AURORA ALERTS: Did you miss the Northern Lights of June 14th? Next time get a wake-up call from Space Weather PHONE. | | | APOLLO RELIC REVEALS ITS SECRETS: In 1967, Surveyor 3 landed on the Moon. Two years later, in 1969, Apollo astronauts visited the little unmanned spacecraft and brought pieces of it back home to Earth. Now, in 2008, the scoop from Surveyor's robotic arm is teaching researchers some long-lost secrets: full story. SPACE STATION TRANSIT: Yesterday, in Sonnenbuehl-Genkingen, Germany, amateur astronomer Martin Wagner looked woefully out the window at his garden. Rain was falling, thunder crashed, and clouds blanketed the sun. If this continued, he worried, he was going to miss a very special event. Namely, this: "The clouds parted just in time for me to photograph the International Space Station passing in front of the sun," says Wagner. "I used a solar-filtered 10-inch telescope and a Canon EOS 400D to make this 1/4000s exposure. After the transit it became cloudy again, so this was a lucky shot!" The snapshot crisply captures the station's newly-expanded silhouette: solar wings almost as wide as football field, a science lab the size of a Greyhound bus (Kibo), and three docked spaceships from Europe (Jules Verne) and Russia (Progress 29 and Soyuz TMA-12). Add them all together and you have one beautiful sunspot. more transits: from Dirk Lucius of Leer, Germany; from E. Signorelli, C. Ryder and J. Stetson of Ocean Park, Maine; PANCAKES, SOME FLIPPED: On June 15th, Danilo Linhares photographed the sun setting behind apartments in his hometown, Curitiba, Brazil. Later when he looked at the pictures, he discovered that a pancake-thin slice of sun had detached from the rest of the star. Solar System Calamity!? No, it was just a mirage: Photo details: Celestron C8, Canon 350D, ISO 100, 1/2000s exposure Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains: "Mirages can slice up the sun into stacked pancakes when it is near the horizon and a slice near the top might turn, like this one, into a green flash. The mirages can flip the pancakes too so that two descend and set while a third rises. Layers of air at unusual temperatures produce these sunset spectacles for us." more mirages: from Jeff Hapeman of Santa Monica, CA; from Mark Parrish of West Beach, Selsey UK; from Mila Zinkova of San Francisco, California;
May 2008 Aurora Gallery [Aurora Alerts] [Night-sky Cameras] |