ASTRONOMY
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BIG INTERSTELLAR DISCOVERY:
The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud
that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue
of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's
Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery. Get the full
story from Science@NASA.
SOLAR ACTIVITY:
Yesterday, Dec. 22nd at approximately 0455 UT, magnetic fields
around sunspot 1036 erupted, producing a C7-class
solar flare. NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft was almost directly
above the sunspot at the time of the blast and recorded this
extreme ultraviolet movie:
The shadowy wave racing away from the blast
site is a "solar
tsunami"--a swell of hot, magnetized plasma about
100,000 km high packing as much energy as a million megatons
of TNT. The tsunami petered out before it went more than halfway
around the sun, but another manifestation of the blast is
still going. The eruption hurled a faint coronal mass ejection
(CME) into space and the billion-ton cloud should cross Earth's
orbit on or about Dec. 25th. A glancing blow to Earth's magnetic
field could spark polar auroras for Christmas.
more images: from
Pete Lawrence of Selsey, West Sussex, UK; from
C. Swiger and J. Stetson of South Portland, Maine; from
Robert Arnold of Isle of Skye, Scotland
SNOW FLAKES:
The industrial district of Marl, Germany, isn't known for
its natural beauty or outdoor photo-ops. But maybe that's
because people just haven't been looking closely enough. On
Dec. 18th, resident Martina
Borchert discovered this scene in her own backyard:
"These crystals landed on top of a rusty
old bird feeder," she says. "Normally they would
have melted instantly, but the temperature outside was -4
C, and that gave me time to arrange a photo shoot using my
Canon
EOS 350D and a 60mm macro lens. Two hours and one cold
nose later, I stored more than 800 snapshots on my hard drive!"
Here is a selection of the best: #1,
#2,
#3,
#4.
Snowflake
photography requires patience ("I have been chasing
these shots since 2005," says Martina), endurance ("By
the end of the session, my fingers were snow white and my
nose was Carddinal red," she adds), and good luck ("The
rare combination of frigid cold and snow was perfect on Dec.
18th"). Martina's photos show that all these things can
come together--even in the industrial district.
December
Northern Lights Gallery
[previous Decembers: 2008,
2007, 2006,
2005, 2001,
2000]
Explore
the Sunspot Cycle |
