APOD - Favorite Astronomical Photos

as on old forum, also start thread here for storing favorite astronomical images of mine, which are not to be / cannot be overlayed on GSky.

here we go with the first one by a compatriot of mine:

Little Planet Astro Camp
Image Credit & Copyright: György Soponyai

Day and night on this little planet look a lot like day and night on planet Earth. In fact, the images used to construct the little planet projection, a digitally warped and stitched mosaic covering 360x180 degrees, were taken during day and night near Tarján, Hungary, planet Earth. They span a successful 33-hour-long photo experiment at July's Hungarian Astronomical Association Astro Camp. The time-series composite follows the solar disk in 20 minute intervals from sunrise to sunset and over six hours of star trails in the northern night sky centered on the North Celestial Pole near bright star Polaris. The orbiting International Space Station traced the offset arc across the northern night. Below the little planet's nightside horizon, red light lamps of fellow astro-campers left the night-long, dancing trails.

full image and more from source: nasa-apod
 AstroCamp.kmz (789 B)

Have you ever had difficulties to imagine sizes in astronomy? Now check this one:

Image Credit & Copyright: Pete Lawrence

What's happening at the edge of the Sun? Although it may look like a monster is rampaging, what is pictured is actually only a monster prominence -- a sheath of thin gas held above the surface by the Sun's magnetic field. The solar event was captured just this past weekend with a small telescope, with the resulting image then inverted and false-colored. As indicated with illustrative lines, the prominence rises over 50,000 kilometers above the Sun's surface, making even our 12,700-diameter Earth seem small by comparison. Below the monster prominence is active region 12585, while light colored filaments can be seen hovering over a flowing solar carpet of fibrils. Filaments are actually prominences seen against the disk of the Sun, while similarly, fibrils are actually spicules seen against the disk. Energetic events like this are becoming less common as the Sun evolves toward a minimum in its 11-year activity cycle.

more from source: nasa-apod

Now not a beautiful, detailed photo, but a great interactive global windmap generated by supercoumputers on nasa-apod page.

For full control mode with many interesting adjustable layers, send your browser directly to earth.nullschool.net

best,
g

full control mode with many interesting adjustable layers,

Thanks for posting this link, which I have saved to Favorites, and will probably look at every time a typhoon roars in our direction. It's a great representational model of wind speed and direction, but wouldn't it be great is somebody could figure out how to do this kind of model in 3-dimentions.



I was just saying this when you made you last edit. I couldn't find how control adjustable layers. The only control I was able to find was moving around the globe and zooming in or out. Is there more that I haven't found?

I couldn't find how control adjustable layers.

Sorry.  Didn't look hard enough.  Click on the word "earth" for a menu of rich choices (but, alas, no 3D modeling).

Oct 11, 2016 9:33:08 GMT washi said:

...a menu of rich choices...

yep! most interesting for me was that one can choose also different heights from where they want (wind) data visualisation.
whoa.. so fast winds high above and how much more simple turbulent system!

Just to pick a great example of this natural phenomenon:

Image Credit & Copyright: Greg Chavdarian

On October 15, standing near the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea and looking away from a gorgeous sunset produced this magnificent snapshot of a Full Moon rising within the volcanic mountain's shadow. An alignment across the Solar System is captured in the stunning scene and seeming contradiction of bright Moon in dark shadow. The triangular appearance of a shadow cast by a mountain's irregular profile is normal. It's created by the perspective of the distant mountaintop view through the dense atmosphere. Rising as the Sun sets, the antisolar point or the point opposite the Sun is close to the perspective's vanishing point near the mountain shadow's peak. But extending in the antisolar direction, Earth's conical shadow is only a few lunar diameter's wide at the distance of the Moon. So October's Full Hunters Moon is still reflecting sunlight, seen through the mountain's atmospheric shadow but found too far from the antisolar point and the Earth's extended shadow to be eclipsed.

Full image, further credit and more from NASA-APOD:
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap161021.html

And only one another earth based photo to the collection of a phenomenon should be dubbed both as atmospheric or astronomical:

"
Image Credit & Copyright: Bjørn Jørgensen

...A large coronal mass ejection occurred on our Sun five days before this 2012 image was taken, throwing a cloud of fast moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Although most of this cloud passed above the Earth, some of it impacted our Earth's magnetosphere and resulted in spectacular auroras being seen at high northern latitudes. Featured here is a particularly photogenic auroral corona captured above Grotfjord, Norway. To some, this shimmering green glow of recombining atmospheric oxygen might appear as a large eagle, but feel free to share what it looks like to you. Although now past Solar Maximum, our Sun continues to show occasional activity creating impressive auroras on Earth visible only last week."

