[NOTE: Whenever I write about actual cosmic events that might possibly affect us on Earth, I get scared emails from some folks. So let me be up front: there are no stars close enough to Earth to hurt us should they explode. Nothing I write in this post changes that; I'm talking about a star that can go supernova that's closer than I thought any was, but still much too far away to do much to us. So don't panic. But do please enjoy the over-the-topness of what happens when a star explodes. Because it's cool.]

Back in January I started writing what I call BAFacts; daily snippets of astronomy factoids. I post them on Twitter and Google+, and I keep an archive of them on the blog, too.

On May 13 I tweeted this one: BAFact: A supernova has to be less than about 75 light years away to hurt us. No star that close can explode, so were OK. The distance may actually be somewhere between 50 100 light years, and it depends on the kind of exploding star, but I have to keep these factoids to about 110 characters to tweet them. Nuance is at a premium.

I got so many replies about that one that I decided to do a theme week, and stick with supernovae. The next day I tweeted this: BAFact: The nearest star that can go supernova is Spica its 260 light years away, so were safe, and I linked to a video I did a few years back this.

A few minutes later I got a tweet from Nyrath, saying that he thought the nearest star that could explode was IK Pegasi, 150 light years away.

I looked this up, and heres the thing: hes right! I had never heard of IK Peg, so I didnt even know it existed. And it turns out it is the nearest star that can explode, though technically it probably isnt.

And you know when I say something weirdly oxymoronic like that there must be a good story here, right? Mwuhahahaha. Yes. yes, there is. Stick with me; this is long, but also awesome.

The story

Its been known for a while that IK Peg is a weird star (you can read quite a bit about it on the ESO website, though the formatting is a bit messed up). It looks like an A-type star that is, more massive, hotter, and bigger than the Sun. Its not nearly enough to explode stars need to be at least 8 times the Suns mass to do that, and this star is only about 1.7 times heftier than the Sun.

It pulsates, getting brighter and dimmer on a pretty rapid timescale: each cycle only takes about an hour. A lot of stars do this, but typically when one does it means its nearing the end of its life. In a few dozen million years itll swell up into a red giant, blow out a strong wind thatll strip its outer layers away (creating a gorgeous planetary nebula), and eventually retire as a white dwarf; small, dense, and hot, cooling slowly over billions of years.

Read this article:

The closest supernova candidate? | Bad Astronomy

KUCHING: The Sarawak State Muftis Office in collaboration with the Islamic Information Centre (IIC), Jakim Sarawak Branch and Tabung Baitulmal Sarawak will hold a forum on Islamic astronomy on May 24.

The forum will be held at IICs auditorium here from 7.30pm.

Assistant Minister in the Chief Ministers Office (Islamic Affairs) Datuk Daud Abdul Rahman is expected to officiate at the one-day forum, which aims at creating awareness of the principles and practices of Islamic astronomy.

The forum also aims at highlighting a more scientific approach towards understanding the Syariah astronomy and providing a platform to discuss and promoting the understanding of the Islamic astronomy among the young generation.

Three speakers namely Dr Azhari Mohamed from Malaysia Survey and Mapping Department, Hanafiah Abdul Razak from Johor Muftis Department and Mohammed Zakuwa Rodzali from Malaysia Islamic Development Department (Jakim) will be deliberating at the forum.

The forum is open to the public.

For enquiries, call Razalie Hussaini at 082-242 170 or Muhamad Zakaria Ashmat at 082-420 798.

See the article here:

One-day forum on Islamic astronomy next Thursday

SPERRY - Southeastern Iowa Astronomy Club member Jim Hilkin has no idea what's inside the time capsule that was locked away in the John H. Witte Observatory classroom 25 years ago. But he's about to find out Saturday night.

"It should be interesting. There should be some newspaper clippings in there," he said. "I think one of my kids put his favorite action figure in there."

Hilkin is one of several of the club's founding members who helped fill the capsule when construction of the observatory complex was completed 25 years ago, and the public is invited to take a peek inside the capsule for themselves when it's opened at 7 p.m. Saturday at the observatory.

Dave Philabaum, another one of the club's founding members, also is anxious to see what's inside the metal box.

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Hilkin, who was a carpenter in the mid 1980s; Claus Benninghoven, a retired mason who erected the walls of the observatory; and electrician Dave Bachtell took the lead on constructing the observatory and accompanying classroom - a two-year project that came together entirely through donated labor and money.

"It's a very involved structure," Hilkin said.

