SOHO Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) solar images last summer and today:

Solar activity is starting to increase again after what has been a relatively long quiet spell associated with the minimum part of the solar cycle. February was the first month in quite some time where there were sunspots every day of the month. In the image above from last July (left), the lone bright area below the equator near the center was not associated with a sunspot, but was in an area of magnetic activity.

Remember that the sun is a star, like all stars, whose business is to fuse lighter elements into heavier ones; our sun fuses hydrogen into helium. This process results in chaotic magnetic behavior of the solar plasma which fluctuates in intensity over an eleven year cycle. We wrote “Ultimate Global Warming - SPF 2 Million Won’t Be Enough” to describe the process.

Evidently, we’re on the upswing after what some scientists (real ones, not climate liars) say was a very extended inactive period, which some feared would put the sun into many years of minimal activity. It is likely that such an extended period, the Maunder Minimum, was the cause of the “Little Ice Age” during the 1600s and 1700s. We wrote “Correlating Sunspots to Global Climate” which illustrates the phenomenon using animations and graphics.

Personally, after the winter we have been having in North America this season, I will be glad to see the sunspots bring us back to our subtropical weather patterns. Old folks like warmer weather, y’know. C’mon global warming!

Cubical rocks lie in a spot designated “Chocolate Hills” by the JPL team. These remind me of stones quarried to build ancient structures on our planet.

Excerpt from the Mars Rover website:

Opportunity at a sweet spot on Mars

This rock has a thick, dark-colored coating that is interesting to scientists because many of the rocks in the surrounding area have the same mysterious dark stuff. The coating could be remnants of a layer that was changed by the action of water and weather or, it could be a layer of rock that melted when a meteor (less than a foot across) impacted Mars, ejecting this rock and others and creating the crater “Concepcion”. Knowing its origins will help them understand the history of Mars. Opportunity’s mission is to figure out the “ingredients” of this morsel by studying the chemicals in it.

The article is silent about the shape of the rocks.

There are signs that the current solar cycle, presently in a relatively low activity state, is on the move to become more active as we enter the second year of the eleven-year cycle. This is a movie of an event captured last February that scientists are calling a “solar tsunami.” It is a towering wave of plasma that lifts itself more than the width of the Earth above the solar surface and hurls massive amounts of solar matter into space.

From NASA:

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a “CME”) into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun’s surface. STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90o, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event:

Above: A solar tsunami seen by the STEREO spacecraft from orthogonal points of view. The gray part of the animation has been contrast-enhanced by subtracting successive pairs of images, resulting in a “difference movie.”

Please note that this is actual science and not the filtered version that you get from, say, the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. You can click on the movie above to see a larger version.

Over at the STEREO Solar observation website, they now feature an animated image of most of the solar globe. From the vantage points of the STEREO Ahead and Behind spacecraft, images are processed into this movie of the globe. Note the hot regions near the right edge just before the blank region - those spots are not in view of the SOHO spacecraft which sees the sun from the same angle as the Earth from its station at L1, the first Lagrangian point between the Earth and Sun.

From the STEREO website:

STEREO consists of two space-based observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind. With this new pair of viewpoints, scientists will be able to see the structure and evolution of solar storms as they blast from the Sun and move out through space.

This movie shows a spherical map of the Sun as it currently appears, formed from a combination of the latest STEREO Ahead and Behind beacon images. The movie starts with the view of the Sun as seen from Earth, with the 0 degree meridian line in the middle. The map then rotates through 360 degrees to show the part of the Sun not visible from Earth. The black wedge shows the part of the Sun not yet visible to the STEREO spacecraft.

The STEREO project, a constellation of two identical solar probes, one ahead of the Earth (STEREO A) and one behind the Earth (STEREO B), simultaneously imaged a solar prominence from their divergent perspectives. This video was featured on NASA’s SOHO Pick of the Week.

The video below shows the mass ejection in synchronized timing from ahead and behind the Earth.

In the left panel (behind), you can see the event emerging from near the top of the solar disk, while on the right panel (ahead) it is occurring above the solar horizon. In these times when there are few sunspots, the old solar machine is still cranking out the good old nuclear fusion.

Last evening, we paused the DVD player to watch the liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery. After a couple of aborted countdowns earlier in the week, Discovery, once again, roared into space from the Florida Coast.

Damsel snapped this image with her camera just at the moment of liftoff. Click to enlarge.

From NASA:

With seven astronauts and a host of experiments and equipment on board, space shuttle Discovery completed a flawless ascent into orbit Friday night to begin a two-day chase of the International Space Station. With Commander Rick “C.J. ” Sturckow at the controls, the shuttle lifted off on-time at 11:59 p.m. EDT from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew will rendezvous and dock with the station Sunday and the crew will begin transferring equipment to the outpost during the 13-day mission.

Even in the doldrums of an extended solar minimum, our nearest star continues to be dynamic in it’s (mostly) unseen behavior. This week’s SOHO Pick of the Week illustrates some of this unseen activity in this animation.

A few areas of this rather unremarkable solar image taken in extreme ultraviolet (UV) light on August 4, 2009, provide good starting points for explicating some of the unseen features of the Sun. For one thing, the darker polar coronal holes at the Sun’s poles (top and bottom) are the source of open magnetic field lines (red) that head way out into space. They are also the source regions of the fast solar wind, which is characterized by a relatively steady speed of approximately 800 km/s.

A more variable slow solar wind (gray) flows from all other areas of the Sun, carrying particles out into space. The solar wind defines the breadth of our solar system, the heliosphere. The image also shows a dark coronal hole at lower latitudes, just about facing towards Earth. The high speed solar wind particles (white) blowing from there will likely reach Earth in a few days and may spark some auroral activity. Lastly, magnetic loops (yellow) above the one sizeable active region arc out and connect back to an area of opposite polarity. Hot particles in these loops make them visible in UV light.

Safe to say, there is more than meets the eye when studying the Sun.

Nobody knows for sure, but the lack of sunspot activity could continue and make the next solar cycle one of the longest minimums in modern times. Shall we call it the Gore Minimum?

Out of the Black and into the Blue

On July 17, 1989 at Edwards Air Force Base, Northrop and the United States Air Force rolled out this magnificent aircraft. I watched the closed circuit TV coverage from the media center at Northrop Electro-Mechanical Division in Anaheim, California.

Damsel and I later had the privilege to visit the B2 production facility in Palmdale for a group tour and a fly-by. It was spectacular.

Photo taken by The Flying Kiwi at the 2005 Air Show at Edwards Air Force Base. Be sure and visit the link for more photos from the air show. Click image to enlarge.