04/08/2011

Timelapse Video of San Francisco-to-Paris Flight Captures Aurora Borealis

SF to Paris in Two Minutes from Beep Show on Vimeo.

Timelapse Video of San Francisco-to-Paris Flight Captures Aurora Borealis.

08/03/2010

Incoming! The Sun Unleashes CME at Earth

Sunnow

Earlier this morning, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) witnessed a complex magnetic eruption on the sun. The joint NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) — a mission sitting at the L1 point between the Earth and the sun — also spotted a large coronal mass ejection (CME) blasting in the direction of Earth.

Read the rest of this entry »

04/19/2010

Still think 2012 is a hoax??

What’s happened to our Sun? Last week, it produced one of the largest eruptive prominences ever seen. Pictured above, the prominence erupted in only a few hours and was captured in movie form by NASA’s twin Sun-orbiting STEREO satellites. A quiescent solar prominence is a cloud of hot solar gas held above the Sun’s surface by the Sun’s magnetic field. Unpredictably, however, prominences may erupt, expelling hot gas into the Solar System via a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). As pictured above, many Earths would easily fit under the expanding ribbon of hot gas. Although somehow related to the Sun’s changing magnetic field, the energy mechanism that creates and sustains a Solar prominence is still a topic of research.