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The Expedition 24 crew on the International Space Station photographed this image of polar mesospheric clouds illuminated by an orbital sunrise. Polar mesospheric, or noctilucent ("night shining"), clouds usually are seen at twilight, following the setting of the sun below the horizon and darkening of Earth's surface. Occasionally the station's orbital track becomes nearly parallel to Earth's day/night terminator for a time, allowing the clouds to be visible to the crew at times other than the usual twilight because of the station's altitude.

This photograph shows polar mesospheric clouds illuminated by the rising, rather than setting, sun at center right. Low clouds on the horizon appear yellow and orange, while higher clouds and aerosols are illuminated a brilliant white. Polar mesospheric clouds appear as light blue ribbons extending across the top of the image. The station was located over the Greek island of Kos in the Aegean Sea (near the southwestern coastline of Turkey) when the image was taken at approximately midnight local time. The orbital complex was tracking northeastward, nearly parallel to the terminator, making it possible to observe an apparent "sunrise" located almost due north. A similar unusual alignment of the ISS orbit track, terminator position and seasonal position of Earth's orbit around the sun allowed for this striking imagery of over the Southern Hemisphere.

Image Credit: NASA

Richard Devine is an Atlanta-based electronic musician. He is recognized for producing a layered and heavily processed sound, combining influences from old and modern electronic music. Devine largely records for the Miami-based Schematic Records. As a result of praise of his music from Autechre as well as a remix of Aphex Twin's Come To Daddy, Devine recorded an album for Warp Records which was jointly released by Schematic and Warp.

Pete Samples is a Canadian electronic music project, fronted by Winnipeg and Montreal musician Brent Freedman. Pete Samples is a solo artist and a multi-instrumentalist

Spiral galaxy NGC 4921 presently is estimated to be 320 million light years distant. This image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is being used to identify key stellar distance markers known as Cepheid variable stars. The magnificent spiral NGC 4921 has been informally dubbed anemic because of its low rate of star formation and low surface brightness. Visible in the image are, from the center, a bright nucleus, a bright central bar, a prominent ring of dark dust, blue clusters of recently formed stars, several smaller companion galaxies, unrelated galaxies in the far distant universe, and unrelated stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Cook (LLNL)

I stumbled upon Hipmunk.com a few days ago and was just amazed at how well they got flight search down. They launched on August 17, 2010. 

At first you might be taken back by the unusual UI (user interface), but after doing a few searches you will start to see the benefits.  It takes minutes to do what took hours on regular old flight search (search multiple flights).  Is it me, or do we need to leave everything up for the Hackers/Developers to get right?  Great job guys!  

• Allow you to visualize how your flights compare in time and duration
• Instantly sort results by price, duration, number of stops, etc.
• Keep multiple searches open at once
• Instantly filter results by time of day, using our sweet draggable triangles
• Hide flights you'd be crazy to take
• Show all results on a single page

Here is a quick bio of the company:

Search is the first element you see (besides "hipmunk" the chipmunk) when visiting the homepage, not spam, ads, or travel deals.

Search is super fast.  At first the layout of flights might confuse you, but think about it for a minute....understand?  Drag the black time indicator to you desired time - see the two different time zones? You can sort by: agony, price, stops, departure time, arrival time, and duration. 

Tabbed searching!  I've have never experienced faster searching to date, especially when doing multiple searches. On the right you will notice worse buttons, which shows deals that most would not want; click the button to unhide them.  Click any of the select buttons on the left to see more details and book your flight.

This image shows the eruption of a galactic “super-volcano” in the massive galaxy M87, as witnessed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NSF's Very Large Array (VLA). At a distance of about 50 million light years, M87 is relatively close to Earth and lies at the center of the Virgo cluster, which contains thousands of galaxies.

The cluster surrounding M87 is filled with hot gas glowing in X-ray light (and shown in blue) that is detected by Chandra. As this gas cools, it can fall toward the galaxy's center where it should continue to cool even faster and form new stars.

However, radio observations with the VLA (red) suggest that in M87 jets of very energetic particles produced by the black hole interrupt this process. These jets lift up the relatively cool gas near the center of the galaxy and produce shock waves in the galaxy's atmosphere because of their supersonic speed. The interaction of this cosmic “eruption” with the galaxy's environment is very similar to that of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland that occurred in 2010. With Eyjafjallajokull, pockets of hot gas blasted through the surface of the lava, generating shock waves that can be seen passing through the grey smoke of the volcano. This hot gas then rises up in the atmosphere, dragging the dark ash with it. This process can be seen in a movie of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano where the shock waves propagating in the smoke are followed by the rise of dark ash clouds into the atmosphere.

In the analogy with Eyjafjallajokull, the energetic particles produced in the vicinity of the black hole rise through the X-ray emitting atmosphere of the cluster, lifting up the coolest gas near the center of M87 in their wake. This is similar to the hot volcanic gases drag up the clouds of dark ash. And just like the volcano here on Earth, shockwaves can be seen when the black hole pumps energetic particles into the cluster gas.

Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/KIPAC/N. Werner et al Radio: NSF/NRAO/AUI/W. Cotton