The Flying Saucer At Sunset

Lenticular clouds (Altocumulus lenticularis) are stationary lens-shaped clouds with a smooth layered appearance that form in the troposphere, usually above mountain ranges. One was spotted in Singapore recently...

Eyes Of 30,000 Honeycombs

With 30,000 individual facets, dragonflies have the most number of facets among insects. Each facet, or ommatidia, creates its own image, and the dragonfly brain has eight pairs of descending visual neurons to compile those thousands of images into one picture...

A Kaleidoscope Of Colours, Shapes And Patterns

Spectacular and innovative in design, the Flower Dome replicates the cool-dry climate of Mediterranean regions like South Africa, California and parts of Spain and Italy. Home to a collection of plants from deserts all over the world, it showcases the adaptations of plants to arid environments...

Lightning Strikes, Not Once, But Many Times

Unlike light, lightning does not travel in a straight line. Instead, it has many branches. These other branches flashed at the same time as the main strike. The branches are actually the step leaders that were connected to the leader that made it to its target...

Are You My Dinner Tonight?

A T-Rex has 24-26 teeth on its upper jaw and 24 more on its lower jaw. Juveniles have small, sharp blade-shaped teeth to cut flesh, whereas adults have huge, blunt, rounded teeth for crushing bones. Is the T-Rex a bone-crushing scavenger?

Saturn In The July Night Sky

Singapore
28 July 2013

Two planets appear in the July evening sky all month long: Venus and Saturn. Venus beams in the west at dusk, and sets roughly one and one-half hours after sunset all month long at mid-northern latitudes. Saturn shines moderately high in the south to southwest at nightfall and stays out all evening long. 

Saturn reached opposition in late April, and now it slowly heads towards its conjunction with the Sun on November 6. Look for it in the southwest as evening twilight fades, to the upper left of Spica and farther lower left of Arcturus. A small telescope will reveal Saturn's system of rings which span 40 arcseconds, surrounding a disk about 17 arcseconds in diameter. The rings are tilted 18° to our line of sight, the widest open they have been since 2006.

The planet's ring system is unique, and quite unlike the obscure rings of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Six major rings all lying in the equatorial plane of Saturn have been identified, of which three, in addition to the Cassini division and a subtler demarcation called the Encke division, can be seen from the Earth with a good telescope.

Saturn's rings are made up of many small particles, all moving round the planet in the manner of tiny moons. There is no mystery about their composition; they are made primarily of water ice.

Merlion Wayfarer spotted a very bright pale yellow dot in the sky. 
At 15x zoom, a white ring can be seen around it...



More photos are available on Merlion Wayfarer Goes Green's Picasa at :
Natural Phenomena


Sources



Revisiting The Flight Of Fancy

Gardens By The Bay 
Marina South, Singapore 
July 2013 

After going on an Adventure Trail led by student leaders from the Green Carpet Awards, Merlion Wayfarer stepped into the fragrant world of the Flower Dome...

As Flight Of Fancy enters its last few weeks, a dragonfly on an airmail envelope sends off visitors...

A handsewn artwork beneath the bottle brush flowers it depicts...

Freshly-watered yellow roses...

"The Secret World Of Seeds", an art exhibition by Roberto Visani...

The flight of balloons...

Cosplayers having a photo session in a quiet corner...

Pollen-dusted petals of a lily...

A gnarled tree that seems right out of a fairytale...

White-tinged leaves with colourful flowers...

The flower-lined path to Pollen, the indoor restaurant...

Harry Potter and friends are graduating this month!

The kaleidoscope of colours within the Flower Dome...

Thank you GCA and Gardens By The Bay!



More photos are available on Merlion Wayfarer Goes Green's Picasa at :