The Space subsite covers all sorts of stories from stargazing to planetary exploration, and from explainers on geological phenomena to marvelling at pretty places. Here’s stories from April that you may have missed.
Not everything gets shared to the io9 main page. Here’s the April stories exclusive to the Space Subsite:
Stargazing at Dark Sky Parks in Arizona, Texas, and Utah.
Weather phenomena: pre-El Niño slosh in the Pacific, weird vocabulary, evaporation of a thin rainbow film, atmospheric layers.
Landforms: not-just-volcanic islands, Landsat collection, and Hawaiian volcanoes starting forest fires.
Space Exploration: how Curiosity gets those beautiful selfies, proposed trajectory for ISEE if the hack succeeds, Rosetta’s original rocket exploded, negative impact of success on NASA’s budget, and the Kerbal Space Program asteroid-module.
Earth: surreal jellyfish-balloons launched in Antarctica, green/white census map for France, portrait of the Earth from the Sun, and using infrared photography to monitor vegetation stress.
Supernova: using the Doppler Effect to determine geometry, multi-wavelength astrophotography for structure, and chemical makeup over time.
Science-inspired: satellite map carpets, Geoscience cakes, and a 1970s astronaut toy.
Geoscience: Peeps for trace fossils, 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and a disaster-simulator game.
Want something more popular? Many stories are shared to the io9 Mainpage; here’s a few of them from April:
Disasters: earthquakes in British Columbia and Chile, personal risk assessments, and controlled burns.
Design: tourism in Chernobyl, student-designed space stations, dino-cookies, and Star Wars tea.
Equipment: transporting telescopes, destructive material testing, massive wind-turbines, Soyuz spacecraft, rocket aerospikes, and Deep Space communication network.
Asteroids & Meteorites: an asteroid seen from Mars, atmospheric signal of a fireball impact, and spotting meteorites while skydiving.
Space: stellar fusion game,first spaceflight, weird landforms on Mars, early space-suit, relative motion, and boomerangs in space
Earth: lab-created volcanic lightning, algae blooms in the ocean, Fossil Rock Anthem, salt ponds, climate change, fossils & politics, and how volcanoes become atolls.
Top image: Portion of Cygnus Loop in the ultraviolet wavelength. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. I’m an io9 Recruit, which means I have a limited time to build traffic to the Space subsite. If you see something you like, please pass it on!