The observatory complex started out as nothing more than an idea in the minds of astronomy club members in 1984 but soon became a reality after the Burlington school district donated its Alvan Clark and Sons refracting telescope, which was given to the school system by Witte in 1937. The land the observatory sits on was donated by the Des Moines County Conservation Department, and the funding came from the John H. Witte Foundation.

The hard labor was entirely in the hands of skilled volunteers, who worked on the buildings during their off time. Construction of the main dome started in 1985 and was completed in 1986, and construction of the classroom started in 1986 and was completed in 1987.

Most of the mortar was mixed by hand

More here:

Area astronomy club to unseal 25-year-old time capsule

The launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 this morning was aborted at literally the last second the sensors detected too high a pressure in a combustion chamber in one of the engines. Apparently this didnt put the rocket in any danger, but it was outside the limits for an allowable launch so the computer shut things down.

[UPDATE: SpaceX is reporting a faulty valve caused the issue, and it's being replaced. They should be ready for the Tuesday launch window.]

Heres video of the last few seconds of the countdown.

Ouch. My thoughts on this are pretty clear: its a bummer, but then again thats all it is. Not a disaster, not a failure, just a setback. These are complicated, complex machines, and delays are inevitable.

The good news is theres a backup launch date of Tuesday, May 22, at 07:44 UTC (03:44 Eastern US time), and another the next day, May 23, at 07:22 UTC. Hopefully, this glitch can be fixed and the rocket launched on one of those dates.

Related Posts:

- Space X set to launch on Saturday May 19 - Elon Musk of SpaceX on CBSs 60 Minutes - SpaceX to launch Dragon capsule December 7

See the original post:

SpaceX launch aborted; next attempt Tuesday | Bad Astronomy

Space X is looking good to launch its Falcon 9 + Dragon capsule on Saturday morning at 08:55 UTC (04:55 Eastern US time). NASA tweeted about it, saying there’s a 70% chance of good weather at that time. It’s Florida, so that can change in an instant. Check with NASA and Space X for updates. Space X put together a press kit with details on the launch and mission activities. Via Universe Today I ...

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Don’t forget the Space X launch! | Bad Astronomy

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Astronomy society invites public to safely view solar eclipse

I wrote earlier about the annular eclipse happening this coming Sunday. Its a solar eclipse, with the Moon blocking the Sun, but because the Moon is at apogee the point in its orbit farthest from Earth the Moon appears smaller in the sky, so it doesnt completely block the Sun. Were left with a ring of solar surface surrounding the Moon, the so-called Ring of Fire.

I got a couple of people asking me why this eclipse is happening at lunar apogee when we just had a "Supermoon", when the Moon was full at perigee (when its closest to Earth in its orbit). This is a good question! Its not a coincidence. In fact, it must happen this way! Heres why.

First, heres a drawing of the Moons orbit, courtesy NASA:

The Moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse, so sometimes its closer to us, and sometimes farther. The ellipticity is exaggerated in the drawing; its actually about a 10% difference in distance between apogee and perigee. The Moon orbits the Earth once every 27.3 days, so it takes about 13.7 days for it to go from apogee to perigee a little less than two weeks.

This is different than the phase of the Moon, which is how much of the Moon we see lit by the Sun. When the moon is between us and the Sun, its new: we only see the unlit side. When its opposite the Sun in the sky when the Earth is between the two the side of the Moon we see is lit, so we say its full. There are approximately 8 billion web pages describing how this works; heres one I wrote. The time it takes to go from full Moon to full Moon is 29.5 days. That means to go from full Moon to the next new Moon takes half that time, or about 14.7 days a little more than two weeks.

We can only get a solar eclipse when the Moon is between us and the Sun. This happens when the Moon is new (Ill note in passing that it doesnt happen every time the Moon is new, because the orbit of the Moon doesnt align exactly with the Earths orbit around the Sun).

The phases of the Moon dont line up perfectly with its position in the orbit because of the two different periods: 27.3 days to go around the Earth, but 29.5 days to go from full to full again (this video might help you). So sometimes full Moon happens at perigee, sometimes at apogee, and most of the time sometime in between.

Now lets put this all together! The Supermoon is when the Moon is full and at perigee, right? Thats what happened on May 5th. On Sunday, a bit more than two weeks will have elapsed since then. That means the Moon will have moved halfway around its orbit it actually reaches apogee on Saturday May 19th. But the phase has been changing, so its new on May 20, and it so happens that things have aligned for it to eclipse the Sun.

