Last night, cameras in Czechia recorded a magnificent display of sprites leaping up from a thunderstorm in neighboring Austria. Photographer Martin Popek of Nýdek, Czechia, selected this specimen from many frames he recorded:

"The storm was about 390km away," says Popek, "and the sprite was huge. It stretched 50 km to 90 km above the ground below."Sometimes called "space lightning," sprites are a true space weather phenomenon. They inhabit the upper atmosphere alongside auroras, meteors and noctilucent clouds. Some researchers believe they are linked to cosmic rays: subatomic particles from deep space striking the top of Earth's atmosphere produce secondary electrons that, in turn, could provide the spark that triggers sprites.

The link to cosmic rays is particularly interesting at this time. Despite a brief reduction in cosmic rays last week caused by the sweeping action of a passing CME, cosmic rays are intensifying. For the past two years, space weather balloons have observed a steady increase in deep space radiation penetrating our atmosphere. This increase is largely due to the decline in the solar cycle. Flagging solar wind pressure and weakening sunspot magnetic fields allow more cosmic rays into the inner solar system--a trend which is expected to continue for years to come.  [higher vibrational light/energy penetrating our solar system and Earth. MS]  These changes could add up to more sprites.

Although sprites have been seen for at least a century, most scientists did not believe they existed until after 1989 when sprites were photographed by cameras onboard the space shuttle. Now "sprite chasers" routinely photograph sprites from their own homes. "I used up a Watec 910HX security camera with UFOCapture software to catch my sprites," says Popek.

Andrew Liptak : The Verge : 16 Jan 2017

The Japanese probe Akatsuki has observed a massive gravity wave in the atmosphere of Venus. This is not the first time such a wave was observed on the Solar System's second planet, but it is the largest ever recorded, stretching just over 6,000 miles from end to end. Its features also suggest that the dynamics of Venus' atmosphere are more complex than previously thought.

An atmospheric gravity wave is a ripple in the density of a planet's atmosphere, according to the European Space Agency. (This isn't a gravitational wave, which is a ripple in space-time.) We have these waves in Earth's atmosphere, too; they interfere with weather and cause turbulence. Scientists have observed atmospheric gravity waves on Venus before: the European Space Agency's Venus Express spotted several before the end of its mission in 2014. Since its initial observations, Akatsuki has spotted several smaller structures with its infrared cameras in April and May 2016.

Akatsuki spotted this particular gravity wave, described in a paper published today in Nature Geoscience, when the probe arrived at the planet on December 7th, 2015. The spacecraft then lost sight of it on December 12th, 2015, because of a change in Akatsuki's orbit. When the probe returned to a position to observe the bow-shaped structure on January 15th, 2016, the bright wave had vanished.

What sets the huge December wave apart from previously discovered ones is that it appeared to be stationary above a mountainous region on the planet's surface, despite the background atmospheric winds.

The study's authors believe that the bright structure is the result of a gravity wave that was formed in the lower atmosphere as it flowed over the planet's mountainous terrain. It's not clear how the wave exactly propagates to the planet's upper atmosphere, where clouds rotate faster than the planets itself — four days instead of the 243 days it takes Venus to rotate once.

The massive gravity wave might mean that the atmospheric conditions closer to the planet's surface are more variable than predicted.

This month, a lot is happening in the mesosphere. The mesosphere is a layer of Earth's atmosphere above the stratosphere; it is the realm of sprites, noctilucent clouds (NLCs), and airglow. Starting on Nov. 17th, NASA's AIM spacecraft spotted bright noctilucent clouds forming in the mesosphere above Antarctica. Then, in an apparently unrelated development on Nov. 24th, the normal dome of airglow over China split in two. Xiao Shuai photographed the event from Mount Balang in Sichuan:

This is called a "mesospheric bore"; a type of atmospheric wave with deep ripples at its leading edge.  Indeed, you can see the ripples in Shuai's photo separating the zone of airglow from clear sky.

