{"id":33485,"date":"2011-04-03T15:43:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-03T15:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/when-the-earth-takes-a-bite-out-of-the-sun-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2011-04-03T15:43:15","modified_gmt":"2011-04-03T15:43:15","slug":"when-the-earth-takes-a-bite-out-of-the-sun-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/when-the-earth-takes-a-bite-out-of-the-sun-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"When the Earth takes a bite out of the Sun | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a week of ridiculously gorgeous astronomy pictures hitting the ‘net, I keep thinking they can’t get cooler… and then this happens: a seriously<\/em> cool picture of the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory!<\/p>

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Yegads! [Click to solareclipsenate.]<\/p>

Given that SDO orbits the Earth and sees the Sun from space, why is the bottom half of the Sun gone in this picture<\/a>? It’s because we’re seeing a solar eclipse which is actually more like a lunar eclipse except the Moon is not involved.<\/p>

Hmm, yeah, maybe I’d better explain.<\/p>

SDO<\/a> circles the Earth in an inclined orbit*<\/a>. If the orbit were directly above the Earth’s equator, the Earth would block the Sun once per day, and that’s not so cool for a satellite designed to continuously observe our nearest star! So the orbit was inclined a bit, giving SDO an unobstructed view of the Sun… kinda. The orbit of SDO is inclined to maximize the viewing time for the Sun and to maintain a continuous downlink for its very large data stream (it sends about 15 megabytes of data to Earth every second!). Because of the ...<\/p>

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In a week of ridiculously gorgeous astronomy pictures hitting the ‘net, I keep thinking they can’t get cooler… and then this happens: a seriously cool picture of the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory!Yegads! [Click to solareclipsenate.]Given that SDO orbits … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33485"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}