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JUPITER & THE MOON: For the second night in a row, the Moon and Jupiter will pop out of the evening twilight side by side--very pretty. Look for them halfway up the southern sky as soon as the sun sets: sky map.
COOL SPOT: Sunspot 898 looks like a seething inferno, but "it's the coolest spot on the sun," insists Gary Palmer of Los Angeles who took this picture on July 4th:
He's absolutely right. Sunspots have magnetic fields so intense they block the flow of heat from nuclear fires below. This lowers their temperature by more than a thousand degrees. If you stuck a thermometer in a sunspot it would register only 4300 C. On the sun, that's cool.
more images: from Gianluca Valentini of Rimini, Italy; from Andreas Murner of Lake Chiemsee, Germany; from Stanescu Octavian of Timisoara, Romania; from Cameran Ashraf of Claremont, CA.
INFRABOW: The colors of the rainbow define what the human eye can see: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet. But what would a rainbow look like at wavelengths the human eye cannot see? Jonas Förste decided to find out. On June 28th, from his frontyard in Jakobstad, Finland, he photographed a bright rainbow through an infrared filter:
This "infrabow" looks much like an ordinary rainbow, but there is a difference. See the scalloped bands inside the bright primary bow? Those are supernumerary arcs, and they appear because the wavelength of infrared light is similar to the diameter of the raindrops forming the bow. The whole scene has an eerie, alien feel. Indeed, rainbows like this may be common in strange places such as Saturn's moon Titan: full story.