NASA snaps Sun in super STEREO NASA has released the first images from its twin Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) probes as they moved into position on opposite sides of the Sun. STEREO image of the Sun. Pic: NASA The above snap shows the far side of the Sun captured on 2 February, when the two spacecraft weren't quite separated by 180 …
knowing about a massive solar event that's going to destroy life as we know 6 months before it happens will make all the difference - we'll all, for one, have the opportunity to make millions buying shares in the companies that make the paper bags we'll all be putting over our heads.
The sun rotates on its axis once every 24 days at its equator, and about once every 34 days at its poles. During those 24-34 days, the Earth moves, so a point on the sun faces the Earth about every 26 days. A part of the sun we cannot see will face Earth in about 7 to 21 days, not six months.
OMG is Wm Blake alive and well and living at NASA?
Blake was a noted naturist - you'd (almost) hardly expect him not to be, given his (more famous) aversion to dark, satanic mills. But I have to wonder whether Blake at NASA today might not have got a bit weary by now of this neverending cosmological voyeurism, the space-tourism-syndrome-by-proxy, the tedious enthusiasm to flaunt yet more holiday snaps of strange places away from boring old Gaia. He would recognize the oddness of being so blase about technology.
One needs some sort of explanation along those lines to account for the scant progress made in astronomy since satellites and telescope have multiplied data millions of times since Sputnik. The common IT confusion between data and information won't cut it, as astronomy is not (yet) software engineering. Why, one might ask, have so few theories been falsified by all that data?
Case in point: bottom picture. Source is not credited, so what I may be seeing is merely a processing artefact, but I see something axisymmetrical. Something like a planetary nebula, which more and more can be seen in detail to have axial symmetry. My question is: where is this predicted in Eddington's theory of stars?
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