Full image, further credit and more from NASA-APOD:
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap161023.html

oldie but goodie, even not an APOD but the EBFAAWPOD (ever best favorite amateur airplane-window photo of the day) (:
"
Image Credit & Copyright: Mark Hersch

How could that city be upside-down? The city, Chicago, was actually perfectly right-side up. The long shadows it projected onto nearby Lake Michigan near sunset, however, when seen in reflection, made the buildings appear inverted. This fascinating, puzzling, yet beautiful image was captured by a photographer in 2014 on an airplane on approach to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. The Sun can be seen both above and below the cloud deck, with the later reflected in the calm lake. As a bonus, if you look really closely -- and this is quite a challenge -- you can find another airplane in the image, likely also on approach to the same airport."

full image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov

A striking view of Earth taken in November of 1969:

Earth Seen from the Window of the Apollo 12 Spacecraft - Photograph by NASA

In this striking photo we see Earth from the window of the Apollo 12 spacecraft. You can see the original photo here, which was rotated and color-corrected by psychgeeker on reddit.

Apollo 12 was the sixth manned flight in the United States Apollo program and the second to land on the Moon. It was launched on November 14, 1969, from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, four months after Apollo 11. Mission commander Charles “Pete” Conrad and Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean performed just over one day and seven hours of lunar surface activity while Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon remained in lunar orbit. The landing site for the mission was located in the southeastern portion of the Ocean of Storms.

Conrad and Bean carried the first color television camera to the lunar surface on an Apollo flight, but transmission was lost after Bean accidentally destroyed the camera by pointing it at the Sun. On one of two moonwalks, they visited the Surveyor and removed some parts for return to Earth. The mission ended on November 24 with a successful splashdown. - wikipedia


For instant full image visit primary source: TwistedSifter

FULL IMAGE
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

Scroll right /medium size image on sourcepage linked below or full image - the editor/ and you can cruise along the icy rings of Saturn. This high resolution scan is a mosaic of images presented in natural color. The images were recorded in May 2007 over about 2.5 hours as the Cassini spacecraft passed above the unlit side of the rings. To help track your progress, major rings and gaps are labeled along with the distance from the center of the gas giant in kilometers. The alphabetical designation of Saturn's rings is historically based on their order of discovery; rings A and B are the bright rings separated by the Cassini division. In order of increasing distance from Saturn, the seven main rings run D,C,B,A,F,G,E. (Faint, outer rings G and E are not imaged here.) Four days from now, on November 29, Cassini will make a close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan and use the large moon's gravity to nudge the spacecraft into a series of 20 daring, elliptical, ring-grazing orbits. Diving through the ring plane just 11,000 kilometers outside the F ring (far right) Cassini's first ring-graze will be on December 4.

all credit at apod.nasa.gov

I feel a strong need to make it audible...

well not an exact astronomical one again, even not only a simple nature-photo, stars also can be seen at least..(:

From the 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year Contest: 3rd Place – Landscape:

Photo and caption by Santiago Borja / 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year

An isolated cumulonimbus storm developed over the Pacific Ocean a few miles south of the coast of Panama City. It sat atop a temperature inversion that created a thick overcast layer of clouds. The strong updrafts of the storm quickly reached the tropopause and spread out, creating the characteristic anvil. The strongest updrafts pierced the tropopause and turned into what scientists call the overshooting tops. The entire frame was lit by a single lightning from within the storm in a moonless night on June 16, 2016.

check all winners' photos at TwistedSifter

Another geat shot from the Saturn-system by NASA Cassini Imaging Team. They took the image with the Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera on Oct. 22, 2016. (Earth Time) (:

Mimas, Crater, and Mountain
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

Mimas is an icy, crater-pocked moon of Saturn a mere 400 kilometers (250 miles) in diameter. Its largest crater Herschel is nearly 140 kilometers wide. About a third the diameter of Mimas itself, Herschel crater gives the small moon an ominous appearance, especially for scifi fans of the Death Star battlestation of Star Wars fame. In fact, only a slightly bigger impact than the one that created such a large crater on a small moon could have destroyed Mimas entirely. In this Cassini image from October 2016, the anti-Saturn hemisphere of the synchronously rotating moon is bathed in sunlight, its large crater near the right limb. Casting a long shadow across the crater floor, Herschel's central mountain peak is nearly as tall as Mount Everest on planet Earth.

full image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov

many cool animations, illustrations, drawings and many-many articles available, here I post only this overview illustration of this amazing system.
great discovery, my sci-fi mind cannot stop still...


click for annotated HI-RES image
article and more from source: jpl.nasa.gov

other sources:
more illustrations and other article at nasa.gov/press-release

and also would like to make my overlay with this nasa-apod, so....

