The aurora is nothing short of occipital ecstasy. It is always moving, always changing, and like snowflakes, no two displays are the same. The glowing red and green forms meander like celestial amoebas crawling across some great petri dish. One time our orbit took us through the center of an auroral display. It was as if we were in a glowing fog of red and green. Had we been shrunk down and inserted into the tube of a neon sign? It looked like it was just on the other side of the windowpane. I wanted to reach out and touch, but of course I couldn’t. Afterwards, I had to clean nose prints from the window.

Astronaut Don Pettit in Fragile Oasis

I had to excerpt only a small bit of this post, but it is well worth reading all of what Pettit wrote about viewing the Earth from the International Space Station. While you’re at it, check out his other posts on Fragile Oasis; they are all spectacularly worthwhile reading!

Source: fragileoasis.org

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What confuses a physicist? A viewer asks our team of physicists and astronomers what part of science they find most confusing. (via Fozzy)

Can you imagine a religious person expressing his or her doubts like that?

This is quite a brilliant look into real science and real scientists. Most of science is not having the answers, and, for all of us, there’s always some subject that we just don’t get. I suspect in my field, if asked this question, there would be a lot of people answering with “turbulence,” even though many of us have or do work on it! Some aspects of nature are just so complicated that they’re beyond our current grasp, but that doesn’t stop us from reaching!