelvin scale.

Watch in awe as the bubbles grow into glass domes and burst before settling into black rivers and boulders of semi-molten rock.