Since this happens the day after apogee, the Moon is farther away than usual, and from Earth it looks smaller. BOOM. Annular eclipse.

Here is the original post:

Followup: Supereclipse | Bad Astronomy

16-05-2012 06:58 Maryann Hartwick, president and co-founder of the society, explains how the group brings exploration of the stars to the community through 'sidewalk astronomy'.

Read the original here:

Southeast Ohio Astronomical Society - Video

Every now again I get surprised by a photo, showing me something I didnt know about. And I love it even more when that surprise is from an object I thought I knew!

So check out this incredible image of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, a nearby galaxy harboring a whole slew of surprises:

[Click to galactinate, or get the 4000 x 4000 pixel version, or, if you're feeling frisky, cram this onto your hard drive: an image that's 8500 x 8400 pixels and 29 Mb in size! And trust me: you want to.]

Isnt that stunning? This picture was taken by the MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope in Chile, and once you get over its beauty youll realize this galaxy is, frankly, seriously messed up.

Cen A is about 12 million light years away and has roughly the same mass as our Milky Way, containing a few hundred billion stars. The underlying glow of those stars is what makes that round background fuzz in the image, and takes on the familiar elliptical shape of many such galaxies. [Note: All the individual stars you see here are in our on galaxy, since we're inside the Milky Way looking out to Cen A. Also, the little circles next to bright stars are reflections inside the camera itself, and aren't real.]

But check out that wide swath of dark stuff across the middle! That blocks the light from stars behind it, so its a cold certainty thats a dust lane: a thick, flat disk of complex molecules commonly seen in galaxies. But its commonly seen in spiral galaxies like ours, not elliptical ones like Cen A. So somethings weird right off the bat. And note how the ends of the disk seem bent in opposite directions; on the right its bent down, and on the left its bent up.

Most likely, this is because Cen A ate another galaxy. Literally: a galaxy collided with it in the recent past well, like in the past few dozen million years and that galaxy was probably more like our own, rich with dust. As it was absorbed, the dust was stripped from it and settled into that disk. The warping at the ends is a gravitational effect, most likely a distortion from the collision itself. We see it in other galaxies that have nearby companions.

When you observe Cen A using a radio telescope it gets weirder: two huge jets of material are being shot out of the core. The image here shows those jets (click to embiggen). Cen A is a very strong emitter of radio waves; in fact thats why its called Cen A: the brightest radio source in the constellation of Centaurus.

The source of those jets is a gigantic black hole in the core of the galaxy. All big galaxies have one, but Cen As is 55 million times the mass of the Sun nearly 14 times the mass of the black hole in the center of our own galaxy! So its a bruiser. Unlike our Milky Ways black hole, the one in Cen A is actively feeding on material. A huge amount of gas is falling into it. As it does, it forms a flattened disk which gets very, very hot. Millions of degrees hot. Swirling magnetic fields and other forces focus the material into those twins beams which scream out from the disk and create the radio waves. We call these active galaxies.

Read the original here:

The long reach of the Centaur’s dark heart | Bad Astronomy

A little while back, I was at Utah State University to give a public talk about the threat from asteroid impacts and what we can do to stop them (PLUG ALERT: if you want me to come talk at your venue, my agent would love to hear from you).

While I was there I was interviewed by Utah Public Radio, and that interview is online.

I was also chatted up by the local TV station, KSL. I think it went OK, and they put it online as well:

[You may have to refresh this page to get the video to load.]

While I rather wish I had stated succinctly that even the basis of the "Mayan 2012 doomsday" nonsense is itself a gross misinterpretation of Mayan history, culture, and calendar, I think I was pretty clear. I have to walk a fine line sometimes: debunking crap doomsday scenarios like 2012 while also warning of real dangers like asteroid impacts while neither over- or understating that danger. Its a delicate balance.

A balance, Ill note, which is apparently completely lost on some of the commenters on the KSL website who are saying Im totally wrong and that the doomsday is coming in December [Note: I checked just before posting this, and most of the really over-the-top comments have been deleted, and I thank the forum moderators for that]. The sheer blind eye some have toward reality is stunning.

I know some people have deep beliefs they hold true, and are willing to deny whats right in front of their face if they have to. I also know its the Internet out there, where people dont read past the first line or watch a video past the first few seconds. Still, the denial and to be blunt dickery is breathtaking. One person actually said they hoped the Universe kills me so they dont have to listen to my "drivel" [that was one of the comments deleted, BTW].

