A Leslie Wong Blog

The YouTube description from NASA Goddard: “Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun’s atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day.

The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.“

from NASA Goddard

I follow @twisst on Twitter. twisst gives you alerts from its Twitter account when the International Space Station (ISS) will be passing over your exact location.

The International Space Station AND the Space Shuttle (STS-129) flew over our house tonight at the same time. I made a 30 second time exposure and the ISS and the Shuttle each made their own track. There’s a bigger version on Flickr.

Hubblesite has some amazing space imagery that is in the public domain – it’s produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Office of Public Outreach.

“NGC 1300 lies some 70 million light-years away on the banks of the constellation Eridanus. This Hubble Space Telescope composite view of the gorgeous island universe was released at this week’s (ed. 01/12/2005) meeting of the American Astronomical Society as one of the largest Hubble images ever made of a complete galaxy. NGC 1300 spans over 100,000 light-years and the Hubble image reveals striking details of the galaxy’s dominant central bar and majestic spiral arms. In fact, on close inspection the nucleus of this classic barred spiral itself shows a remarkable region of spiral structure about 3,000 light-years across. Unlike other spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, NGC 1300 is not presently known to have a massive central black hole.” – Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (USRA)

The images in the galleries make thoughtful desktop backgrounds for your ‘puter. Kinda makes your mind expand, looking deep into space and time at something that may be long gone…

robszol over at digg.com says, “This is a picture is really a monumental achievement of humankind.”

read more | digg story

From CNET News: “NASA is celebrating the 17th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in April 1990…”

All I can say is the photographs are amazing.