Solar Stuff and Mars Attack!!!!

Got a cool pic of the Sun a couple days ago. it was shinning behind some wispy clouds and looked huge, grabbed my palmcorder and took the pic. The thing I like about the images is that they are in 16:9 Anamorphic widescreen, looks classy, and I love to say Anamorphic. Another Anamorphic Widescreen image I took is below, it is our lovely Sun in all it's Solar Minimum glory. Just missed an actual sunspot, #0978 had just rotated out of view a few hours before this image was taken. I took this image of the Sun with my Anamorphic Widescreen Plamcorder, stuck my white light telescopic Solar filter in front of it with one hand and snapped the image with the other, in this image you can see solar granules on the surface of the Sun, gives it a grainy appearance, basically they are caused by bubbling plasma, the same way when you boil fudge on the stove it bubbles, or boling water.



I put on the image for comparisons sake circles representing the sizes of Jupiter and Earth, the ratio is 1, 10, 100, that is the Sun is roughly 10 x the diameter of Jupiter, Jupiter is 10x the diameter of Earth, therefore the Sun is 100x the diameter of the Earth. Haven't posted many pictures of the Sun since I started my blog mostly because it is at Solar Minimum. The Sun goes through this 11 year cycle of high and low activity, right now and up until March of next year we are at the low spot , after March the Sun will start it's 5 and a half year climb to Solar max and we will slowly see increases in the amount and frequency of items such as solar flares, sunspots and prominences, nothing like a good ole solar flare to raise my spirits! Below is an image I took of the Sun a couple years ago while it still had some cool activity.

An asteroid, which by the way has been tracked by NASA since November 20, has a 1 in 75 chance of hitting little Mars on January 30th, 2008. Asteroid 2007 WD5 is around 160 feet across, is also supposed to be similar to the asteroid that broke up in midair before it flattened a Siberian forest back in 1908. If it does hit Mars the rovers may or may not get an image of the event, they figure it will hit somewhere north of Opportunity.

The blue arrow in the above image shows the predicted path of the asteroid and the orange line is the predicted impact zone. Scientists say the asteroid is behind the Moon right now, they will have a better idea if and when it will hit Mars in January when the glow of the Moon dies down and they can fine tune it's trajectory. NASA is pretty excited about the prospect of an asteroid hitting Mars, no one has ever witnessed an asteroid hitting anything, I'm all excited it's not gonna hit us!!

Since this will be my last post till after Christmas, MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE !!