Metallic photos of the sun by renowned photographer Greg Piepol bring together the best of art and science. Buy one or a whole set. They make a stellar gift. |
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WATCH
OUT FOR THE MARTIAN TRIANGLE: When
the sun goes down tonight, step outside and look
southwest. Mars, Saturn and the blue-giant star
Spica have converged to form a 1st-magnitude triangle
not far above the horizon. The eye-catching arangement
makes it easy to find the Red Planet on the eve
of the Mars Landing. [full
story] [video]
ERUPTING
MAGNETIC FILAMENT: A filament of
magnetism connecting sunspots AR1538 and AR1540
rose up and erupted on August 4th. Look for the
extreme UV glow of hot plasma in this movie recorded
by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:
As the filament ripped through the
sun's atmosphere, it propelled a massive CME into
space: movie.
The expanding cloud does not appear to be on a collision
course with Earth, although a glancing blow might
be possible 2 to 3 days hence. Stay tuned for further
analysis.
FLYING
SAUCERS: On August 1st, Ken Rotberg
observed a pair of rainbow-colored saucers over
Delray Beach, Florida --but they weren't UFOs. The
technical term is pileus
clouds:
Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley
explains how they form: "On sunny afternoons,
cumulus clouds boil upwards, pushing layers of moist
air above them even higher where they cool and condense
to form cloud caps or 'pileus' (Latin for cap).
When pileus clouds form very quickly, their water
droplets tend to be all the same size--the perfect
condition for iridescent
colors."
"I noticed the sun dropping behind
a huge storm cloud in the west and ['the saucers'
appeared]," says Rotberg. "I was just
amazed at what I was witnessing, watching it slowly
change. There was nobody near me at the time to
share it with!" Consider
it shared.
Realtime
Space Weather Photo Gallery
RIPPING
PERSEID: As Earth enters a broad
stream of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle, more and
more Perseid meteors are appearing in the night
sky. "Last night, I captured a Perseid fireball
ripping through the ionosphere over New Mexico,"
reports amateur astronomer Thomas Ashcraft. "It
was traveling pretty fast - 133,000 miles per hour!"
Click to see and hear the meteoroid disintegrate:
The movie's sound track comes from
Ashcraft's dual-frequency meteor radar. It works
like
this: Radio signals from distant VHF transmitters
bounce off the meteor's ion trail. Ashcraft's antennas
can pick up those reflections, which sound like
ghostly echoes in the loudspeaker of his VHF receiver.
At the moment, Perseid meteor rates
are low--no more than about 10 per hour. In the
days ahead, however, Earth will plunge deeper into
the comet's debris stream, and meteor activity will
increase accordingly. Forecasters expect the shower
to peak on August 12-13 with as many as 100+ meteors
per hour visible from dark-sky sites. Stay
tuned for Perseids.
Realtime
Meteor Photo Gallery
Realtime
Noctilucent Cloud Photo Gallery
[previous years: 2003,
2004,
2005,
2006,
2007,
2008,
2009,
2011]
