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First results from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory are in! In dynamic fashion, NASA have released a bunch of movies on YouTube of the satellite’s first observations, as well as great images. Enjoy.
Beautiful sun with the coronal mass ejection of 8 April 2010.
Prominence
I don’t usually envy people who live in places like Iceland or Northern Canada – cold, dark and desolate places. But I am insanely jealous of them for one reason: the Aurora Borealis. Aurorae light up their skies, when charged particles streaming out from the Sun slam into the Earth’s magnetic field, get accelerated along the field lines towards the poles, creating these luminescent showers of light as they interact with the atoms in the upper atmosphere.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, commemorating the 19th century British Countess who became one of the pioneers of computing. The first Ada Lovelace Day was held last year, as an international day of blogging about inspirational women in science and technology. I read some really great pieces last year, so decided I’d make a bit more of an effort too this time round.
When I started my PhD at University College London, I joined the astronomy department’s instrumentation lab. Not many astronomers knew where to find us, we were way down in a dark windowless basement. At the time the group was in the final throes of building an instrument for the 8-m Gemini South telescope. Behind my tiny little desk in our large office was a much larger cubicle with a desk, and on, under and all around it was truly the largest amount of paper I have ever seen. Somewhere buried beneath was a computer, and judging by the muffled but incessant ringing, a telephone. That was the desk of the scientist who was managing the project, and that person was Maggie Aderin-Pocock.
Gift-wrapping MIRI for our NASA colleagues
NASA issued a press release yesterday to announce that the engineering test model of the mid-infrared instrument for its next-generation space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, has arrived at Goddard. A picture is featured in the BBC’s Science & Technology news section today. As a member of the team that is in charge of testing MIRI prior to its integration with the telescope and launch, I’m glad to see the little one has arrived safely on US soil.
Astropixie has started a new post on her blog called Dirty Space News, inspired by a rather unfortunate-looking figure in a paper she was reading from astro-ph. There have been lots of contributions with more suggestively shaped figured and images. I wonder if Sarah Gallagher, the paper’s lead author, knows the new movement her last paper has sparked?
I spotted the poster shown above in our corridor – its designers have amazingly managed to make the XMM satellite look even more phallic than it already did…. I’m starting to think X-ray astronomers have had a lot of fun with this over the years.
Go check it out here and send her your own Dirty Space images!
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