The Sun Gets Loopy (again): Blogolicious Image of the Day

This week the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) “Pick of the Week” offers a video clip of a massive loop of hot plasma caught by one of NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft. Here’s a video loop of the event, compressing hours of time into a few seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/v/dLqfcHE95V0?fs=1&hl=en_US

Says the SOHO website:

The STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft watched as an eruptive prominence near the back of the Sun arched up but then headed back to the Sun’s surface over a few hours (Sept. 19, 2010). Prominence eruptions occur fairly frequently and with both STEREO spacecraft now able to see most of the Sun, we do observe more of them.



And one great prominence deserves another. Check out this whopper from back in April:


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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

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The Sun gets loopy: blogolicious image of the day

Steele Hill, Goddard’s salesman of all things solar, just posted the latest weekly release of Sun imagery, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Steele dubs it “The South Rises Again”

SDO watched as an active region in the Sun’s southern hemisphere produced a whole series of looping arcs of plasma in profile (Sept. 11-13, 2010).  The arcs are actually charged particles spiraling along magnetic field lines.  The images were taken in extreme ultraviolet light and reveal the dynamic activity visible above active regions.  The material seen here is ionized iron heated to about one million degrees.  We have seen very little activity in this hemisphere as opposed to the northern one, hence the tongue in cheek title.

This image is a feast, but it’s true beauty shines through when you play the video. It’s a whopper of a file, so make sure you’ve got a fast Internet connection and give it a few seconds to download.

click to zoom in on the action

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

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Blogolicious image of the day: Earth and its moon as seen from the MESSENGER spacecraft

Some images are so extraordinary you don’t have to say all that much. And you don’t even need color.

So, briefly, here is an image snapped by the MESSENGER spacecraft, now exploring Mercury. The big blob is us, the littler blob is our moon. MESSENGER snapped the image May 6, 2010, from 114 million miles away — greater than Earth’s average distance from the sun.

And that’s all I gotta say about that. Read more about it at OnOrbit.



Earth and its moon

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

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Gogblog's Excellent Atlas 5 Launch Adventure

I just got home from Goddard Space Flight Center, where I was “embedded” this morning — starting at 6 am! — at the Flight Dynamics Facility. This morning, the FDF helped to launch a massive Atlas 5 rocket carrying a military communications satellite into orbit. It was so cool! Our people do the calculations to allow NASA’s orbiting tracking satellite network to follow the Atlas from launch to orbit. Recently I wrote about their work supporting Space Shuttle launches.

At the FDF, you watch the whole thing in a 3-D computer animation environment as well as live on webcam. Here is the moment of launch, looking over the shoulders of the two of the FDF engineers who ran the show.



light that candle!



I don’t know about you, but when they hit that final “10…9…8…7…” there is something thrilling about it, like the moment when gamblers go “all in” with every chip they have and there’s no turning back. In this case, a million pounds of rocket, fuel, and satellite sit balanced perfectly on the pad and someone punches that final red button….. (ok, maybe it’s a final mouse click)

Anyway, days like this I feel like I have the coolest job in the world.

Soon I’ll post a full account of Gogblog’s Excellent Atlas 5 Launch Adventure, including exclusive video and animation of the launch.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

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Oh no! SDO is blowing my mind again! Blogolicious image of the day: May 20, 2010

AREA OF DETAIL (BELOW)

I double-clicked this image a few minutes ago and heard a loud clanging sound in my head. It was the “SDO is blowing my mind again” alarm.

This image, captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory on Tuesday this week, shows a dark filament of superhot gas, or plasma, suspended above the sun’s surface by magnetic fields. This filament is 22 times the width of Earth!

UPDATE: The filament is  estimated to be at least 60 Earth diameters long (about 500,000 miles).

The bright yellow-orange pockmarks around the filament are so-called active regions. Shafts of plasma emanate from the active regions, following (again) magnetic field lines emerging from the sun’s interior.

I could say more but I won’t. Just enlarge the image as much as you can and feast.

Gogblog tips his superheated plasma hat to Steele Hill, a media specialist with the SOHO, STEREO, and SDO missions. He sends gorgeous images and video of the sun out once per week to various institutions for public viewing, including the American Museum of Natural History and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Click to make me bigger!

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center.


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