Astronomy picture of the day - 2017 October 1 - Concept Plane: Supersonic Green Machine

Concept Plane: Supersonic Green Machine 
Illustration Credit: NASA, Lockheed Martin Co.

Explanation: What will passenger airplanes be like in the future? To help brainstorm desirable and workable attributes, NASA sponsors design competitions. Shown here is an artist's depiction of a concept plane that was suggested in 2010. This futuristic plane would be expected to achieve supersonic speeds, possibly surpassing the speeds of the supersonic transport planes that ran commercially in the late twentieth century. In terms of noise reduction, the future aircraft has been drawn featuring an inverted V wing stretched over its engines. The structure is intended to reduce the sound from annoying sonic booms. Additionally, future airplanes would aim to have relatively little impact on our environment, including green limits on pollution and fuel consumption. Aircraft utilizing similar design concepts might well become operational by the 2030s.

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Sitios lindos de Portugal - Fonte na rua Serpa Pinto - Evora

Fonte na rua Serpa Pinto

Astronomy picture of the day - 2017 September 30 - Portrait of NGC 281

Portrait of NGC 281 
Image Credit & Copyright: Eric Coles and Mel Helm

Explanation: Look through the cosmic cloud cataloged as NGC 281 and you might miss the stars of open cluster IC 1590. Still, formed within the nebula that cluster's young, massive stars ultimately power the pervasive nebular glow. The eye-catching shapes looming in this portrait of NGC 281 are sculpted columns and dense dust globules seen in silhouette, eroded by intense, energetic winds and radiation from the hot cluster stars. If they survive long enough, the dusty structures could also be sites of future star formation. Playfully called the Pacman Nebula because of its overall shape, NGC 281 is about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp composite image was made through narrow-band filters, combining emission from the nebula's hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen atoms in green, red, and blue hues. It spans over 80 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 281.

Sitios lindos de Portugal - Rua Miguel Bombarda, Evora

Rua Miguel Bombarda, Évora

Playing For Change - "Island style" - Video - Music

"Island style"

Astronomy picture of the day - 2017 September 28 - LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap

LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap 
Illustration Credit: LIGO- Virgo Collaboration - Optical Sky Data: A. Mellinger

Explanation: From around planet Earth three gravitational wave detectors have now reported a joint detection of ripples in spacetime, the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole merger in the distant Universe. The eventwas recorded on 2017 August 14, and so christened GW170814, by the LIGO observatory sites in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, and the more recently operational Virgo Observatory near Pisa, Italy. The signal was emitted in the final moments of the coalescence of two black holes of 31 and 25 solar masses located about 1.8 billion light-years away. But comparing the timing of the gravitational wave detections at all three sites allowed astronomers to vastly improve the location of the signal's origin on the sky. Just above the Magellanic clouds and generally toward the constellation Eridanus, the only sky region consistent with signals in all three detectors is indicated by the yellow contour line in this all-sky map. The all-sky projection includes the arc of our Milky Way Galaxy. An improved three-detector location of the gravitational wave source allowed rapid follow-up observations by other, more conventional, electromagnetic wave observatories that can search for potentially related signals. The addition of the Virgo detector also allowed the gravitational wave polarization to be measured, a property that further confirms predictions ofEinstein's general relativity.

Alencanto - "Açorda de coentros e alhos" - Video - Musica

"Açorda de coentros e alhos"

FC Porto venceu em casa do Mónaco por 3-0

FC Porto venceu em casa do Mónaco por 3-0 na segunda jornada da fase de grupos da Liga dos Campeões. Imprensa internacional com fortes elogios.

Mónaco curvou-se

"A equipa de Leonardo Jardim curvou-se perante um FC Porto melhor organizado a todos os níveis. Aboubakar, possante como de costume, destruiu a defesa do Mónaco e resolveu o jogo" .

L'Equipe, França

Poder físico do FC Porto

"O Mónaco não conseguiu conter o poderio físico do FC Porto e teve dificuldades para entrar num bloco defensivo muito sólido. O segundo golo, construído por Brahimi e Marega, foi muito bom".

France Football, França

Tigre metido na jaula

"Os dragões conseguiram apagar o máximo goleador das grandes Ligas europeias, Falcao. El Tigre não foi capaz de rugir, de sacar das unhas, nem sequer de morder. Um FC Porto organizado venceu".

Marca,  Espanha

O principado é mexicano

"Com os quatro mexicanos em campo, o FC Porto sacou um triunfo valioso no Mónaco e voltam a estar na luta pelos oitavos de final. Laýun fez o terceiro e cobriu de glória o triunfo dos dragões".

Récord, México

FC Porto surpreende

"O FC Porto está vivo na Liga dos Campeões! Os portugueses foram ao Mónaco enfrentar o campeão francês e, apesar do favoritismo dos donos da casa, venceram com autoridade".

Lancenet, Brasil

Astronomy picture of the day - 2017 September 27 - Layers of a Total Solar Eclipse

Layers of a Total Solar Eclipse 
Image Credit: Inside: Solar Dynamics Observatory, LMSAL and NASA’s GSFC;
Middle: Jay Pasachoff, Ron Dantowitz, and the Williams College Solar Eclipse Expedition/NSF/National Geographic;
Outside: LASCO from NRL on SOHO from ESA 

Explanation: Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night can keep a space-based spacecraft from watching the Sun. In fact, from its vantage point 1.5 million kilometers sunward of planet Earth, NASA's SOlar Heliospheric Observatory(SOHO) can always monitor the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. But only during a total solar eclipse can Earth-based observers also see the lovely coronal streamers and structures - when the Moon briefly blocks the overwhelmingly bright solar surface. Then, it becomes possible to follow detailed coronal activity all the way down to the Sun's surface. In the outside layer of this composite image, SOHO's uninterrupted view of the solar corona duringlast month's eclipse is shown in orange hues. The middle, donut-shaped region is the corona as recorded by the Williams College Eclipse Expedition to Salem, Oregon. Simultaneously, the inner view is from NASA's Earth-orbitingSolar Dynamics Observatory, which, being outside of totality, was able to image the face of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light, shown in gold.