With Miles O’Brien on vacation, David Waters hosts this episode of This Week in Space highlighting rocket plane racing, the upcoming private-sector SpaceX rocket launch, the Atlantis and Discovery shuttle missions with new antimatter telescope components to be installed aboard the ISS, NASA uses weather satellites to keep an eye on BP’s oily mess in…
Category: sun
Showing Some Flare
After weeks of waiting patiently, the first images are finally here! This video shows an arching prominence erupting from the surface of the Sun on March 30, 2010, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in beautiful IMAX-quality high resolution. (By the way, AIA stands for Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, one of the three main tools…
Fatal Attraction
This video from SOHO spanning several days’ worth of time shows the activity of the Sun’s corona as stellar energy is streamed out into space against a passing background field of stars…and then right in the final moments we see it: the bright trail of a comet as it makes its final journey straight into…
Seeing Spots
A gorgeous photo of our Sun by Alan Friedman, taken from his location in Buffalo, NY and uploaded to his site on February 7, shows a huge string of sunspots and an energetic region of prominences, as well as the granules and spicules that create the Sun’s surface texture. Sunspot 1045, the string seen here,…
Solar Cover-Up
ESA’s new Proba-2 solar observation satellite captured this stunning image of the annular eclipse that as visible across Africa and Asia on January 15. In an annular eclipse the moon is further from the Earth than it would be during a total eclipse, so part of the Sun remains visible. This eclipse has been the…
A Stormy Star
This video from the SOHO solar observatory spacecraft shows a a partial rotation of the Sun seen in ultraviolet light (the green color is from the specialized camera filter, corresponding to emissions at 1.5 million degrees Kelvin.) In the Sun’s northern hemisphere an energetic area of solar prominences can be seen, tens of thousands of…
And still they come…
Watching a video of SOHO images today, I noticed two more comets diving toward the Sun (located behind the white circle on the blue disc), on the 8th and the 9th. Both came from the same direction, from the lower left as seen in the still above. Watch the video here. With over 1500 comets…
The End of a Comet’s Tale
These two images, taken by the SOHO solar observatory spacecraft, show the last moments of a comet as it approaches the Sun in what turned out to be its final voyage…the Sun’s radiating energy sizzled the icy traveler shortly after. (See the video version on my earlier post.) The two images were taken with different…
Final Flight
On January 3, the European Space Agency’s SOHO solar observatory spacecraft captured images of a comet flying towards the Sun….and then disappearing into it, evaporating in heat of the solar furnace. The video above, taken by the spacecraft’s Heliospheric Imager which monitors the activity of the Sun’s corona, clearly shows the comet’s final moments before…
Solar Power
This video taken by the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft, a joint project by NASA and the European Space Agency, shows a large bright active region on the Sun rotating into view on November 13. These areas, many times larger than Earth, expel large amounts of solar material and energy in the form of…
Sun Dance
This mesmerizing animation by photographer Alan Friedman shows a solar prominence as it changes structure over the course of 78 minutes. Solar prominences are eruptions of hot gases extending from the sun’s surface, held together by magnetic forces which constantly shift and move. They can last for days or months, and extend thousands and even…
Electric Blue
Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was this fantastic image by the talented Alan Friedman, showing the sphere of our Sun taken in a special wavelength of light emitted by hydrogen gas and then inverted to look blue. Incredible details of the Sun’s surface – the chromosphere – become visible, most notably the texture…
Lights in the Dark 