Bores fall into the category of "gravity waves"—so called because gravity acts as the restoring force essential to wave motion. Analogy: boats in water. When a boat goes tearing across a lake, water in front of the boat is pushed upward. Gravity pulls the water back down again and this sets up a wave.  In this case, instead of water, rarefied air is the medium through which the wave propagates.  The sudden boundary in the airglow layer is probably akin to a hydraulic jump.  But what created the disturbance in the first place?  (What is the 'boat'?) No one knows.

"There may be more updates in the coming days as scientists from NASA and the Chinese Academy of Science check data from satellites to learn more about this event," says Jeff Dai, who has been helping Xiao Shuai process and communicate his extraordinary images. 
www.spaceweather.com

The biggest radio telescope located in China's Guizhou Province is now operational. Featuring a reflector the size of 30 football pitches, it took five years and $180 million to construct. Called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope's (FAST), the telescope is located in a karst valley in Pingtang County, a mountainous area in southwest China.

Some 8,000 local residents were relocated to ensure a 5km radio silence zone around the facility. About $269 million were allocated to pay compensations to the villagers. The name FAST referrers to the main structure of the gigantic instrument, which has 4,450 triangular 11-meter panels and measures 500 meters in diameter. For comparison, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which held the title of world's largest radio telescope before FAST, has a 305-meter dish.

FAST was first brought online in July for trial observation and received a set of data from a pulsar about 1,351 light-years away, as Xinhua news agency was told by Qian Lei, an associate researcher with the National Astronomical Observation (NAO) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which built the project. China plans to use one of its best supercomputers, the SkyEye-1, to process the massive amounts of data supplied by FAST. At its peak the data flow is expected to require computing power of over 200 teraflops per second.

The instrument would be used to study gravitational waves, stellar radio emissions and potentially signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, Qian Lei, an associate researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told state broadcaster CCTV. "In theory, if there is civilization in outer space, the radio signal it sends will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar [spinning neutron star] is approaching us," Qian said.

FAST is the world's biggest radio telescope with a single dish. The old Soviet RATAN-600 in southern Russia is bigger still, but, unlike China's new telescope, its 576-meter reflector structure resembles a donut.

Scientists have been taken by surprise to discover that a galaxy they thought was tiny and conventional is, in fact, enormous and bizarre - and quite unlike anything they have seen before. 
At about 718,000 light-years across, UGC 1382 is more than seven times wider than the Milky Way - 10 times larger than was previously thought. But that isn't the strange part.

Whereas most galaxies have the oldest stars closer to the centre, this one is the reverse.  "The centre of UGC 1382 is actually younger than the spiral disc surrounding it," says Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, in California.  "It's old on the outside and young on the inside. This is like finding a tree whose inner growth rings are younger than the outer rings."

Seibert and Lea Hagen of Pennsylvania State University found the galaxy by accident while they were looking for stars forming in run-of-the-mill elliptical galaxies - of which they thought UGC 1382 was one.  But when they started looking more closely at images in ultraviolet light through data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), they were amazed to see a vast expanse of stars that shouldn't have been there.

"We saw spiral arms extending far outside this galaxy, which no one had noticed before, and which elliptical galaxies should not have," said Hagen, lead author of a study to be published in the Astrophysical Journal. "That put us on an expedition to find out what this galaxy is and how it formed."
The rest of this story can be read here.

Galaxies are often found in clusters, with many 'red and dead' neighbours that stopped forming stars in the distant past. Now an international team of astronomers, led by Andra Stroe of Leiden Observatory and David Sobral of Leiden and the University of Lisbon, have discovered that these comatose galaxies can sometimes come back to life. If clusters of galaxies merge, a huge shock wave can drive the birth of a new generation of stars – the sleeping galaxies get a new lease of life. The scientists publish their work in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Galaxy clusters are like cities, where thousands of galaxies can be packed together, at least in comparison to the sparsely-populated space around them. Over billions of years, they build up structure in the universe - merging with adjacent clusters, like growing cities absorb nearby towns. When this happens, there is a huge release of energy as the clusters collide. The resulting shock wave travels through the cluster like a tsunami, but until now there was no evidence that the galaxies themselves were affected very much.

