Steven S. Holland

This article from NASA talks about the measurement of magentic portals that connect the earth to the sun every 8 minutes, due to their magnetic fields pushing against each other and forming connections.  It is always interesting to see something happening on a such a large scale and with these huge fields that, as the article points out, many people didn’t believe in only 10 years ago.
I find the interaction of the electromagnetic waves on the scale of the solar system, between immensely large objects (here the earth and the sun) to be fascinating.  I spend so much time dealing with such small scale fields - antennas, microwave circuits, where fields are coerced into existence in these carefully designed structures to behave in a certain way.  Then I read articles on fields stretching 100 million miles between the earth and the sun, or the various effects the sun’s fields have on the earth, such as solar flares - fields covering half our solar system, in unbounded space, whose origins are not always clear or understood.  I mean, the earth’s magnetic field seems such a simple field that we take for granted - yet why it exists in the first place is not fully understood - you can’t exactly cut the earth in half and take a peak at it’s cross-section. It has even been shown to have flipped thousands of times over it’s lifetime - also something that we don’t quite understand the reason for.

Images of the earth and moon from 31 million miles away.

“A NASA spacecraft designed to look for comets turned its cameras homeward, capturing a unique view of the moonEarth as seen from 31 million miles away. The spacecraft, Deep Impact, took shots at 15-minute intervals, which were combined to make the sequence shown below. passing in front of the

The latest images show the moon and Earth in greater detail than previous ones taken by orbiting spacecraft, showing oceans and continents on our planet and craters on the moon. By studying how Earth looks from so far away, the scientists hope to sharpen their search for alien worlds that may share similar characteristics”

Nasa’s Picture of the day has an image taken using the magnification due to gravity of a galaxy to see galaxies much further on. It’s a phenomenon that has been used for a long time to see distant objects.
Really interesting to see an actual image of how this looks.

I came across a page detailing the past year in the life of the Hubble Telescope, and what’s in store for it’s future: Nasa’s news website on Hubble. It aslo talked, however, about Google Sky, which is a google earth feature that allows you to look at the sky in addition to what is on the earth. This is really neat, I am currently downloading Google earth to play with this a bit.

Has anyone used this before?