SOLAR MINIMUM DEEPENS: The sun has been without sunspots for 31 of the past 32 days. To find a similar stretch of blanks suns, you have to go back to 2009 when the sun was experiencing the deepest solar minimum in a century. Clearly, solar minimum has returned, bringing extra cosmic rays, long-lasting holes in the sun's atmosphere, and strangely pink auroras. Free: Aurora alerts.
A QUIET DAY ON THE SUN: Solar minimum has arrived, but even the "quiet sun" is an awesome thing. Powered by fusion, the sun is a 1027-ton nuclear explosion contained in one place only by the awesome force of its own gravity. On July 29th, Alan Friedman of Buffalo, New York, photographed the seething edge of that exploding ball:
"Finally... a Sunday sun with some fireworks!" says Friedman. "There were no sunspots on the face of the sun, the action was all at the edge of the disk. It was a wonderful day to be out observing."
Friedman and other observers around the world have been monitoring this prominence--a ragged magnetic filament dancing along the sun's eastern limb all weekend long. Readers, if you have a solar telescope, take a look.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
SOUTH POLE LUNAR ECLIPSE: Around the world, on July 27th, hundreds of millions of people watched a total eclipse of the Moon. Only a handful saw it from the bottom of the world. Robert Schwarz was one of them, and he sends this picture from Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica:
"Mars is on top, the Moon is on the bottom, with a faint band of auroras cutting across them," says Schwarz, who is overwintering at the south pole for the 8th year in a row and 14th year overall. "I am currently working with a Cosmic Microwave Background experiment called SPUD/KECK. The building in the photo is MAPO (Martin A. POmerantz) which houses our telescope."
"The weather definitely wasn't great for photos--quite hazy and lots of blowing snow with winds around 25 knots, but at least it was quite warm with a temperature about -45°C."
This was the longest lunar eclipse of the century. The Moon spent 1 hour 43 minutes inside the sunset-colored shadow of Earth, giving sky watchers on 6 continents plenty of time for astrophotography. Browse the photo gallery for snapshots from around the world.
Realtime Lunar Eclipse Photo Gallery
100,000 FEET ABOVE HOBBITON: On June 21st, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched a payload full of Tolkien rings on a cosmic ray balloon over the north island of New Zealand. The golden bands flew more than 100,000 feet above Hobboton, movie set for Lord of the Rings:
You can have one for $149.95. The students are selling these rings as a fundraiser for theirglobal radiation monitoring program. They are made of golden-colored tungsten and inscribed with the authentic Mordor script of the One Ring. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the ring in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space.
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