Of course this isnt the first time Ive had someone wish me dead, or that Id shut up. Duh. But what I find fascinating is the irony. One complaint I hear about critical thinking is that it takes away hope, takes away beauty, and replaces them with despair and the ugly nature of reality. And yet here we see people shredding their critical thinking to hold fast to a doomsday scenario that is as ugly as it is hopeless.

If they actually applied a bit of skepticism, theyd see the 2012 doomsday garbage for what it is. But they cleave unto it as fervently as a drowning man to a life preserver.

I dont think I have anything particularly profound to add to this; Im just shining a light on it for you to see. Be aware of this, and always remember peoples ability to be paradoxical and completely embrace a nonsensical danger while denying the real one.

Read the rest here:

If the Mayans were right, it was probably about Internet comments | Bad Astronomy

When the sun vanishes behind the moon for the first time over the United States in this century, what better place to enjoy the view than from one of the 154 national parks that stand in its path?

Go here to read the rest:

Sunday solar eclipse visible from national parks

The view from the International Space Station is always pretty cool, but when an astronaut points the camera at the Earths horizon and takes a series of short exposures, adding them together gives a view right out of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s:

[Click to psilocybinate.]

Whoa, man!

Astronaut Don Petit took the pictures to make this composite. Basically, its a series of eighteen 30-second exposures added together so the motion of the ISS around the Earth makes the stars trail, the cities blur, and your mind expand, dude.

The brown and green glow over the horizon is the atmospheric aerosol layer; molecules that absorb sunlight during the day and release that energy at night. The red glow above that puzzles me; Ive written about it before. It might be a reflection of lights from inside the space station, but I suspect its actually the aurora; it follows the curve of the Earth, and as you can see from the star trails the camera was pointed toward the poles the direction youre likely to see an aurora.

You can see faint star trails above the bright ones too, with a different center of curvature those probably are from an internal reflection. Either that or the camera got moved, but that seems unlikely! Several people pointed out to me that the fainter trails above the stars are from the solar panels. I shouldve realized that myself!

This picture is one of several posted to Flickr, including this one which looks like its from the last scene of "2001: A Space Odyssey". But theyre all worth looking at, if only for their alien beauty.

After all, the photographer was literally high when he took them!

Image credit: NASA

Read the original:

Psychedelic space station stars and cities | Bad Astronomy

I do a roughly monthly segment with astronomer Seth Shostak on Big Picture Science, a radio show/podcast done by The SETI Institute. This month, Seth and I talked about the American Airlines dustup when they were planning to run an interview with reality-impaired antivaxxer Meryl Dorey. This story is a great victory for reality, and Ive already written about the back story.

Never forget: this antivax issue is more than important: it is literally life and death. Because of lowering vaccine rates, pertussis outbreaks are so prevalent health officials in the state of Washington have declared it to be an epidemic. The governor has had to dip into emergency funds to the tune of $90,000 to finance an information campaign to get the word out.

But the money is secondary to the idea that babies and people with immune deficiencies are at risk of dying from a disease that is essentially totally preventable if everyone got their vaccinations and boosters.

I cannot state that any more simply. The antivax crowd says vaccines cause autism, vaccines cause neurological problems, vaccines hurt your immune system. None of that is true. The real danger is when people believe the antivax propaganda. Infants too young to be vaccinated themselves rely on herd immunity if enough people are vaccinated the disease has no place to live. And when we as a community dont vaccinate, people get sick, and some people including those infants, usually just a few weeks old die.

Talk to your board-certified doctor, and if they say its OK, get vaccinated. You may save more than one life doing so.

Related Posts:

- Followup: Antivaxxers, airlines, and ailments - UPDATE: partial Complete success with American Airlines! - Whooping cough outbreak in Boulder - Stop antivaxxers. Now.

Excerpt from:

Big Picture Science: Antivaxxers (and updates) | Bad Astronomy

When Im getting the mid-afternoon drowsies, and looking for a comfortable, warm, cozy place to take a nap, what could possibly be better than the impact crater-scarred surface of the Moon?

This may be the greatest blanket throw in the history of blankets. Who wouldnt want to cuddle up in a little regolith?

And ZOMFSM and it comes with matching pillows! And theres a floor cushion!

Supermoon, indeed.

Tip o the spacesuit visor to Design for Mankind via Jeri Ryan on Pinterest.

