SpaceX launch of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying Starlink satellites on Mission 12-2 on December 23, 2024. The rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39A in Florida. (Photo by USA Today)
A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. The launch of the first rocket from Russia's new space facility has been delayed after a last-minute problem. (Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP Photo)
This artist's rendering illustrates the evaporation of HD 189733b's atmosphere in response to a powerful eruption from its host star. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope detected the escaping gases and NASA's Swift satellite caught the stellar flare. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
German photographer Markus Reugels. Using large satellite photos as a backdrop and a high speed camera he captures the background’s refraction through water drops. The perfectly timed shots result in these spherical representations of the Earth, Moon and Jupiter. See much more of his work here and also here. Thanks Markus for sharing your work with Colossal!
Our moon is a pretty big object. It's big enough to be a respectable planet in its own right, if it were orbiting the sun instead of the Earth. (Actually, it is orbiting the sun in a nearly perfectly circular orbit, that the Earth only slightly perturbs... but that's a topic for another day.) The Moon is a quarter the diameter of the Earth. Only Pluto has a satellite that is larger, in proportion to the size of the planet it orbits.
Chinese security stands near a Long March 2F rocket carrying Tiangong-1, China's first unmanned space module, stands at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on September 28, 2011 in Jiuquan, Gansu Province of China. Tiangong-1,a small unmanned space lab, will be launched at 21:19 (Beijing time) on September 29, 2011, and will attempt a docking procedure with a Shenzhou 8 spacecraft later in the mission. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
A three minute time exposure shows the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Launch Complex 40, Thursday, January 7, 2021 in Port Canaveral, Fla. The rocket is carrying the Turksat 5A satellite for Turkey. (Photo by Malcolm Denenark/Florida Today via AP Photo)