Does it rain on the Sun? The answer to this is yes, however, it is not water that falls but very hot plasma. On July 19, 2012, there was an eruption on the Sun that produced a massive burst of solar wind and magnetic fields and released into Space. This eruption also produced a powerful solar flare. After that, a phenomenon known as coronal rain occurred. Corona Rain occurs occurs when hot plasma in the corona cools and condenses in strong magnetic fields, usually associated with regions that produce solar flares. The plasma condenses and slowly falls back to the solar surface.

The electrons, protons and ions in the rain is forced to move along the magnetic loops of the Sun’s surface. As a result, this bright flare highlights matter glowing at a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. The entire coronal rain lasted about 10 hours.

Video Credit : http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130226.html

This is the stuff of dreams, imagination, creativity and innovation.This is especially cool for parents to have their children witness something “out of this world” live as it happens. This is American science education at its absolute finest.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has done it again, BIG TIME!

In normal fashion for JPL in Pasadena, this was no normal, everyday kind of landing, as Curiosity will blast into the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour and in a death-defying “Seven Minutes of Terror” come to a soft landing on Mars. Fingers and toes were crossed. And, due to its heavy weight, it will not land like Spirit and Opportunity did about 8 years ago landing in cushioned, inflated air bags that looks like giant raspberries. Curiosity was lowered to the surface under a rocket-powered sky-crane, never before attempted by any spacecraft. Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity is the most sophisticated and complex robotic spacecraft ever built.

Even now that this event has happened, you can witness this history-making event through these special  NASA TV video along with millions of people around the world.

Curiosity was launched on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011:

Some folks may have heard that there was a problem anticipated with the transmission of the landing telemetry (radio signal), possibly taking hours before we would know what happened during the landing. That problem was with America’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft orbiting Mars (along with America’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Europe’s Mars Express Orbiter). A “reaction wheel” that helps control Mars Odyssey’s orbital path location had problems, that could have impacted its ability to receive and relay the telemetry as it happens. The week before landing, JPL engineers successfully corrected the issue, putting Mars Odyssey back on course to directly receive the landing telemetry and beam it back to Earth as it is happening.

Newsflash! Curiosity has successfully landed on the surface of Mars!

Bear in mind that the transmission time from Mars to Earth will be about 14 minutes at the speed of light, so Curiosity will have experienced the Seven Minutes of Terror and landed before we get the signals from Mars. Hold your breath and wish Curiosity the best as you watch these videos!

Here are some of the first images:

More images are being posted by NASA here: Mars Science Laboratory Image Gallery

How do astronomers find planets around distant stars? If you look at a star through binoculars or a telescope, you’ll quickly notice how bright the star is, and how difficult it is to see anything other than the star, especially a small planet that doesn’t generate any light of its own!

Aurora, or ‘northern lights’, is the natural light display in the sky in northern regions like Canada, Alaska, and northern Eurpoean countries that have had people puzzled for centuries as to what exactly they were, and how the light displays were made. Here’s a rare view of the aurorae taken from the International Space Station:

Auroras (or aurorae) happen about 50 miles up, when solar wind hits particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. When charged particles from the solar wind hit the Earth’s magnetosphere (a magnetic field that extends far beyond the Earth’s surface and protects us from solar wind), they are funneled by the Earth’s magnetic field. When these highly charged particles from the sun hit a molecule in our atmosphere, they give off a photon. The green and brownish-red colors come from oxygen and the blue and red are from nitrogen.

In northern latitudes, the aurora borealis was named after the Roman goddess of dawn (Aurora) and the Greek name for the north wind (Boreas). In the south, the aurora australis (or the southern lights) appear anytime the northern lights are visible. This effect is also seen on other planets like Jupiter and Saturn.

Once you’ve looked at Jupiter through your binoculars, you might be wondering which moon is which. Here’s how you can tell the positions of the four moons.

Can’t find Jupiter? Use this star chart to help locate Jupiter in the night sky:  You can try using an interactive Sky Map if you’re at the computer and want to plan out what you’re going to see tonight and familiarize yourself with the night sky ahead of time, or use the paper Sky Map which is the same one I personally use (it’s free) so you can print it out and take outside with you.

