Perspective

First ever black hole image released

Tonight’s full Moon is also the Harvest Moon because it falls closest to the Autumnal Equinox. More lunar facts: http://go.nasa.gov/2yskA5F

Hurricane Harvey has been upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane, seen here from the International Space Station. Hurricane Harvey is predicted to hit land at 1:00 am CDT according to the National Hurricane Center. Details: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/harvey-atlantic-ocean

Solar eclipse from the space!

NASA's Cassini probe just got closer to Saturn than ever before — here's what its death spiral is revealing To prevent Cassini from crashing into and contaminating the oceans on Saturn's moons, NASA has directed it onto a crash course with the planet itself.

Jupiter's clouds of many colors are seen in this image from our Juno spacecraft as it was racing away from the planet following its seventh close pass on May 19, 2017, from about 29,100 miles (46,900 km) above the cloud tops. Take a look: http://go.nasa.gov/2sBCBMe

Enhanced Image by Gerald Eichstadt and Sean Doran (CC BY-NC-SA) based on images provided Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Turquoise Swirls in the Black Sea

Most summers, jewel-toned hues appear in the Black Sea. The turquoise swirls are not the brushstrokes of a painting; they indicate the presence of phytoplankton, which trace the flow of water currents and eddies.

On May 29, 2017, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured the data for this image of an ongoing phytoplankton bloom in the Black Sea. The image is a mosaic, composed from multiple satellite passes over the region.

Phytoplankton are floating, microscopic organisms that make their own food from sunlight and dissolved nutrients. Here, ample water flow from rivers like the Danube and Dnieper carries nutrients to the Black Sea. In general, phytoplankton support fish, shellfish, and other marine organisms. But large, frequent blooms can lead to eutrophication—the loss of oxygen from the water—and end up suffocating marine life.

One type of phytoplankton commonly found in the Black Sea are coccolithophores—microscopic plankton that are plated with white calcium carbonate. When aggregated in large numbers, these reflective plates are easily visible from space as bright, milky water.

“The May ramp-up in reflectivity in the Black Sea, with peak brightness in June, seems consistent with results from other years,” said Norman Kuring, an ocean scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Although Kuring does not study this region, the bloom this year is one of the brightest to catch his eye since 2012.

Other types of phytoplankton can look much different in satellite imagery. “It’s important to remember that not all phytoplankton blooms make the water brighter,” Kuring said. “Diatoms, which also bloom in the Black Sea, tend to darken water more than they brighten it.”

https://go.nasa.gov/2rf52PI

The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 3597 - the product of a collision between two galaxies - slowly evolving to become a giant elliptical galaxy. This type of galaxy has grown more common as the Universe has evolved, with initially small galaxies merging and progressively building up into larger galactic structures over time. See http://spacetelescope.org/images/potw1602a/

ESA's deep-space tracking station in Malargüe, Argentina, will receive a €4m tech upgrade in the next 18 months to make it ready for future high-bitrate missions like BepiColombo, JUICE and Euclid. The upgrade was announced at the station today. News via http://www.esa.int/mlgupgrade Images credit: ESA/D. Pazos

To help you celebrate , here are postcards of our home planet 🌎! Send to a friend or keep them for yourself: http://go.nasa.gov/2oTUEtS