These pictures are almost too hot to touch. Metallic photos of the sun make great Christmas gifts. | | | CHRISTMAS LIGHTS: On Christmas Eve, a bright light will glide through the night sky over North America--and we don't mean Santa's sleigh. It's the International Space Station putting on a spectacular holiday show. Check the Simple Satellite Tracker or your cell phone for flyby times. LUNAR ECLIPSE REVEALS AURORA BOREALIS: Normally, the full Moon is bad news for Northern Lights; lunar glare overwhelms the delicate aurora borealis. The full Moon of Dec. 21st, however, was different. It slipped into the shadow of Earth for a lunar eclipse, reducing the glare and revealing hidden auroras: Photo details: Canon EOS 5D MarkII and 500D. Sigma 8/3.5, EF 15/2.8, and EF 24/1.4L II lenses. "Auroras were dancing in the northern sky throughout the eclipse," says photographer Yuichi Takasaka of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada. In the snapshot, above, the Moon is circled, apparently not much brighter than surrounding stars. A video prepared by Takasaka shows how dramatically the sky darkened while the Moon was inside Earth's shadow. "What a night!" Lunar Eclipse Photo Gallery [NASA: "Solstice Lunar Eclipse"] [astronomy alerts] November 2010 Aurora Gallery [previous Novembers: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000] Potentially Hazardous Asteroids ( PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time. On December 23, 2010 there were 1167 potentially hazardous asteroids. Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | The official U.S. government space weather bureau | | The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. | | Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. | | 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory | | Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | the underlying science of space weather | |