| DOOMED SPACECRAFT: Jules Verne is about to become a fireball. On Sept. 29th, with NASA airplanes looking on, the 22-ton European spacecraft will plunge into Earth's atmosphere over the south Pacific Ocean. Jules Verne recently spent five months docked to the space station where it delivered supplies, used its engines help the station avoid a piece of space junk, and served as an impromptu bedroom for the ISS crew. Mission accomplished, the doomed spacecraft is now making its final orbits around Earth. If you'd like to see it, check the Simple Satellite Tracker for viewing times. BONUS: Veteran satellite watcher Kevin Fetter of Ontario, Canada, caught Jules Verne gliding by Polaris on Sept. 10th: movie. PICTURE THIS: You're a nuclear engineer with a problem. The plasma in your fusion chamber keeps slipping through the magnetic force field, foiling your efforts to sustain a energy-producing reaction. What do you do? Watch this movie: 
The twisting, swirling, rising and falling thing you just witnessed is a polar crown prominence photographed by Japan's Hinode spacecraft. It is, essentially, a gigantic sheet of hot plasma exquisitely controlled by solar magnetic force fields. Hinode's unprecedented high-resolution images of these prominences reveal plasma falls, "van Gogh vortices", and dark tadpole-shaped bubbles--things the sun can do with plasma and magnetic fields, but nuclear engineers can't. Not yet. Further studies of the sun may eventually reveal the the secrets of plasma control. Get the full story and more movies from Science@NASA. ALERT: Readers, if you have a solar telescope, you can see a polar crown prominence with your own eyes, today, on the northwestern limb of the sun: photo. LUNAR TRANSIT: Last night, photographer John Stetson drove to Goosefair Bay in Maine, set up his camera, and waited for a winged form to flit across the Moon. Right on time, it appeared: 
"It's the International Space Station," says Stetson. "The ISS was 233 miles above Goosefair Bay when it passed directly in front of the 89% illuminated Moon." Because the ISS was in Earth's shadow at the time of the overpass, it made a dark-as-night silhouette against the gray lunar surface. An even better time to see the ISS is when it is out of Earth's shadow. Sunlight striking the behemoth space station turns it into one of the brightest objects in the night sky, second only to the Moon and sometimes Venus. Its easy to spot if you know when to look. more images: from Ralf Vandebergh of the Netherlands; from Thomas Dorman of Horizon City, Texas; from Mike Salway of Central Coast, NSW Australia; from John C McConnell of Maghaberry Northern Ireland;
Sept. 2008 Aurora Gallery
[Aurora Alerts] [Night Sky Cameras] | 
