This recording was made in 2008 at Cornell’s Bailey Hall by the Cornell Symphony Orchestra. The video images come from NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission currently orbiting Saturn.

This isn’t the first time a composer has been inspired by Saturn: the sounds of Saturn are inspiring, too. Diehard Alien fans are scratching their heads and pondering, “But I thought in space, no one could hear you scream?” Technically, this is correct: sound needs a medium through which to propagate, and there isn’t much of one in deep space, which is about as close to a cold, dark perfect vacuum as you can get. But there’s some fine print. Poke around between the planets and other celestial bodies, and you’ll find plasma (hot ionized gas), i.e., in the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, and Saturn’s moon Titan, not to mention Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter. Plasma gas is thinner (by a lot) than the Earth’s atmosphere, but it’s just dense enough to allow sound waves to propagate.

In fact, the sounds of space are far more varied and complex than on Earth, because of the ionization: plasmas produce a mixture of acoustic and electromagnetic waves (the latter usually in the radio frequency of the spectrum). What do plasma waves sound like? It depends. Lightning produces whistling sounds, regardless of whether it strikes on Earth or on Jupiter, and of course, so do the charged particles in the Aurora Borealis. The magnetic fields surrounding the planets can trap electrons, producing bird-like chirps. And the sun emits high-velocity plasma known colloquially as the solar wind, which produces turbulent shock waves and an accompanying roaring boom. The rings of Saturn sound like this:

Read more at discovery news.

It happens only once in a blue moon — and scientists say a blue moon is exactly what we’ll see in the skies this New Year’s Eve.

Don’t expect an azure glow over our lunar satellite, however. The term “blue moon” simply refers to the second full moon in a calendar month, something that hasn’t happened on a New Year’s Eve for nearly 20 years, NASA says.

“December 1990 ended with a blue moon, and many New Year’s Eve parties were themed by the event,” said Professor Philip Hiscock of the department of folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in Canada. “It was a lot of fun.”

Most months have just one full moon, because the 29.5-day cycle of the moon matches up pretty well with the length of calendar months. Occasionally, there will be two full moons in a month, something that happens about every 2½ years, NASA says.

But a blue moon on December 31 is rare.



Elvis Presley crooned about it when he sang the old Rodgers and Hart song “Blue Moon,” in which he stood alone without a dream in his heart or a love of his own.

He struck a more hopeful tone in another tune, singing about his love returning to his arms “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again.” He also covered Bill Monroe’s bluegrass classic, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

It is possible for the moon to have a cerulean hue, NASA says, but that’s sometimes caused by fine dirt circulating in the Earth’s atmosphere or the dark blue tone of the sky.

A blue moon hasn’t always meant the second full moon in a month. Hundreds of years ago, it simply meant “never” or “absurd,” Hiscock said.

“The phrase ‘blue moon’ has been around a long time, well over 400 years, but during that time its meaning has shifted,” he said. “I have counted six different meanings which have been carried by the term, and at least four of them are still current today. That makes discussion of the term a little complicated.”

When the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, it put so much dust in the atmosphere that the moon actually appeared blue — an event so unusual that the term “once in a blue moon” was coined, according to NASA’s National Space Science Data Center. The effect lasted for almost two years, Hiscock said.

Full moons used to have 12 names, one for each month, such as “harvest moon,” NASA said. The term “blue moon” referred to the 13th full moon in a year.

The term acquired its current meaning in the 1940s, after the Farmer’s Almanac of Maine offered an astronomical definition of a blue moon “so convoluted that even professional astronomers struggled to understand it,” NASA wrote on its Web site.

A writer at Sky and Telescope magazine in the late 1940s tried to explain the almanac’s definition by saying it referred to the second full moon in a month.

“That was not correct, but at least it could be understood,” NASA wrote. “And thus the modern blue moon was born.”
cnn.com and photobucket.com

Catching one of nature’s jaw-dropping light shows, the auroras, can be a chilly experience, especially in the northern hemisphere. Away from the distracting city lights and city comforts and into dark, cold wilderness can be a daunting experience for some. So for those of us who would still like to catch a glimpse of the awe-inspiring northern lights, but would prefer to be relatively warm, there is a place out in northern Finland, amongst the reindeer, where you can find a field of igloos. Except the igloos here are not made from snow. Instead, the igloos here are made from glass that might be mistaken for clear transparent ice. This is Hotel Kakslauttanen, where the experience of viewing the northern lights can be done from a comfortable bed in a warm room with a special glass that keeps all the heat in. But the star attraction is the panoramic view of the majestic night sky. And hopefully, from your bed, you’ll be able to catch a glimpse of nature’s light show, the aurora borealis.



Hotel Kakslauttanen. In addition to the ice igloo, the hotel has other attractions such as a glass teepee for cocktail parties under the northern lights, a snow chapel for services, and this stylish ice lounge. Any guy in a tux here would feel right at home as a penguin.



Via Travelphant