Astronomy
Astronomy is the Queen, the most ancient of all the sciences. By 4500 BCE the megalithic structures of Carnac, France, were built. This was over 6500 years ago! These stones may have been used for astronomy to align the sun and the moon; the research is ongoing. The Stones of Carnac This is photograph of the rows and rows of standing stones, or Menhirs, in Carnac. Credit:Courtesy of Corel Photography Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise This Astronomical object looks like a delicate butterfly. But it is far from serene.What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour -- fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes! A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. This object is an example of a planetary nebula.Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team.
Saturn By Hubble Space Telescope
April 23, 1998: In honor of NASA Hubble Space Telescope's eighth anniversary, we have gift-wrapped the astronomical object: Saturn in vivid colors. Actually, this image is courtesy of Hubble's infrared camera, which has taken its first peek at Saturn.This view provides detailed information on the clouds and hazes in Saturn's atmosphere. The blue colors indicate a clear atmosphere down to the main cloud layer. Most of the Northern Hemisphere that is visible above the rings is relatively clear. The dark region around the South Pole indicates a big hole in the main cloud layer. The green and yellow colors indicate a haze above the main cloud layer. The red and orange colors indicate clouds reaching up high into the atmosphere. The rings, made up of chunks of ice, are as white as images taken invisible light.Credit:Erich Karkoschka (University of Arizona), and NASA. Aurora on Saturn In January and March 2009, astronomers using NASA's Hubble SpaceTelescope took advantage of a rare opportunity to record the astronomical object: Saturn when its rings were edge-on, resulting in a unique movie featuring the nearly symmetrical light show at both of the giant planet's poles. It takes Saturn almost thirty years to orbit the Sun, with the opportunity to image both of its poles occurring only twice during that time.The light shows, called aurorae, are produced when electrically charged particles race along the planet's magnetic field and into the upper atmosphere where they excite atmospheric gases, causing them to glow. Saturn's aurorae resemble the same phenomena that take place at the Earth's poles.The 2009 Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys observations have allowed astronomers to monitor the behavior of Saturn's poles in the same shot over a sustained period of time and to analyze the planet's northern and southern lights simultaneously. The northern auroral oval appears to be slightly smaller and more intense than the southern one, implying that Saturn's magnetic field is not equally distributed across the planet; it is slightly uneven and stronger in the north than the south.Credit:NASA, ESA, andJonathan Nichols (University of Leicester)
During its approach to Mimas on Aug. 2, 2005, the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera obtained multi-spectral views of the astronomical object, the moon from a range of 228,000 kilometers (142,500 miles).False color images of Saturn's moon, Mimas, reveal variation in either the composition or texture across its surface.Herschel crater, a 140-kilometer-wide (88-mile) impact feature with a prominent central peak, is visible in the upper right of each image.The unusual bluer materials are seen to broadly surround Herschel crater.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute In October 2003, the Sun’s disk included active region 10486,which became the largest sunspot seen by SOHO. Sun's Size is "Rock Steady".
On Solar Astronomy. A new result, announced this week by a team of solar physicists, uses only measurements taken by a single instrument over 12 years simply to see if the Sun's diameter has changed — and the answer, apparently, is "no." Jeff Kuhn (University of Hawaii) and three colleagues find that the Sun's mean diameter hasn't changed more than one part in a million since 1998. And what makes them so sure? They've sifted through some 500,000 frames taken by the Michelson Doppler Imager aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. Launched in December 1995, SOHO has followed the Sun through a full 11-year solar cycle and then some. Moreover, it doesn't have to contend with turbulence in Earth's atmosphere. Getting above the atmosphere is an enormous advantage for astrometry, more than an order of magnitude improvement," Kuhn explains, "and we just don't see any solar-cycle variability." His team's analysis of SOHO observations will appear soon in Astrophysical Journal.  Credit: Story from Sky and Telescope.
SOHO / MDI Consortium.
Huge Solar EruptionA gargantuan eruption of plasma on the surface of the sun has caused a celestial tsunami shower of ionized atoms to head straight for the Earth, which scientists expect to arrive at our planet Tuesday night. Scientists also say there is nothing we can do and the coronal mass ejection will hit our world, illuminating the night sky before a final collision between us and the inevitable geomagnetic storm. "It's the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time," Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told Space. And besides causing problems with satellites in the way, it should be quite an entertaining show.NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which was launched in February and studies space phenomena like this one, and looks into the sun to see how it works. Scientists there say people in the Northern U.S. have a great view of it, and it should be even better if it triggers aurorae, or solar particles coming into contact with earth's magnetic field andour atmosphere. Read more:http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/08/03/solar-tsunami-celestrial-show-to-hit-earth-tonight/#ixzz0vkGRNioy NOTE : It has hit earth and it did cause auroras Go see the wonders of the evening sky for yourself! Telescopes for the raw amateur, the advanced amateur and the professional.
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