...could anyone point to the star in GSky?

Thanks,
g

for the first glance burning bush from the bible crossed my mind:

instant FULL IMAGE
Image Credit & Copyright: Alyn Wallace Photography

...visual coincidence between the dark branches of a nearby tree and bright glow of a distant aurora. The beauty of the aurora -- combined with how it seemed to mimic a tree right nearby -- mesmerized the photographer to such a degree that he momentarily forgot to take pictures. When viewed at the right angle, it seemed that this tree had aurora for leaves! Fortunately, before the aurora morphed into a different overall shape, he came to his senses and capture the awe-inspiring momentary coincidence. Typically triggered by solar explosions, aurora are caused by high energy electrons impacting the Earth's atmosphere around 150 kilometers up. The unusual Earth-sky collaboration was witnessed earlier this month in Iceland.

more from source: apod.nasa.gov

not only to represent it's kind in my selection and introducing images made by a great tool: a Solar System Radar, but
also to raise attention for importance of the work they do involved with that near-earth-objects-observations-program orwhaddaheck ehh..(:

Asteroid 2014 JO25 - Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Goldstone Solar System Radar

A day before its closest approach, asteroid 2014 JO25 was imaged by radar with the 70-meter antenna of NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. This grid of 30 radar images, top left to lower right, reveals the two-lobed shape of the asteroid that rotates about once every five hours. Its largest lobe is about 610 meters across. On the list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, this space rock made its close approach to our fair planet on April 19, flying safely past at a distance of 1.8 million kilometers. That's over four times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The asteroid was a faint and fast moving speck visible in backyard telescopes. Asteroid 2014 JO25 was discovered in May 2014 by the Catalina Sky Survey, a project of NASA's Near-Earth Objects Observations Program in collaboration with the University of Arizona.

more from source: apod.nasa.gov

something new and literally great:

Image Credit: NASA, CXC, GSFC, Stephen Walker, et al.

The cosmic swirl and slosh of giant waves in an enormous reservoir of glowing hot gas are traced in this enhanced X-ray image from the Chandra Observatory. The frame spans over 1 million light-years across the center of the nearby Perseus Galaxy Cluster, some 240 million light-years distant. Like other clusters of galaxies, most of the observable mass in the Perseus cluster is in the form of the cluster-filling gas. With temperatures in the tens of millions of degrees, the gas glows brightly in X-rays. Computer simulations can reproduce details of the structures sloshing through the Perseus cluster's X-ray hot gas, including the remarkable concave bay seen below and left of center. About 200,000 light-years across, twice the size of the Milky Way, the bay's formation indicates that Perseus itself was likely grazed by a smaller galaxy cluster billions of years ago.

full image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov

now something, we really did not know about Steve: ......(:

All-Sky Steve
Image Credit & Copyright: Alan Dyer, Amazingsky.com, TWAN

Familiar green and red tinted auroral emission floods the sky along the northern (top) horizon in this fish-eye panorama projection from September 27. On the mild, clear evening the Milky Way tracks through the zenith of a southern Alberta sky and ends where the six-day-old Moon sets in the southwest. The odd, isolated, pink and whitish arc across the south has come to be known as Steve. The name was given to the phenomenon by the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group who had recorded appearances of the aurora-like feature. Sometimes mistakenly identified as a proton aurora or proton arc, the mysterious Steve arcs seem associated with aurorae but appear closer to the equator than the auroral curtains. Widely documented by citizen scientists and recently directly explored by a Swarm mission satellite, Steve arcs have been measured as thermal emission from flowing gas rather than emission excited by energetic electrons. Even though a reverse-engineered acronym that fits the originally friendly name is Sudden Thermal Emission from Velocity Enhancement, his origin is still mysterious.

