Zoom in to this cool moon map

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If a private spaceflight doesn’t fit your travel budget, NASA’s new interactive lunar atlas may be the next best thing. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team has stitched together 10,581 images into a gorgeous, detailed online map of the moon’s north pole.

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How different animals see the world around them

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Recent scientific research has revealed how animals see the world around them and many possess dramatically different “sights” than humans. For instance, the brain of the dragonfly processes the images it sees so fast, it appears to be in slow motion and pigeons are capable of detecting more subtle color gradations than the most complex…

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Rare photographs of unusual animals before they became extinct

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When we think of extinct animals, species which are no longer living, we tend to envision dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, and saber tooth tigers. What you may not know is that several species, some quite unusual, have only recently been wiped out. In fact, some extinct animals ceased to exist after the 1820’s when photography was…

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Wow! Stunning picture of Milky Way taken from Northern Chile

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NASA published this stunning photograph today featuring the road that connects the Northern Cross and Southern Cross – the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Taken from Laguna Cejar in Northern Chile by Nicholas Buer, the photo was shot in October, just after sunset. Included in the photo are the Moon, Venus (above/left of…

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Wave your hands in the air and dance like the Peacock Spider

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This festive little critter knows how to party. It’s fancy name is Maratus volans but we prefer the more descriptive term, peacock spider (or “gliding spider”), a species of jumping spider with colorful red, blue, black, and green flap-like extensions on its abdomen that it raises for display during mating. The colorful little showboat’s artistic…

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Nearby record-breaking M82 supernova continues to grow brighter

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Three days ago, a white dwarf exploded in the nearby M82 galaxy (aka Messier 82, Starburst Galaxy, or the Cigar Galaxy), the closest galaxy to our own. The explosion created the closest, and brightest, supernova seen by man in over a quarter of a century. In fact, the explosion is so bright, backyard astronomers are…

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