Gallery of Solar Activity. 15 Mind-Blowing Featured Images by NASA. The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the United States’ largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.
They are also home to some of the most amazing images, visualizations and videos NASA has to offer! Please do yourself a favour and check out their incredible Flickr page which has thousands of images with wonderfully detailed descriptions. Below is a collection of 15 mind-blowing featured images from NASA. Enjoy! 1. The STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft caught this spectacular eruptive prominence in extreme UV light as it blasted away from the Sun (Apr. 12-13, 2010). 2. This is a mosaic image, one of the largest ever taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion. The orange filaments are the tattered remains of the star and consist mostly of hydrogen. 3. 4. AS15-87-11847. Shuttle-atlantis-sts135-launch-pad-ingalls-1920.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 1280x800 punkter) 1011a.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 1280x905 punkter) - Skalert (96 %)
Smithsonian Institution. 494796main_image_1795_946-710.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 946x710 punkter) Catching Its Tail. WISE2011-022-lg.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 1600x1309 punkter) - Skalert (60 %) AP15_8.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 4224x544 punkter) WISE2011-003-lg.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 1600x1600 punkter) - Skalert (54 %)
Map-of-mars.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 1280x782 punkter) 419131main_iss017e013842_high.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 3072x2098 punkter) - Skalert (41 %) Pie.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 612x792 punkter) Universe-history-wmap.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 496x358 punkter) Seriously jaw-dropping picture of the Sun. Need your slice of awesome today?
Then check out this truly astonishing picture of a detached prominence off the limb of the Sun: Holy wow! Click to ensolarnate. And I mean it: you want to see the bigger version of this. This picture was taken by Alan Friedman, who is no stranger to this blog: his picture of the boiling Sun last year was hugely popular, and so amazing I featured it as one of my top pictures of 2010. And with this he’s done it again… and maybe even topped it. Alan used a filter that lets through only a very narrow wavelength of light emitted by hydrogen (called Hα for those of you keeping track at home), so this tracks the activity of gas on the solar surface. The scene-stealer is that detached prominence off to the left. The beauty of this picture belies its violence and sheer magnitude: the mass of material in a prominence can easily top 10 billion tons!
Yegads. You really need to go and see the rest of Alan’s photography at his site, Averted Imagination. Related posts: 08pd2539.jpg (JPEG-bilde, 3000x2008 punkter) - Skalert (43 %)