more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171014.html

related read about the discovery at bbc.com and scienceworldreport.com

Illustration Credit & Copyright Tom Abel & Ralf Kaehler (KIPAC, SLAC), AMNH

Explanation: Is our universe haunted? It might look that way on this dark matter map. The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly deflect light, and why visible matter is distributed as it is both in the local universe and on the cosmic microwave background. The featured image from the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium Space Show Dark Universe highlights one example of how pervasive dark matter might haunt our universe. In this frame from a detailed computer simulation, complex filaments of dark matter, shown in black, are strewn about the universe like spider webs, while the relatively rare clumps of familiar baryonic matter are colored orange. These simulations are good statistical matches to astronomical observations. In what is perhaps a scarier turn of events, dark matter -- although quite strange and in an unknown form -- is no longer thought to be the strangest source of gravity in the universe. That honor now falls to dark energy, a more uniform source of repulsive gravity that seems to now dominate the expansion of the entire universe.

credit and more from source nasa-apod article:
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171031.html

creepy resemblance with (illustrations of) nervous system

download large image in quotation below and you will see such patterns in Earth's watersphere what one can see in Jupiter's atmosphere:

download large image (9 MB, JPEG, 5000x5000) / acquired September 2, 2017

The third image is a blend of art and science. Like a photographer adjusting lighting and using filters, Norman Kuring of NASA’s Ocean Biology group works with various software programs and color-filtering techniques to draw out the fine details in the water. The detailed swirls in the chlorophyll-rich water are all quite real; Kuring simply separates and enhances certain shades and tones in the radiometer data to make the biomass more visible.

...

Read full article on nasa-EO:
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91198

Probably my last post this year, so all the best in the new one for everyone who use the Gregorian calendar, and Merry Christmas for those who celebrate!

Also let me let this thread alone for a while with this beautiful nasa-apod composite image included:

Solstice Sun and Milky Way

Composite Image Credit & Copyright: Stefan Seip (TWAN)

Welcome to December's solstice, first day of winter in the north and summer for the southern hemisphere. Astronomical markers of the seasons, solstice and equinox dates are based on the Sun's place in its annual journey along the ecliptic, through planet Earth's sky. At this solstice, the Sun reaches its maximum southern declination of -23.5 degrees today at 16:28 UTC, while its right ascension coordinate on the celestial sphere is 18 hours. That puts the Sun in the constellation Sagittarius in a direction near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. In fact, if you could see today's Solstice Sun against faint background stars and nebulae (that's really hard to do, especially in the daytime ...) your view might look something like this composited panorama. To make it, images of our fair galaxy were taken under dark Namibian night skies, then stitched together in a panoramic view. From a snapshot made on December 21, 2015, the Sun was digitally overlayed as a brilliant star at today's northern winter solstice position, close to the center of the Milky Way.
...

Full image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171221.html

See you next year!

g

In the Valley of Orion

Visualization Credit: NASA, ESA, F. Summers, G. Bacon,
Z. Levay, J. DePasquale, L. Frattare, M. Robberto, M. Gennaro (STScI) and R. Hurt (Caltech/IPAC)

This exciting and unfamiliar view of the Orion Nebula is a visualization based on astronomical data and movie rendering techniques. Up close and personal with a famous stellar nursery normally seen from 1,500 light-years away, the digitally modeled frame transitions from a visible light representation based on Hubble data on the left to infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope on the right. The perspective at the center looks along a valley over a light-year wide, in the wall of the region's giant molecular cloud. Orion's valley ends in a cavity carved by the energetic winds and radiation of the massive central stars of the Trapezium star cluster. The single frame is part of a multiwavelength, three-dimensional video that lets the viewer experience an immersive, three minute flight through the Great Nebula of Orion.

full image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180117.html

Total Solar Lunar Eclipse
Composite Image Credit & Copyright: Wang Letian, Zhang Jiajie

Explanation: This digitally processed and composited picture creatively compares two famous eclipses in one; the total lunar eclipse (left) of January 31, and the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017. The Moon appears near mid-totality in both the back-to-back total eclipses. In the lunar eclipse, its surface remains faintly illuminated in Earth's dark reddened shadow. But in the solar eclipse the Moon is in silhouette against the Sun's bright disk, where the otherwise dark lunar surface is just visible due to earthshine. Also seen in the lunar-aligned image pair are faint stars in the night sky surrounding the eclipsed Moon. Stunning details of prominences and coronal streamers surround the eclipsed Sun. The total phase of the Great American Eclipse of August 21 lasted about 2 minutes or less for locations along the Moon's shadow path. From planet Earth's night side, totality for the Super Blue Blood Moon of January 31 lasted well over an hour.

