Month: August 2023

Elaborate live-action trailers crafted to help promote major video game franchises are nothing new. Recall the stirring Hollywood-style shorts produced for “Doom,” “Mass Effect,” “HALO 3: ODST,” “Destiny” and “Gears of War,” for example. And now “Starfield,” an upcoming outer space odyssey from Bethesda Game Studios and Microsoft, is continuing that cinematic marketing tradition with a dynamic live-action teaser introduced at this week’s Gamescon 2023. The trailer beautifully captures the extraordinary game’s expansive scope, exploratory spirit and pure, raw emotions. The main art for the space role-playing game “Starfield.”  (Image…

Where to go for the annular solar eclipse on October 14, 2023, is largely down to where the eclipse path is.  On that day the entire Americas will experience a partial solar eclipse, but the ‘ring of fire’ will only be visible from within a 125-mile (200-kilometer) wide path heading from the northwest U.S. through Central America to Brazil.  That path of the eclipse is the moon‘s antumbra, where the moon appears completely within the sun‘s disk to create the ‘ring of fire’ effect. The light levels will also noticeably…

If you live under a popular plane route, you’re probably no stranger to long, thin clouds in the sky. These are contrails emitted from airplanes.  Contrails, or condensation trails, are essentially human-made clouds; they are trails of condensed water vapor created by jet engines, according to the National Weather Service.  We most commonly see them behind planes at cruising altitude, but they can also be emitted by rockets. Related: Wow! Rare rainbow contrails caught on camera (photos)  How do contrails form? Contrails are created when the hot water vapor emitted…

A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying four astronauts will arrive at the International Space Station early Sunday (Aug. 27) and you can watch it all live online in a free livestream.  The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance is scheduled to reach the International Space Station (ISS) at 8:39 a.m. EDT (1239 GMT), where it will dock itself to a space-facing port on the outpost’s U.S.-built Harmony module.  The docking will mark the end of a nearly 30-hour journey for the capsule’s four-person crew, which launched in the wee hours of Saturday from…

A new record may have just been set for the fastest-moving sloth in the world. And not just any sloth — a three-toed sloth. “It is a three-toed sloth, not a two-toed sloth, because apparently that would be too fast for me,” said Crew-7 pilot Andreas “Andy” Mogensen, a Danish astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA), from on board SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft “Endurance,” which was launched from Florida early Saturday morning (Aug. 26). Now on his way to a six-month stay on the International Space Station, Mogensen, together with…

NASA is seeking education and community organizations to help grow a practical forest of trees with a unique pedigree — the moon. Inspired by an Apollo program astronaut’s initiative, the space agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Forest Service are looking to plant seedlings that were grown from seeds flown around the moon on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission in 2022. More than 1,000 seeds of five different species of tree were flown as part of the official flight kit on the 26-day uncrewed test flight. The Artemis program has…