Did you miss last night's auroras? Next time get a wake-up call from Spaceweather PHONE.
PROMINENCE ALERT: A large prominence is dancing over the sun's southwestern limb, reports Les Cowley of England, who spotted it this morning while looking through his Personal Solar Telescope. "In spite of their immense size, prominences evolve fast; this one was visibly changing as I drew it."
FIRST SATURN OF SPRING: "Saturn is now perfectly placed for observing just after sundown," says astrophotographer Alan Friedman. "I took this picture on March 20th in the hours just after the vernal equinox--my first Saturn of Spring!"
Saturn's blue north pole, the Cassini division in Saturn's rings, and at least four moons are visible in the full-sized image.
Such a picture must have been taken at a fully-staffed professional observatory, right? Wrong. Friedman worked alone using a 10-inch backyard telescope in light-polluted Buffalo, New York. If you have a telescope, point it at Saturn tomorrow night, March 28th. The ringed planet will be unusually easy to find right beside the Moon: sky map.
DROPLETS WITH A BONUS: Looking at the world through a water droplet can be a little disorienting. Droplets are natural inverting lenses, forming an upside-down image of objects beyond. This also makes them attractive targets for off-beat photography.
Last Saturday, "we had a foggy morning which caused droplets of water to be hanging on the end of tree branches," reports Lois Reinert of Tracy, MN. "When I took my camera out to photograph those droplets, I noticed something quite interesting." (continued below)
Photo details: Nikon Coolpix 5700 on macro mode.
"There were tiny little droplets attached to spider web strands that were located on the tree branches. If those tiny droplets were big enough, you could see the inverted images in them, too. I think of them as droplets with a bonus." more images: #1, #2, #3.
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