NEW AND IMPROVED: Turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a field-tested global satellite tracker. The Satellite Flybys app now works in all countries. | | | BIG MYSTERY: In a surprising development that has transformed the appearance of the solar system's largest planet, one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has completely disappeared. Get the full story from Science@NASA. ALIEN BEAUTY: Multiwavelength images of the sun beamed to Earth by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory have a beauty that can only be described as ... alien. We've never seen the sun quite like this before. Consider the following picture taken just hours ago by SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly: The image is a composite of three extreme ultraviolet wavelengths: 211 Å (false-color yellow) 193 Å (green) and 171 Å (blue), each tracing a different gas temperature ranging from 1 to 2 million degrees K. Highlights of today's sun include an enormous magnetic filament bisecting the northeastern quadrant, a coronal hole, and a new sunspot: labels. And that's just for starters. The high-resolution copy of this image shows many more weird and interesting things. Go ahead and take a look; it really is your star. SPACE STATION TRANSIT: Yesterday over Leer, Germany, the International Space Station (ISS) passed directly in front of the sun, splitting the distance between a dark magnetic filament and sunspot 1072: "The transit-path was just 14km away from my backyard observatory," says photographer Dirk Lucius. "I loaded my Coronado 90 into the car and drove to the position of the central transit. This is the result of my short trip. The ISS crossed the sun in just 0.72 seconds." The ISS crosses the sun (and Moon) more often than you might suppose. Transit predictions are available from CalSky. more images: from Jerome Delpau of Moncé en Belin, France; from Ralf Vandebergh of the Netherlands; from Pete Lardizabal of St Johns, Florida; from David Dickinson of Hudson, Florida; from Syed Baqir Naqvi of Quetta, Pakistan May 2010 Aurora Gallery [previous Mays: 2008, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002] [aurora alerts] |