Related Posts:

- WANT Part XII: Earth Globe Fire Pit - WANT Part XI: To boldly slice - WANT Part X: The TARDIS. A REAL TARDIS! - WANT Part IX: Levitating TARDIS edition - WANT Part VIII: Zen and the art of Apollo maintenance - Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnt!!! - Want: Part 6 - Want: Part V, lunar furniture edition - Want: Part IV - Want: Part III - Want: Part II - Want

Read more:

WANT Part XIII: Moon throw | Bad Astronomy

I worked with Hubble Space Telescope data for about ten years, and one of the most amazing things about that was seeing the images fresh off the mirror. Knowing that no human on Earth had ever seen that particular object that sharply was a thrill.

Not every Hubble observation gets turned into a gorgeous image, though. A lot of them dont need to be for scientific publications, for one thing, and for another not every observation is of a targeted object for a specific purpose. Because of that, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of amazing objects galaxies, nebulae, star clusters buried in the data, waiting to be found.

Thats where you come in: the folks at the European Space Agencys Hubble HQ are holding a contest they call Hidden Treasures. You can look through the Hubble observation archive for images and tweak them using online tools they provide, or you can really roll up your sleeves and use professional astronomical software to prettify the images. Theyve made a video explaining the Hubble archive, which may help.

The contest has nice prizes (an iPod Touch, an iPad, and other "goodies"), but you have to hurry: it ends May 31. I know, Im late to the game here, and I apologize. But if this sounds like something youd like to do, go dive in! I can tell you as someone with (a lot) of first-hand experience here: its huge fun. And who knows? You might find something beautiful, something interesting, or even something no one has ever seen before.

Related Posts:

- When beauty and science collide - A spiral that can beat you with two arms tied behind its back - Happy 22nd, Hubble! - Desktop Project Part 26: Carina will keelhaul your brain

See the original post here:

Help find Hubble’s Hidden Treasures | Bad Astronomy

You are looking at the Sun's Evil Eye. Or the Death Star ready to shoot its planet-destructing laser. Or Jean Grey turning into the Phoenix. Actually, I really don't care about what the hell is going on hereit just looks amazing.

And the fact is that, even while this M4.7-class solar flare ended before any coronal mass ejection happened, it doesn't make it look less scary. According to NASA, "this image is shown in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength that is typically colorized in teal and that provided the most detailed picture of this particular flare."

So. Pretty. [NASA Goddard Flickr]

Go here to read the rest:

NASA Captures the Sun's Most Striking Photo Yet [Astronomy]

A hundred million light years away, two gorgeous spiral galaxies are locked in an embrace that may end with them merging, a dance spread across a hundred thousand light years in space and a hundred million years of time.

[Click to galactinate, and yeah, just do it. The hi-res version is big and lush and lovely indeed.]

This image, taken by frequent BABlog contributor Adam Block, shows this cosmic waltz in lovely detail (another wonderful image is available via the ESO as well [UPDATE: ... and from Gemini, with a diagram of the two and a nice explanation]). The two galaxies (NGC 5426 on the left, and NGC 5427 on the right) are just starting this eons-long encounter, but affects are already visible. You can see tendrils of material stretching from NGC 5426 to its companion, drawn out by the force of NGC 5427s gravitational attraction.

Inside the galaxies, you can easily see the pink glow of gas clouds, disturbed by the interaction, starting to furiously churn out hot young stars. Actually, stars of all masses are born in these clouds, but its the rare massive stars that have the most impact. They blast out ultraviolet light which makes the gas glow, and will explode as supernovae, lighting things up even more.

In galactic collisions like this the outcome can be difficult to ascertain. Perhaps theyll pass this one time and do so with sufficient velocity to make this a one-eon stand, continuing on into the night. Or, if their relative speeds arent enough, theyll pull apart, only to be drawn inexorably together once again. Even then they may pass, but this time in an ever-decreasing arc, until finally they merge into one bigger galaxy. Although this plays out over far too long a timespan to watch in real time, we see so many colliding galaxies that its like having snapshots at all different stages of evolution (see Related Posts below for lots of collidey goodness).

The general steps here are known, but the specific outcome of this particular encounter is still to be seen.

And well see something like it up close, if not for quite some time: the Andromeda Galaxy will one day collide with our Milky Way, and when that happens well be able to see what a galactic collision looks like from the inside. Buy your tickets now. The show begins in just a billion years or two.

Image credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

Related Posts:

See the rest here:

The start of a long, long dance | Bad Astronomy

The Tamil Nadu Science and Technology Centre will be organising a three-day Summer School on Astronomy and Astrophysics for students studying in classes VII to IX.