Lyman Spitzer was a theoretical physicist and astronomer who worked on star formation and plasma physics. The scape telescope named after him is equipped with infrared imaging capability that enables the telescope to see through dust and gas clouds to reveal what lies underneath.

Spitzer is part of the 1970s idea NASA conceived for the Great Observatories. The idea was to have the Hubble Space Telescope operate in the visible range, Chandra which operates in the x-ray, and Spitzer which operates in the infrared. Here’s an informational video about Spitzer:

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was one of the most careful, thorough, and impressive astronomers in the first part of the 20th century who worked in may different areas of astronomy, making great leaps with his discoveries. He won the Nobel prize for his ideas about when and how to get supernova, which he did while traveling on a boat at age 19! Chandra had a very elegant way of using mathematics to describe atmospheres of planets and stellar structures of galaxies. He was one of the few researchers that is able to teach as well as do his own research.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is the third of NASA’s Great Observatories. Chandra looks for high energy X-ray radiation, which appears near supernovae, supermassive black holes and neutron stars. Here’s an video about the telescope itself and how difficult it is to observe x-rays:

NASA’s Deep Impact Mission

Launch and flight teams are in final preparations for the planned Jan. 12, 2005, liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., of NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft. The mission is designed for a six-month, one-way, 431 million kilometer (268 million mile) voyage. Deep Impact will deploy a probe that essentially will be “run over” by the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 at approximately 37,000 kilometers per hour (23,000 miles per hour). It’s like hitting a comet with something the size of a fridge. Click here to read more.

Galileo Probe Mission to Jupiter

Galileo was an unmanned spacecraft sent by NASA to study the planet Jupiter and its moons. Named after the astronomer and Renaissance pioneer Galileo Galilei, it was launched on October 18, 1989 by the Space Shuttle Atlantis on the STS-34 mission. It arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, a little more than six years later, via gravitational assist flybys of Venus and Earth.

Galileo conducted the first asteroid flyby, discovered the first asteroid moon, was the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter, and launched the first probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

On September 21, 2003, after 14 years in space and 8 years of service in the Jovian system, Galileo’s mission was terminated by sending the orbiter into Jupiter’s atmosphere at a speed of nearly 50 kilometres per second to avoid any chance of it contaminating local moons with bacteria from Earth. Of particular concern was the ice-crusted moon Europa, which, thanks to Galileo, scientists now suspect harbors a salt water ocean beneath its surface. Click here to read more.

Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn

The incredible journey to Saturn and Titan. Click here to read more.

New Horizons Mission to Pluto

This montage of New Horizons images shows Jupiter and its volcanic moon, Io. The images were taken during the spacecraft’s near-pass of the gas giant in early 2007. Credit: NASA/JHU/APL New Horizons’ voyage through the Jupiter system in 2007 provided a bird’s-eye view of a dynamic planet that has changed since the last close-up looks by NASA spacecraft. Click here to read more.

Enrico Fermi gave physics a give leap as he uncovered many puzzles in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. Fermi had the rare ability to work with both experimental and theoretical physics who also could do the math and teach students in his spare time. He was awarded the Nobel prize at age 37 for figuring out what happens to the nucleus of an atom when you throw too many neurons at it (this induces radioactivity). Here’s a look at the mission that was named after him:

Kepler was the mind that pulled together the observations of Galileo and the data from Tycho to figure out how the planets moved around the sun.

Although his three laws were not recognized in his day (scoffed was more like it!), these laws are still used in today’s science classes. The Kepler mission launched in March, 2009, and is designed to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Here’s a video that details the mission:

Please login or register to read the rest of this content.

If your kid is crazy for Astronomy, get your hands on a $25 copy of Guy Ottewell’s Astronomical Calendar. You won’t find a better, more complete yearly almanac of astronomy anywhere. (In fact, most sources use Ottewell’s information in their publications.)

If a telescope is in your near future, here are a few of my personal recommendations. (Please note that I do not sell any of these telescopes, nor do I get paid for posting these links.  Think of this as a sneak peek into my personal collection.)

Please login or register to read the rest of this content.