Stroe and Sobral observed the merging galaxy cluster CIZA J2242.8+5301, nicknamed the 'Sausage', located 2.3 billion light years away in the direction of the constellation of Lacerta, in the northern hemisphere of the sky. They used the Isaac Newton and William Herschel Telescopes on La Palma, and the Subaru, CFHT and Keck Telescopes on Hawaii, and found that far from ‘watching from the back’ the cluster galaxies were transformed by the shock wave, triggering a new wave of star formation.

Stroe comments: "We assumed that the galaxies would be on the sidelines for this act, but it turns out they have a leading role. The comatose galaxies in the Sausage cluster are coming back to life, with stars forming at a tremendous rate. When we first saw this in the data, we simply couldn’t believe what it was telling us."

The rest of this article, with images, can be found at :
http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/2619-giant-cosmic-tsunami-wakes-up-comatose-galaxies

http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/...

Gigapixels of Andromeda [4K]
The video shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the Galaxy,
stretching over 40,000 light-years.    Nature is truly breathtaking and immensely vast!

Justin Warmoth : WPTV West Palm Beach : 20 May 2015

© Screen Capture Youtube
Titusville, Florida - A strange object was caught on surveillance video at the U.S. Space Walk of Fame Museum in Titusville.  Employees have noticed an orb-shaped object a couple of times and have no idea what it is. On two separate occasions in just the last week, the orb was spotted by surveillance cameras.

This video, which has garnered more than 500 views on YouTube, was taken May 12 in a room filled with artifacts, memorabilia and photos from the Mercury and Gemini space programs. The video shows the mysterious object come into frame, leaves, then comes back before suddenly disappearing.

In a video, taken May 15, you can see it quickly move around toward the bottom of the screen before vanishing once again.

"We can't explain it, nor can the (person) who put in the system for us," Charlie Mars, the president of the U.S. Space Walk of Fame Museum. Mars said in both instances the lights and air conditioning were turned off, which is why he rules out that that it's a glare or a floating dust ball, like some staffers think it is. "There were many items in here that were brought in by people who are no longer with us. They could be coming back to check on it," said Mars. Mars said this type of unexplainable activity is nothing new for the space museum, which just moved into the 100-year-old building after spending the last 10 years just down the street.

"We have had a number of things like that have occurred over the past 10 to 12 years that we don't have an explanation for and we do love speculating about it," said Mars. Some wonder whether it could be a ghost in the historic building, which once served as a county records facility. But for the staff here, whether it's a glare dust ball or perhaps the spirit of Neil Armstrong, it's something for them to talk about. "We love having something come in unexplainable. and it gives us a chance to interchange with each other and talk about what it will possibly be," said Mars.
Source: WKMG via CNN Wire

John Vibes : True Activist : 08 Apr 2015

Scientists in Japan have successfully transmitted electric energy wirelessly through the air, proving that Nikola Tesla was onto something big.

For years debates have raged about whether or not power could be transferred through the air, and while there have been many reports of this being achieved on a small scale, there has never been a major mainstream study into the phenomenon, until now.  Scientists with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency used microwaves to deliver electricity to a specific target 55 meters away.

"This was the first time anyone has managed to send a high output of nearly two kilowatts of electric power via microwaves to a small target, using a delicate directivity control device," a spokesman for the agency told AFP on Thursday.  "SSPS consists of a space-based power generation/transmission facility that gathers sunlight, converts it into microwaves or laser beams, and transmits those to the ground; and a power receiving facility on the ground," explained researcher Yasuyuki Fukumuro.  "There are many technological challenges to solve before SSPS can be implemented. When transmitting power by microwaves, a significant technological challenge is how to control the direction, and transmit it with pinpoint accuracy from a geostationary orbit to a receiving site on the ground," he added.

The SSPS project will initially be geared towards space applications, to power space stations, shuttles, and equipment, but will eventually be used for practical purposes on Earth as well.

See also : https://www.pinterest.com/messengerspirit/nikola-tesla-the-genius-who-lit-the-world/