Comet Ison

Solar Dynamics Observatory: Three years in three minutes

Pete Baker on April 22, 2013, 9:56 pm

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What it says on the tin. Three years after First Light, Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has released three stunning minutes of images compiled during its virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum. Enjoy! [Video from NasaExplorer on YouTube. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO] As they note in the associated text During the course of the video, the sun subtly increases and decreases in apparent size. This is because the distance between the SDO spacecraft and the …

“Will Comet ISON fizzle … or sizzle?”

Pete Baker on January 19, 2013, 2:45 pm

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Science at Nasa has a great assessment of the potential for Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) to become the ‘Comet of the Century’. Worth watching. Just remember – “comets are like cats: they have tails, and do whatever they want to do.” But as the Science at Nasa assessment notes “Comet ISON is probably at least twice as big as Comet Lovejoy and will pass a bit farther from the sun’s surface” notes Knight. “This would seem to favor Comet ISON surviving and …

“comets are like cats: they have tails, and do whatever they want to do”

Pete Baker on January 1, 2013, 11:25 pm

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In the BBC’s science news preview of 2013, reporter Jason Palmer highlights a couple of astronomical events worth keeping an eye out for. In mid-February we will get another reminder we live in a (potentially) violent cosmos – asteroid 2012 DA14 will make a harmless but attention-grabbing pass near the Earth, at a distance just a tenth that of the Moon. Exactly what happens then will determine how near the asteroid’s next pass will be, in 2026. (Don’t worry, signs are pretty …