Tag: sun

Pillar at Sunset

Posted by Nexus – 08/03/2010

[via APOD]

Reddened light from the setting Sun illuminates the cloud banks hugging this snowy, rugged terrain.

Inspiring a moment of quiet contemplation, the sunset scene included a remarkable pillar of light that seemed to connect the clouds in the sky with the mountains below. Known as a Sun pillar, the luminous column was produced by sunlight reflecting from flat, six-sided ice crystals formed high in the cold atmosphere and fluttering toward the ground.

Last Monday, astronomers watched this Sun pillar slowly fade, as the twilight deepened and clearing, dark skies came to Mt. Jelm and the Wyoming Infrared Observatory.

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Chasing Carina

Posted by Nexus – 27/02/2010

[via APOD]

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A jewel of the southern sky, the Great Carina Nebula, aka NGC 3372, spans over 300 light-years.

Near the upper right of this expansive skyscape, it is much larger than the more northerly Orion Nebula. In fact, the Carina Nebula is one of our galaxy’s largest star-forming regions and home to young, extremely massive stars, including the still enigmatic variable Eta Carinae, a star with well over 100 times the mass of the Sun.

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A Sun Halo Over Cambodia

Posted by Nexus – 09/02/2010

[via APOD]

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Have you ever seen a halo around the Sun? This fairly common sight occurs when high thin clouds containing millions of tiny ice crystals cover much of the sky. Each ice crystal acts like a miniature lens. Because most of the crystals have a similar elongated hexagonal shape, light entering one crystal face and exiting through the opposing face refracts 22 degrees, which corresponds to the radius of the Sun halo.

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Mars Opposition 2010

Posted by Nexus – 29/01/2010

[via APOD]

Mars is at opposition tonight, opposite the Sun in planet Earth’s sky. Of course, it will be easy to spot because Mars appears close to tonight’s Full Moon, also opposite the Sun in Earth’s night sky in the constellation Cancer.

For this opposition, Mars remains just over 99 million kilometers away, not a particularly close approach for the Red Planet. Still, this sharp view of Mars recorded on January 22nd is an example of the telescopic images possible in the coming days.

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Lake Macquarie Sunset (widescreen)

Posted by Nexus – 26/01/2010

[via deviantart.com]

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Annular Eclipse Over Myanmar

Posted by Nexus – 26/01/2010

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A hole crossed the Sun for a few minutes this month, as seen across a thin swath of planet Earth. The event on January 15 was actually an annular solar eclipse, and the hole was really Earth’s Moon, an object whose dark half may appear even darker when compared to the tremendously bright Sun.

The Moon was too far from Earth to create a total solar eclipse, but instead left well placed observers with a bright surrounding circle called the ring of fire. Pictured above was a complete solar annular eclipse sequence as seen above the Ananda Temple in Bagan, Myanmar.

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Millennium Annular Solar Eclipse

Posted by Nexus – 23/01/2010

[via APOD]

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The Moon’s shadow raced across planet Earth on January 15. Observers within the central shadow track were able to witness an annular solar eclipse as the Moon’s apparent size was too small to completely cover the Sun. A visually dramatic ring of fire, the annular phase lasted up to 11 minutes and 8 seconds depending on location, the longest annular solar eclipse for the next 1,000 years.

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The Known Universe

Posted by Nexus – 21/01/2010

[via APOD]

What would it look like to travel across the known universe? To help humanity visualize this, the American Museum of Natural History has produced a modern movie featuring many visual highlights of such a trip.

The video starts in Earth’s Himalayan Mountains and then dramatically zooms out, showing the orbits of Earth’s satellites, the Sun, the Solar System, the extent of humanities first radio signals, the Milky Way Galaxy, galaxies nearby, distant galaxies, and quasars. As the distant surface of the microwave background is finally reached, radiation is depicted that was emitted billions of light years away and less than one million years after the Big Bang.

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Eclipse over the Temple of Poseidon

Posted by Nexus – 19/01/2010

[via APOD]

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What’s happened to the Sun? The Moon moved to partly block the Sun for a few minutes last week as a partial solar eclipse became momentarily visible across part of planet Earth. In the above single exposure image, meticulous planning enabled careful photographers to capture the partially eclipsed Sun well posed just above the ancient ruins of the Temple of Poseidon in Sounio, Greece.

Unexpectedly, clouds covered the top of the Sun, while a flying bird was caught in flight just to the right of the eclipse.

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New Year Sungrazer

Posted by Nexus – 17/01/2010

[via APOD]

Intense and overwhelming, the direct glare of the Sun is blocked by the smooth occulting disk in this image from the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft.

Taken on January 3rd, an extreme ultraviolet image of the Sun to scale, is superimposed at the center of the disk. Beyond the disk’s outer boundary is a sungrazer comet, one of the brightest yet seen by SOHO.

The comet was discovered (movie link) by Australian amateur astronomer Alan Watson, while examining earlier images from another sun-watching spacecraft, STEREO-A. Based on their orbits, sungrazers are believed to belong to the Kreutz family of comets, created by successive break ups from a single large parent comet that passed very near the Sun in the twelfth century.

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