Space

Lebanese Astrophotographer Moophz Featured on NASA’s APOD!


Moophz (Maroun) is a dear friend of mine, and when I’m busy at a club or festival in Beirut or Amsterdam, Moophz is busy zipping across continents to remote regions with the loads of equipment trying to capture our cosmos in a way our eyes never could.

Today, his epic “Breaking Time / Bending Space” image was selected as NASA’s APOD (astronomy picture of the day). You can check it out here.

This is the explanation a NASA astronomer gave below the image:

Is it possible to capture the entire plane of our galaxy in a single image? Yes, but not in one exposure — and it took some planning to do it in two. The top part of the featured image is the night sky above Lebanon, north of the equator, taken in 2017 June. The image was taken at a time when the central band of the Milky Way Galaxy passed directly overhead. The bottom half was similarly captured six months later in latitude-opposite Chile, south of Earth’s equator. Each image therefore captured the night sky in exactly the opposite direction of the other, when fully half the Galactic plane was visible. The southern half was then inverted — car and all — and digitally appended to the top half to show the entire central band of our Galaxy, as a circle, in a single image. Many stars and nebulas are visible, with the Large Magellanic Cloud being particularly notable inside the lower half of the complete galactic circle.

Making us proud Moophz! Thank you for putting in all this work, above and below the equator, over a period of 6 months to create this masterpiece.

Check out loads more amazing photos of the night sky on his website.

Beirut Yesterday, Taken from the ISS

Soure @Thomas_astro on Twitter (Feb 8th, 2017)

On Wednesday around 1PM, while all of you were at school, work, stuck in traffic or probably just eating your lunch, the International Space Station zoomed past us at 7.66km per second, 400 kilometers above our heads.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet took this beautiful shot, and tweeted it in both French and English

I hope Thomas will come visit Beirut when he comes back from orbiting the Earth for the next 6 months. I’m sure many of you guys are like me, and are fascinated by space. I’d watch every ISS documentary I could on the Discovery Channel as a kid. Today though, with astronauts doing research up there having access to the Internet, we get a lot of amazing first-hand stories, photos and videos. Who didn’t spend hours sifting through Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s epic timeline? After Chris came back to the surface though, I stopped getting updates like these, so I’m extra happy I discovered Thomas today!

His shots and animated gifs are all awesome, and his captions are always lighthearted and sweet. Here’s a couple more I liked:





Don’t forget, no matter how bad things are, and how huge your problems might seem, at the end of the day, they’re just a tiny spec on a tiny planet in an infinitely vast and gorgeous universe. Take some time out of your week to go somewhere dark and lie back and look up into space. Who knows, there might be an astronaut zooming past and looking back at you, like on Wednesday afternoon!