February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its…
Light travels at a speed of 299,792 km per second (186,282 mps). That’s fast. Jupiter is 778,500,000 km (483,737,000 miles) from the Sun. That’s far. To try to convey the vastness of space, Alphonse Swinehart created this animation to illustrate that even at the blistering speed of light, it takes over 43 minutes just…
Photograph by NASA/Goddard/SDO An instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured its 100 millionth image of the sun. The instrument is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, or AIA, which uses four telescopes working parallel to gather eight images of the sun—cycling through 10 different wavelengths—every 12 seconds. This is a processed image of SDO…
This amazing graphic was created by Roberto Ziche and shows our solar system to scale. Roberto explains: “At the Chabot Space and Science Center there were some old, poor quality images, probably downloaded from internet and printed on office paper, showing the Sun and the planets to scale. I found the images content to…
Did you know the Sweden Solar System is the largest permanent scale model of the Solar System in the world? The Sun, represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, is the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in…
Using an ultraviolet camera, people on the street were shown how the sun sees them. Under UV light your skin may look more different than you think. Video by Thomas Leveritt Music: ‘Summer in the City – Starcadian remix’ by Freedom Fry
This past Sunday (9 March 2014) marked the premier of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the new 13-part Cosmos is a 21st-century follow-up to the landmark 1980 series hosted by famed astronomer Carl Sagan, who passed in 1996. The reboot was written by Ann Druyan (Sagn’s widow) and Steven…
Midnight Planétarium is an incredible timepiece that features six bejewelled planets in our solar system accurately rotating around our Sun. The watch was created by Van Cleef & Arpels in partnership with Christiaan van der Klaauw. After three years of work, Midnight Planétarium was unveiled at the annual Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie…
A CANYON OF FIRE ON THE SUN Photograph by NASA/SDO NASA/SDO – A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon…
PRAISE THE SUN Photograph by Anton Jankovoy | jankovoy.com In this perfectly timed sunset capture by Anton Jankovoy, we see the silhouette of a woman appearing to hold/praise the sun. The photo was taken in July of 2011 at Paradise Beach in Maharashtra, India. To get the shot Anton used a FL…