Blogs & Ecology

The legendary Hubble Space Telescope is set to be decommissioned in 2010. While the new telescope on the station, set to launch only a year later, will be far more advanced, many astronomy fanatics will always remember the Hubble as a source of great joy, and sometimes, frustration. In tribute, here are the top ten shots taken, or contributed to, by the Hubble Telescope.

10. Shot on May 11, 2002, this anomaly, called the Cone Nebula, is a seven light-year long pillar residing in a violent nebula where many new stars are being born.

Shaun from Deputy Dog has reavealed the lengths some people will go to to get a suntan. In an attempt to have sunlight 24/7, Italian ship engineer, Angelo Invernizzi, from Marcellise, and his architect friend Ettore Fagiouli created a house that rotates to face the sun all year-round.

Sporting a 43 meter tower and weighing a whopping 1,500 tons the wedged shaped building rotates on a circular track at a speed of 4mm per second, which means the building would take just over 9 hours to make a complete rotation.

Built between 1929 and 1935, this amazing feat of architectural brilliance was way ahead of its time.

It might not quite be the Whole Earth Catalog of the glorious 1960s, but I like it anyway. Asian Productivity Organization publishes its biannual Green Products Directory with the latest from our part of the world (was WEC ever truly global?) and the listings are comprehensive.

It might not quite be the Whole Earth Catalog of the glorious 1960s, but I like it anyway. Asian Productivity Organization publishes its biannual Green Products Directory with the latest from our part of the world (was WEC ever truly global?) and the listings are comprehensive.

I know that this comes as a shock, seeing as the sun is powered by the most powerful fusion reaction we can easily wrap our paltry little minds around, but the tsunamis of hot gas moving around its surface were filmed, and they move really, really fast.

Image from NASA

Considering that we didn’t even recognize that this phenomena existed until the 1990s, I think it’s pretty impressive that it took less than 20 years to capture it on film.