The programme will be held during May 17 to 19, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. at the B. M. Birla Planetarium, Periyar Science and Technology Centre, Gandhimandapam Road, Guindy.

Topics such as fundamentals of celestial coordinate systems, solar system, studies on the Moon, birth and evolution of stars, galaxies, cosmology, telescopes in astronomy, etc., will be taught. The course also has practical sessions for observing stars, planets, deep sky objects and the Sun, using modern telescopes. Only 50 students will be admitted on first-come-first served basis.

For registration and further details, contact 2441 0025.

Continued here:

Three-day course on Astronomy

Did the universe have a beginning? When was it, and what was it like? What are the stars? How distant are they? Why do they shine? How and when did the Earth form? Are there other worlds like Earth in the universe? Do they, too, have life?

We are living in a Golden Age of astronomy, where some of the oldest and most profound questions of philosophy long thought unanswerable are finding resolution.

The Apollo era created new interest and capabilities to answer these questions, and our next forays into the solar system led us to Venus, Mars and Jupiters moon, Europa. Our searches there have led to a scientific bounty, but also mild philosophical disappointment: so far, there is no sign of life on these worlds, or even conditions where much life from Earth could thrive.

Astronomers have not given up on these nearby bodies as potential hosts for life, but in 1992 a new avenue of discovery opened when Alexander Wolszczan, now an Evan Pugh professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, discovered planets orbiting the distant corpse of a burnt-out star the first exoplanets ever found outside our own solar system. Three years later, a Swiss team led by Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva, discovered a giant gas planet like Jupiter orbiting scorchingly close to a nearby star. The methods that professors Wolszczan and Mayor helped to pioneer rapidly led to the discovery of many more of these distant planets. Over the next five years, the number of known exoplanets would approach 40 and astronomers would begin to measure the

sizes and compositions of these alien worlds.

The promise of research for finding Earth-like exoplanets has been realized rapidly over the past decade. Ever-smaller and balmier exoplanets have been continuously discovered in systems reminiscent of our own solar system. The past few years have been especially exciting, as the first exoplanets have been directly imaged, and exoplanets not much larger than Earth have been detected around the nearest stars.

The Kepler spacecraft has discovered thousands of exoplanets throughout our galaxy. As astronomers pore over this bounty they hope, and cautiously expect, to find the sort of exoplanet Kepler was specifically designed to reveal: an Earth-sized body (a terrestrial planet) around a sun-like star with an orbital distance implying a surface temperature compatible with liquid water (within the habitable zone). This discovery may be only months away.

And what of life? The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been scouring the skies for radio and

Editors note:The Focus on Research column will highlight different research projects being conducted at Penn State. The bimonthly columns will feature the work of researchers from across all disciplines at the university.

Coming up next:A look at the new Center for Sport Concussion Research and Service at Penn State.

Continue reading here:

This is Golden Age of astronomy

Because you simply cannot have enough incredibly beautiful photographs of aurorae in your life, heres one taken near Tromso, Norway, on March 28, 2012 by photographer Helge Mortensen:

[Click to coronalmassejectenate, and you should.]

What a shot! Dead center in the picture is the Pleiades, the small cluster of bright stars. The bright object is the Moon, and to the lower right is Venus. If you look carefully, just above the horizon, lies Jupiter. To see it, start at the Pleiades, let your eyes move down and to the right to Venus, then keep going; Jupiter is in line with the clouds, just at the edge of the aurora itself.

I love how that one long swooshing ribbon of aurora cuts across the whole picture. See how it looks broader to the left, then narrower as you follow it to the right? Thats almost certainly perspective making it looks smaller. Its probably something like 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the Earths surface and follows the Earths curve. The far end of it, near the horizon, is much farther away than the part at the upper left.

And despite all the drama occurring in the sky, my eye keeps getting drawn to the water. In this 10 second exposure, the slow movement of the water softens its appearance. Funny, too: I saw a face in the water and chuckled, then noted that Mortensen got a note from a friend who saw the face as well or maybe a different one. But the one I see is pretty obvious. Do you see it too?

Mortensen has many more beautiful shots of aurorae on his 500px page, so head over there and soak up the glory of the active sky.

Image credit: Helge Mortensen, used by permission.

Related Posts:

- The green fire of the aurora, seen from space - Januarys aurora from way far north - Faith and begaurora - The rocket, the laser, and the northern lights

Read this article:

Fire, water, and ice | Bad Astronomy