Comet Shoemaker Levy Colliding with Jupiter
Spectacular images of Jupiter during and after impacts, when over twenty fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into the planet in July 1994. Click here to read more.
Solar Flares caught by SOHO
This mega-flare was seen being spewed out by the Sun starting at 20:29 CET on 4 November 2003. This video sequence was captured by SOHO’s Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope. Don’t worry about the image being green – it’s just the filter they used in order to see.Click here to read more.
In this video below, astronomers blocked out the sun (seen as a white circle in the center of the red disk) so they could see the action in the corona.
Yes – they sure do! Read more here:
http://www.carliniinstitute.com/how_recent_solar_flares_are_affecting_us
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/info/FAQ.html
http://www.space.com/11506-space-weather-sunspots-solar-flares-coronal-mass-ejections.html
Do sun flares affect our weather?
They can get WAY bigger than the earth! Here’s an article about space weather:
http://spaceweather.com/
And here’s an image of a large flare compared with the size of the earth:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/images/eit99promclose.html
How high is a sun flare?
Whoa, cool!
Laura
Transiting means that one object is passing in front of another. So when Venus transits across the face of the sun, you’ll see a black dot (Venus) moving from one side of the sun to the other. (This isn’t something you want to observe with your naked eyeballs, though.)
You can see pictures of Io transiting Jupiter here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_transit
What is “transiting”?
Yes, good question – I think it was Venus transiting. I can check my star charts to verify that it was Venus, not Mercury.
In the Huge Solar Flare video, what was that thing that looked like a small, white ship going across the sun close to the end?