nasa

The final frontier, now in full color.

NASA did a real solid the other day, when they uploaded thousands of pictures from the Apollo missions to Flickr. The beautiful collections show the breathtaking awe that exists in some of humankind's greatest technological achievements.

But one Redditor didn't think they looked quite right. I mean, the photos were taken 50 some odd years ago.

So jdreier decided to take a crack at color correcting a few of them. And the results are just stunning.

Well, the pictures are stunning anyway, but now they're more stunning.

He posted them to his Imgur page, where he described his efforts as such:

I took the liberty to color correct a few. Note, i've never been to space, so I don't know exactly how things look like out there. These are corrected purely on aesthetics.

And then later on his Reddit post, he made sure the astronauts got as much credit as possible.

The astronauts at NASA deserve all the credit for taking such amazing photos. I merely retouched a few photos while staying up late at night.

Thank you, sir. Your efforts are very appreciated.

What are these glorious golden space swirls? According to NASA, who captured this video with the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), this happened when a dark solar filament erupted and caused a chain reaction.They call these cascading magnetic arches because what you see here is a lot of particles spinning around the sun's magnetic field lines. 

Here's a video where you can see what a dark solar filament looks like. The darker area, almost in the shape of a circle is it. Filaments are plasma held above the sun's surface by magnetic forces. 

The space shuttle Discover took its final flight today mounted on top of a modified Boeing 747 from the Kennedy Space Center to Washington D.C. The shuttle will then be put on display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. Though we're sad to see the shuttle go (and NASA's current funding is certainly not a WIN), it's pretty amazing to see the old bird take a flight one more time. Check out more information in the via link from our friends at The Daily What!

What you're seeing is a bloom of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic Ocean.  These microscopic organisms are very important to the environment and might even influence clouds and the climate. 

This image was taken by the Suomi NPP satellite. Data from chlorophyll in the phytoplankton was combined with red, green and blue bands from the satellite's imaging system to make this picture. The mission of the satellite is to keep track of climate change and weather.  

It's also pretty good at taking amazing pictures of Earth.



Some images taken from the satellite look a lot more like weather forecasts than gorgeous water colors but the phytoplankton blooms are actually a pretty normal occurrence. 

Check the via link for a high-res version!