Morning

Neon sky

Scrub Jay awaiting peanuts

Moon and Venus (the tiny pixel at lower left)

Nesting season is over, but bluebirds still use these boxes for shelter

White beauty

Reflection

Funereal Duskywing

A new blue planet

For the first time, we know the color of an extrasolar planet:

Although the planet seems to be the shade of a deep ocean, it is unlikely to host liquid water. The exoplanet is a giant ball of gas, similar to Jupiter, and was previously often painted brown and red in artists' impressions.
The blue colour may come from clouds laden with reflective particles that contain silicon — essentially raindrops of molten glass. Evidence for this idea dates to 2007, when Hubble observed the planet passing in front of its star. Light from the star seemed to be passing through a haze of particles.

 (See also this post for more about exoplanet weather.)

Creatures of Europa

Diagram of hypothetical life-forms on Jupiter's moon Europa, from an old issue of New Scientist.

Europa's icy shell may also contain large embedded "lakes" which, like the ice fissures, might provide an abode for life.

Polyhedral planets

This interesting article describes several hypothetical cubical worlds-- a hypothesized Planet X from 1884; a world of chimeric creatures called Aocicinori (illustrated in tracts handed out at Rice University, Texas, by a "mysterious, well-dressed gentleman" and created by a mental patient); and a cubical version of our own Earth:

Contemporary cosmologist Karen L. Masters also finds the topic of cube worlds fascinating -- especially the atmospheric possibilities. As she explains in Cornell's Ask a Physicist feature, all six faces of the [planet] would boast temperate weather, centralized bodies of water and none of them would feature polar or equatorial weather. What's more, the pointy edges of the cube would actually poke through the planet's atmosphere like titanic mountains.

 I am reminded of the far-future tetrahedral Earth described in a magazine article from 1918:

The world is now the shape of a globe, the shape which gives the biggest possible bulk for its surface, but the inside of the earth is still cooling and condensing, and the internal changes are slowly changing its shape. The surface, already condensed to its utmost, will not change with the core; it cannot reduce its area, but it adapts itself to the shrinking interior by taking a shape which occupies less bulk. So the earth is to become a tetrahedron, a sort of pyramid, the shape which gives the smallest bulk for its surface. Let us think about it all.

Springtime on Mars

From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, which provides this explanation:

What is causing these dark streaks on Mars? A leading hypothesis is flowing -- but quickly evaporating -- water. The streaks, visible in dark brown near the image center, appear in the Martian spring and summer but fade in the winter months, only to reappear again the next summer. These are not the first markings on Mars that have been interpreted as showing the effects of running water, but they are the first to add the clue of a seasonal dependence... The streaks bolster evidence that water exists just below the Martian surface in several locations, and therefore fuels speculation that Mars might harbor some sort of water-dependent life. Future observations with robotic spacecraft orbiting Mars, such as MRO, Mars Express, and Mars Odyssey will continue to monitor the situation and possibly confirm -- or refute -- the exciting flowing water hypothesis.

Millions of years ago, Mars may have had an ocean, which might have supported microbial life. Perhaps Martian microbes still thrive today in regions where floods occur, rising from dessicated dormancy when spring rolls around.

Europan shore

Depiction of Jupiter's moon Europa by Camille Flammarion, 1903. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Stormy Saturn

Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft now have the first-ever, up-close details of a Saturn storm that is eight times the surface area of Earth.
On Dec. 5, 2010, Cassini first detected the storm that has been raging ever since. It appears at approximately 35 degrees north latitude on Saturn. Pictures from Cassini's imaging cameras show the storm wrapping around the entire planet covering approximately 1.5 billion square miles (4 billion square kilometers).
The storm is about 500 times larger than the biggest storm previously seen by Cassini during several months from 2009 to 2010.

This world-spanning tempest is noisy as well:

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured these sounds of lightning strikes at Saturn on March 15, 2011, during the largest and most intense storm observed up-close at Saturn. Lightning at Saturn creates phenomena known as Saturn electrostatic discharges, which are like the static that Earth lightning creates on an AM radio. The amplitude and duration of the Saturn lightning radio signals were used to create the audio signals heard here.
...The storm is still raging. At its most active, lightning flashes occurred at a rate of more than 10 per second. This was so frequent, in fact, that Cassini could no longer resolve individual strokes.

M82

The galaxy Messier 82, shown in a composite of images from the Chandra X-Ray telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer infrared telescope, with colours adjusted to fit everything into the visual spectrum.

 The soft, multicolored glow of this image reminds me of Lumia.

The unmoving Earth

The Earth has an equatorial bulge because it rotates. If it were to suddenly cease rotating, its surface would be transformed as the oceans migrated to opposite poles:

 ...eventually creating an equatorial megacontinent that would ring the earth and thus separate both polar oceans.
What a strange new world this would be. As the earth would stop rotating (but presumably still circle the sun), one night-and-day cycle would last an entire year. The new continent ringing the globe (2) would include a large part of current Mid-Atlantic, Indian and Mid-Pacific seabeds, perhaps re-emerging legendary continents like Mu, Atlantis and other lands lost beneath the waves...
(2) What would it be called? Pangaea – again? Ringland? Equatoria?

