A Sunspot in the New Solar Cycle.

2008 February 6


Credit & Copyright: Greg Piepol

Explanation: A new cycle has begun on our Sun. Over the past year, the Sun's magnetic field has reset and now a new 11 year period is beginning. Pictured above in a specific color of light emitted by hydrogen is sunspot 10982, one of the first sunspots of the new solar cycle. The two dark lines visible just above and to either side of the bright sunspot are cool filaments held aloft by the Sun's magnetic field. Hot and cold regions are shown as regions of relative light and dark, respectively. A solar cycle is caused by the changing magnetic field, and varies from solar maximum, when sunspot, coronal mass ejection, and flare phenomena are most frequent, to solar minimum, when such activity is relatively infrequent. Solar minimums occurred in 1996 and 2007, while the last solar maximum occurred in 2001. Of course, tomorrow's annular solar eclipse is mostly for penguins.

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Random Space shots...

Uncovering the Veil Nebula
















Galactic HII Region RCW 120















The Sun Loses its Spots















Bullet Cluster


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Interglatic Crash...

I was reading earlier about the big crash between 4 separate galaxies. They say it will make one big mess of a galaxy much larger than our own Milky Way. With all of those stars and planets, who can there not be any life on them? I am Christian, but how can we think that we are the only people alive? Isn’t that rather presumptuous of us?

I guess that if we are the only inhabitants of this universe, then that is a big waste of space out there. And with us only beginning to explore space, we may never get to those other planets to see what they are all about. If we are the only people, then why did God just make Earth the only planet with a Sun and a moon? I mean that is all we really need. We do not have the technology to be able to go and use resources from that we have found on other planets. Gentlemen, We do not have the technology to achieve this goal. I guess that they give us something to look at during the night.

I kind of boggles the mind to think that when we use the Hubble Telescope to look deep into space that we are looking back in time. The light that we see has been traveling for millions and billions of years to get to the earth. For all we know, some of the pictures we see are no longer there and have been gone for millions of years and in fact, I am sure some of them are that way.
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