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NASA Solar Satellite's First Sun Images
coondoggie writes "NASA today showed off the amazing first pictures of the Sun taken from its 6,800lb Solar Dynamics Observatory flying at an orbit 22,300 miles above Earth. The first images show a variety of activity NASA says provide never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths."
I believe NetworkWorld may have been less than prudent in failing to put a thumbnail in place of scaling a 4,096 x 4,096 image totaling 8.6 MB down to 300 x 400. Although I guess since they are sourcing it from nasa.gov this slashdotting is going to come at the taxpayer's expense? :-)
I didn't see a link in the article, but here's the original NASA press release.
My work here is dung.
if you look at the article directly, you'll burn out your retinas!
weinersmith
I do not know what everyone else thinks but I think that sounds pretty exciting. I can see it having a huge impact on airline and space travel.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
That little thing in the lower left side of the sun. It is a perfect rectangle. It couldn't be made in nature. It must be a door!
I like how the corona kind of circles around and seems to open up the sun as a giant dark hole.
Oh, ew. Gah!
It is nice of NASA to provide these images to view for those of us who haven't looked at the Sun with a telescope or binoculars.
There's some absolutely awesome video from SDO here
Wow.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I'd love to see the infrastructure design document from whomever is working at Solar Dynamics Observatory on what they are using for an online disk and long-term storage solution. If they are doing MOC, ingest and data processing/control all in one central location with was mentioned ITFA:
Specifically, NASA says the SDO will beam back 1.5 terabytes of data every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week
Annually, at it's rawest data form, they house ~548TB (0.5 petabytes)!! I work for a NASA funded land processing project, and with our MODIS ingest from GSFC and ASTER pan ingest from Japan, in 11 years, we've accumulated close to 1.5PB of data. Of course, this is trimmed down and anything we need to generate other data product levels is starting to get housed long-term, but that's a HELL of a long of volume to consume and do fantastic projects with. Hurray for science once again. At least this NASA function still is getting money, eh?
that we aren't going to die out in 2012!
I'm glad they told us the weight of the satellite. That sounds like really important information. There's no way we could know if the observatory was fit for science if we didn't know it weighed more than three Volkswagens.
Apparently iTunes has morphed into a unit of scale. What is that in Library of Congresses?
I downloaded the 40mb(h264 mov) file which was all of 31 seconds. What would be super awesome though would be a torrent of a longer period of time...like an hour at least. Pretty please NASA? If the Norweigans can do it with a train ride surely we can do it for a great solar instrument like this.
Normal guy: How much do you think that chick weighs?
Slashdot guy: How much do you think that satellite weighs?
Sounds about right.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
"During 2008-2009 NASA scientists noted that the Sun is undergoing a "deep solar minimum," stating: "There were no sunspots observed on 266 of [2008's] 366 days (73%). Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of September 14, there were no sunspots on 206 of the year's 257 days (80%). It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the National Space Science and Technology Center NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center.
from wikipedia quoting legitimate sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_minimum
I'm all for space exploration, but the TFA should at least mention the solar minimum. And isn't http://solarstormwatch.com/ more interestin' anyway?
Girls(I hope)! Guys!
These videos are awesome. For once, don't bother with the article, just feast your eyes on extraordinary false-color footage of the source* of our life:
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/445831main_Alan-1-FirstSunImageandFootageH264.mov
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/445834main_Alan-4-Larger-activeRegion-H264.mov
Others are available here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/briefing-materials-20100421.html
These are some of the most beautiful works of art I've ever seen, and I studied Fine Art for over a decade. Ok, I've studied Physics for longer, but still!
What particularly struck me was the very "organic" looking cell structure (wikipedia suggests they're http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9nard_cells but I'm not a solar physicist, and I suspect it's just a _little_ bit more complicated than that, what with the vast EM energies at work and such). Call me a nerd, but my chest heaved as though I were looking into the eyes of a beautiful girl** ***.
* Yada yada
** Ok, so I've had a couple of large glasses of wine, and "life looks rosier through the bottom of a wine glass". But then, "in vino veritas". And anyway, it was white wine.
*** All girls are beautiful.
science in government
Now why the hell does a story about new pictures from NASA link to Network World instead of, oh, say, NASA?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
My eyes! My eyes!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Wait a minute... 1.5TB/d = 500,000 iTunes/d??
This would mean that iTunes has only 3MB? The size of a song...
OMG, those complete retard mean MP3s!!
I bet they refer to MP3 players as “iPods”...
This is even dumber than not knowing the difference between $0.02 and 0.02 cent!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Actually I believe it's closer to 0 lbs. in its current position.
Almost all of the links on that article refer back to crap at network world -- I'm still trying to figure out what this link is at the bottom, that claims to be "Solar Dynamics Observatory", but seems to just be a 404 to : sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/site/icon.ico
(There's no 'images' directory on that server at the top level)
I'd just appreciate it if someone were going to link to our servers that they didn't link to crap.
If you want movies, see one of :
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If you look closely, you can see the flag that Louis Armstrong planted on the surface.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
The issue is that when you're flying long distances, you have the choice of either flying over the poles, or refueling mid-way. If there's a solar storm going on, everyone's exposed to a fair amount of radiation in a polar flight, and it might affect some of their instruments. Most airlines will take the refueling stop if there's a storm.
The radiation likely won't be enough to affect the average passenger, but it's the pilots who get to decide, and it's the flight crews that are exposed to radiation over and over again on these trips. ... but it'll be more important when we move to GPS for air traffic control -- GPS doesn't work when there's too much noise in that frequency band. This would mean that the FAA would have to fall back to radar, and all of the benefits they're claiming for their new system would be wiped out. (ie, need to leave more space around planes, so you can't pack the airspace as well)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
That's just typical for Obama's disastrous NASA politics:
Take remote pictures of it from an unmanned observatory.
-Under George W. we would have landed there!
They've booby trapped their sun somehow!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYt8af7C3U
(start about 5:30 in)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You know that watch/non-watch particle/wave thing... what if we look and it becomes different (as in very bad)?
Wait Wait Wait man........ That picture is the cover for a 1977 Parliament-Funkadelic album, isn't it man?!!! Far out man! On two levels!
Check out the full-screen mpegs here: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/SDOFirstLight.html
But it's in focus, without needing a servicing mission.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I heard a valid reason from Dean Pesnell (SDO Project Scientist) -- they wanted to compare it to a compressed media, rather than using units of 'library of congress'. Either someone misheard the quote, or someone screwed up their line, as it was supposed to be something like 'downloading 500k songs from iTunes a day'.
For some reason, they weren't willing to go with the PornYear metric.
(and to the other commenter who said they should've said 'MP3' -- iTunes uses AAC, not MP3, and if you said file format only you'd have to mention at what quality, etc. Not to mention that the bad math analogy you went with is for telecommunications pricing, when you could've gone with the bad-metric-conversion analogy.)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I found that this link provides access to several high quality movies that downloaded quite quickly. They are very interesting to watch.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Does this mean we can finally figure out how to land on the sun at night?
And god knows that people who read science news cannot possibly comprehend how much a terabyte is.
No really.. it is. Awesome.
Vid is on youtube also..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YShVRLSJ-7c
I know it goes without saying here, but "Do Not Look Directly at the Article for any amount of time!"
don't look directly at a picture of the Sun.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Lockheed Martin (AIA PI institution) has some of the 4096 x 4096 images available:
I have no idea why they didn't match the same color tables for the 304/171/19[35] images as SOHO and STEREO.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
1.5 (terabytes per day) = 145.635556 megabits per second
show night time photos?