Raining iron and olivine

On a far-off planet known as OGLE-TR-56b (a "hot Jupiter" which orbits its star in about the length of a terrestrial day), a hellish weather phenomenon may occur:

Intriguingly, the temperature of OGLE-TR-56b's upper atmosphere is theoretically just right to form clouds, not of water vapor, but of iron atoms. Earlier this year, astronomers reported evidence for iron rain on brown dwarfs. However, such storms only occur over a short portion of a brown dwarf's lifetime, while the newly discovered 4 billion year-old OGLE-TR-56b should still be experiencing this exotic weather, thanks to strong heating from the nearby star.

Elsewhere in the cosmos, in the nebula surrounding a newly-forming star, it rains crystals of a green mineral called olivine:

"We propose that the crystals were cooked up near the surface of the forming star, then carried up into the surrounding cloud where temperatures are much colder, and ultimately fell down again like glitter." ...
"If you could somehow transport yourself inside this protostar's collapsing gas cloud, it would be very dark," said Charles Poteet, lead author of the new study, also from the University of Toledo. "But the tiny crystals might catch whatever light is present, resulting in a green sparkle against a black, dusty backdrop."

Illustration of the crystal rain from NASA

Jovian jellyfish and aerial plankton

Beautiful clip from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, showing hypothetical life forms in the atmosphere of a gas giant: 

Since they are adapted for a wide-open environment where buoyancy counters gravity, these imaginary aerial creatures somewhat resemble marine life in form and behavior (the "floaters" in particular look like jellyfish). This same analogy of sea to sky underlies in the term "aeroplankton"-- referring to the much tinier creatures (insects, seeds, bacteria) that drift in Earth's atmosphere-- and presumably inspired the AirPenguin. 

Saturnian "speech"

These spooky sounds do vaguely resemble distorted speech, even in their unmodified form. But this reveals nothing about any life-forms on Saturn (an unlikely notion); rather, it reveals a lot about the way humans perceive sounds. Our pattern-seeking instincts cause us to hear "speech"-- even if we can't comprehend its "message"-- in random natural noises such as wind.

Update: Saturn's radio signals are asymmetrical:

Recent data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the variation in radio waves controlled by the planet's rotation is different in the northern and southern hemispheres. Moreover, the northern and southern rotational variations also appear to change with the Saturnian seasons, and the hemispheres have actually swapped rates.

Perigee

A bigger-than-usual full moon, shining through a veil of clouds.

Giants and airy spirits in the outer solar system

Excerpts from Wikipedia's article on naming conventions for planetary moons:

In 1847 the seven then known moons of Saturn were named by John Herschel. Herschel named Saturn's two innermost moons (Mimas and Enceladus) after the mythological Greek Giants, and the outer five after the Titans (Titan, Iapetus) and Titanesses (Tethys, Dione, Rhea) of the same mythology.... Since the outer moons fall naturally into three groups, one group is named after Norse giants, one after Gallic giants, and one after Inuit giants....
[Uranus:] Herschel, instead of assigning names from Greek mythology, named the moons after magical spirits in English literature: the fairies Oberon and Titania from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the sylphs Ariel and Umbriel from Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (Ariel is also a sprite in Shakespeare's The Tempest). The reasoning was presumably that Uranus, as god of the sky and air, would be attended by spirits of the air.
Subsequent names, rather than continuing the "airy spirits" theme (only Puck and Mab continuing the trend), have focused on Herschel's source material.... Current IAU practice is to name moons after characters from Shakespeare's plays and The Rape of the Lock.

In addition, individual geological features on moons have their own naming conventions: those of Ariel are named for spirits of light, those of Umbriel bear the names of darker spirits, and those of Miranda continue the Shakespearean theme of Uranian satellites. Features on Titan get their names from such varied concepts as "sacred or enchanted places", "planets from the fictional Dune universe created by Frank Herbert", and "islands on Earth that are not politically independent".

Andromeda and Cassiopeia

Picture from Planisphère céléste, a 1705 celestial atlas by Philippe de La Hire

Miranda sings

The unearthly sounds in this video are derived from electromagnetic signals picked up by the Voyager spacecraft as it flew past Miranda, moon of Uranus. 

Possible worlds

How would the night sky look if our moon was replaced by one of the planets?

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

The Constitution as celestial mechanics

...Montesquieu insists that the English Whigs copied the new astronomy when they were creating the modern British Constitution. Referring to this in one of his essays, Woodrow Wilson drew attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States had been made on the same principle. 'They [writers in the Federalist] speak of the checks and balances of the Constitution,' he said, 'and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe and particularly of the solar system....'

From a passage on the metaphorical uses of mechanical and scientific terms during the Enlightenment, in History in English Words by Owen Barfield.

World views

Though intended to represent medieval beliefs (following a common misconception), the flat world depicted here is actually more akin to that of Homeric or Old Testament cosmology. In the Middle Ages, the prevailing cosmological model was geocentric (with a round Earth surrounded by celestial spheres), as laid out in Dante's Paradiso.