full image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180209.html

from the beginning when hear about that young man: Elon Musk, one expression comes into my mind: likeable, and reading wikipedia article of his I understand why:

During his childhood he was an avid reader. At age 10, he developed an interest in computing with the Commodore VIC-20. He taught himself computer programming at the age of 12, sold the code of a BASIC-based video game he created called Blastar, to a magazine called PC and Office Technology, for approximately $500. A web version of the game is available online. His childhood reading included Isaac Asimov's Foundation series from which he drew the lesson that "you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one."
...
Musk stated that he wants "to die on Mars, just not on impact". ...

I like his brilliant inventions on e-force and cost reductions in rocket tecnology so, that I can forgive him whether if somewhat seems to be opinionated.

now with this latest "show" besides its outcomes in rocket science and space transport, he has made a (funny?) monument for eternity: a memorial of today's technology and memorial of an ingenious young man.

Car Orbiting Earth
Credit: SpaceX

Explanation: Last week, a car orbited the Earth. The car, created by humans and robots on the Earth, was launched by the SpaceX Company to demonstrate the ability of its Falcon Heavy Rocket to place spacecraft out in the Solar System. Purposely fashioned to be whimsical, the iconic car was thought a better demonstration object than concrete blocks. A mannequin clad in a spacesuit -- dubbed the Starman -- sits in the driver's seat. The featured image is a frame from a video taken by one of three cameras mounted on the car. These cameras, connected to the car's battery, are now out of power. The car, attached to a second stage booster, soon left Earth orbit and will orbit the Sun between Earth and the asteroid belt indefinitely -- perhaps until billions of years from now when our Sun expands into a Red Giant. If ever recovered, what's left of the car may become a unique window into technologies developed on Earth in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

many more useful links from source: nasa-apod/ap180213

I hate development and modern technology! It is not alike head of a horse anymore! (:

Horsehead: A Wider View

Composition and Processing: Robert Gendler
Image Data: ESO, VISTA, HLA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Combined image data from the massive, ground-based VISTA telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope was used to create this wide perspective of the interstellar landscape surrounding the famous Horsehead Nebula. Captured at near-infrared wavelengths, the region's dusty molecular cloud sprawls across the scene that covers an angle about two-thirds the size of the Full Moon on the sky. Left to right the frame spans just over 10 light-years at the Horsehead's estimated distance of 1,600 light-years. Also known as Barnard 33, the still recognizable Horsehead Nebula stands at the upper right, the near-infrared glow of a dusty pillar topped with newborn stars. Below and left, the bright reflection nebula NGC 2023 is itself the illuminated environs of a hot young star. Obscuring clouds below the base of the Horsehead and on the outskirts of NGC 2023 show the tell-tale far red emission of energetic jets, known as Herbig-Haro objects, also associated with newborn stars.

Full image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180309.html

NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team
Reprocessing by Maksim Kakitsev

Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and some 45 times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie a mere 7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a composite of Hubble Space Telescope image data from 2016, reprocessed to present the nebula's intense narrowband emission in an approximate true color scheme.

Full image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180419.html

The Observable Universe

FULL IMAGE

Illustration Credit & Licence: Wikipedia, Pablo Carlos Budassi

How far can you see? Everything you can see, and everything you could possibly see, right now, assuming your eyes could detect all types of radiations around you -- is the observable universe. In visible light, the farthest we can see comes from the cosmic microwave background, a time 13.8 billion years ago when the universe was opaque like thick fog. Some neutrinos and gravitational waves that surround us come from even farther out, but humanity does not yet have the technology to detect them. The featured image illustrates the observable universe on an increasingly compact scale, with the Earth and Sun at the center surrounded by our Solar System, nearby stars, nearby galaxies, distant galaxies, filaments of early matter, and the cosmic microwave background. Cosmologists typically assume that our observable universe is just the nearby part of a greater entity known as "the universe" where the same physics applies. However, there are several lines of popular but speculative reasoning that assert that even our universe is part of a greater multiverse where either different physical constants occur, different physical laws apply, higher dimensions operate, or slightly different-by-chance versions of our standard universe exist.

more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180508.html

best ever yet image of this beautiful astronomical object:

Pillars of the Eagle Nebula in Infrared
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Processing: Lluís Romero >>FULL IMAGE<<

Newborn stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. Gravitationally contracting in pillars of dense gas and dust, the intense radiation of these newly-formed bright stars is causing surrounding material to boil away. This image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in near infrared light, allows the viewer to see through much of the thick dust that makes the pillars opaque in visible light. The giant structures are light years in length and dubbed informally the Pillars of Creation. Associated with the open star cluster M16, the Eagle Nebula lies about 6,500 light years away. The Eagle Nebula is an easy target for small telescopes in a nebula-rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).

more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180620.html

now something one would not expect in an astronomy thread:

Methane Bubbles Frozen in Lake Baikal
Image Credit & Copyright: Kristina Makeeva

Explanation: What are these bubbles frozen into Lake Baikal? Methane. Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Russia, is the world's largest (by volume), oldest, and deepest lake, containing over 20% of the world's fresh water. The lake is also a vast storehouse of methane, a greenhouse gas that, if released, could potentially increase the amount of infrared light absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, and so increase the average temperature of the entire planet. Fortunately, the amount of methane currently bubbling out is not climatologically important. It is not clear what would happen, though, were temperatures to significantly increase in the region, or if the water level in Lake Baikal were to drop. Pictured, bubbles of rising methane froze during winter into the exceptionally clear ice covering the lake.

more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap181218.html

also read great report at petapixel!


***

related from oGEC: (dead link)
Circles in Thin Ice, Lake Baikal, Russia 

source: nasa EO article from spring of 2009.

and another occurence from 2016.:

source: nasa-EO

***
revised kmz overlay with description, great 360°Cities location and placemark for Shaman Stone attached:
Lake Baikal.kmz (3.41 KB)
also worth to check historical imagery above the water for great ice-views.

I could not locate bubbles-photo scene so far...

with stunning details:

A Rainbow Geminid Meteor // (FULL IMAGE)
Image Credit & Copyright: Dean Rowe
...
Meteors can be colorful. While the human eye usually cannot discern many colors, cameras often can. Pictured is a Geminid captured by camera during last week's meteor shower that was not only impressively bright, but colorful. The radiant grit cast off by asteroid 3200 Phaethon blazed a path across Earth's atmosphere longer than 60 times the angular diameter of the Moon. Colors in meteors usually originate from ionized elements released as the meteor disintegrates, with blue-green typically originating from magnesium, calcium radiating violet, and nickel glowing green. Red, however, typically originates from energized nitrogen and oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. This bright meteoric fireball was gone in a flash -- less than a second -- but it left a wind-blown ionization trail that remained visible for several minutes, the start of which can be seen here.

more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap181219.html

***
not to bump this thread, only I edit to include this related one:

Meteor Misses Galaxy
Image Credit: Aman Chokshi
...
The galaxy was never in danger. For one thing, the Triangulum galaxy (M33), pictured, is much bigger than the tiny grain of rock at the head of the meteor. For another, the galaxy is much farther away -- in this instance 3 million light years as opposed to only about 0.0003 light seconds. Even so, the meteor's path took it angularly below the galaxy. Also the wind high in Earth's atmosphere blew the meteor's glowing evaporative molecule train away from the galaxy, in angular projection. Still, the astrophotographer was quite lucky to capture both a meteor and a galaxy in a single exposure -- which was subsequently added to two other images of M33 to bring up the spiral galaxy's colors. At the end, the meteor was gone in a second, but the galaxy will last billions of years.

more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190430.html

***
so as I do with this one... ( :

A Colorful Quadrantid Meteor
Image Credit & Copyright: Frank Kuszaj

Explanation: Meteors can be colorful. While the human eye usually cannot discern many colors, cameras often can. Pictured is a Quadrantids meteor captured by camera over Missouri, USA, early this month that was not only impressively bright, but colorful. The radiant grit, likely cast off by asteroid 2003 EH1, blazed a path across Earth's atmosphere. Colors in meteors usually originate from ionized elements released as the meteor disintegrates, with blue-green typically originating from magnesium, calcium radiating violet, and nickel glowing green. Red, however, typically originates from energized nitrogen and oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. This bright meteoric fireball was gone in a flash -- less than a second -- but it left a wind-blown ionization trail that remained visible for several minutes.

hi-res image and more from source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210202.html