A beautiful and trippy time-lapse video of the midnight sun in Iceland, filmed in June of 2011. From the vimeo description:

Iceland is a landscape photographers paradise and playground, and should be number 1 on every photographers must visit list. Iceland during the Midnight Sun is in sort of a permanent state of sunset. The sun never full sets and travels horizontally across the horizon throughout the night, as can be seen in the opening shot and at the :51 second mark in the video.

During the Arctic summer, sunset was at midnight and sunrise was at 3am. The Arctic summer sun provided 24 hours a day of light, with as much as 6 hours daily of “Golden light”. Once the sun had set it wouldn’t even get dark enough for the stars to come out, and they don’t start to reappear until August.

-via Metafilter

Photo: Luis Argerich - via Buzzfeed

First it was Sunsquatch, now Pikachu sunrise! Argentinian photographer Luis Argerich took this photo of an unusual sunrise over Rio de La Plata.

APOD explains that it's just low level clouds but just you wait till it attacks with the Volt Tackle!

See any resemblance between these two photos? You recognize Bigfoot on the right, of course. The picture on the left is a detail from a larger picture of an eruption of ionized gas from the surface of the sun. Dr. Phil Plait recognizes pareidolia when he sees it, leading one commenter to speculate that Bigfoot sightings increase in conjunction with solar activity. Read more about it at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link -Thanks, Adrienne!

(Solar image credit: Alan Friedman)

Don’t worry, the Earth isn’t that close! It was just inserted into the picture so you could get a sense of the size of this huge solar flare that emerged last Thursday. It was spat out by sunspot AR 1302, which is so big that you can see it with the naked eye.

Link | Photo: JP Brahic

This image was selected as the Astronomy Picture of the Day last weekend. It was taken by the Cassini probe in 2006 from the shadow of Saturn.

First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn, slightly scattering sunlight, in this exaggerated color image. Saturn’s rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the image. Seen in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn’s E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, at the left, just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

You should take a look at the larger version at NASA. Link -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA)

Aah, the beach. The shimmering ocean, the scantily clad girls frolicking in the sun ... wait scratch the last one, at least if you're in South Korea.

John Glionna of the Los Angeles Times wrote to tell us how people in South Korea's most popular beach go there to avoid the sun:

Covered end-to-end with multihued parasols that turned the beige sand into a sea of blue, red, white and pink, South Korea's popular summer playground is a beach where people studiously avoid the sun.

American businessman Greg Conklin shook his head at the sight: This isn't a public beach; it's another planet.

"In Michigan, we go to the water to sizzle and burn," he said. "You don't see umbrellas jammed together like cars during rush hour. I mean, where's the sand? Where do you throw the Frisbees?"

And it doesn't end there. Read more about how the local officials had to install a high heel-friendly runway on the beach and other eccentricities: Link (Photo: Matt Douma/ LA Times)

Celestial Buddies

Do you dream of snuggling up at night with a heavenly body? Well, now you can with the Celestial Buddies from the NeatoShop.  These fantastic plush toys are designed to look like the sun, earth, moon, and mars.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more loveable Plush Toys.

Link

The answer — spoiler alert! — is almost certainly “no”. I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming. That’s baloney, and what follows is why. The reasons take a minute to explain, but of course that’s where the cool stuff (haha!) is. So let’s take this one step at a time. And if you have the attention span of an E. coli bacterium, you can skip down to the conclusion section.

What follows is a pretty comprehensive but simply written explanation of the sun’s magnetic cyle and its effect on Earth’s temperature. Link

Sunspots are actually regions of slightly cooler material at the Sun’s surface. Hot plasma (ionized gas, stripped of one electron or more) rises from the solar interior, reaches the surface, cools off, and sinks back down. This is called convection, and is the same process you see in a pot of boiling water. But at the surface, the tortured and twisted magnetic field of the Sun can suppress convection, preventing the cooler material from sinking. Since the brightness of the plasma depends on the temperature, this cooler stuff is darker. Boom! Sunspot.

Or, in this case, sunspots. You can see five of the suckers here, changing and mutating as the plasma interacts with the magnetic field. I recognize these spots, too: they were responsible for the first X-class flare of the season on March 15th. There’s dramatic footage of that as well which I posted on my blog at the time. They’re busy spots; they blew out a lower energy flare a few days earlier, too.

And here I am calling them cute and little when they’re actually comfortably bigger than the Earth and exploded with the energy equivalent of millions — millions! — of nuclear bombs.

Now I’m excited, too! Watch the video at Bad Astronomy. Link

(Image credit: NASA/SDO)

The flares were so powerful that “people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora,” Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting last December.

In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.

In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world’s high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.

Such a flare today could disrupt our cellular signals, internet, GPS system, satellite transmissions, and even our electrical grid. Read all about it at National Geographic.

Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

(Image credit: SDO/NASA)

It was invented in 1853 by the Scottish Gaelic scholar Iain Òg Ìle, known in English as John Francis Campell.  Perhaps unsurprisingly he was also the Secretary to the Lighthouse Commission at the time.  It was adapted and improved in 1879 by Sir George Gabriel Stokes (pictured left) a Cambridge University based physicist and mathematician known for his work in fluid dynamics, mathematical physics and, importantly, optics.  As president of the Royal Society and Commission he also investigated the causes of railway disasters during that period.

Campbell’s idea was straightforward but brilliant.  A glass sphere would be placed in to a wooden bowl.  The sun would burn a trace on the bowl as it the earth circled it – the above is a picture of the original now housed at the Science Museum in London.  It worked and would measure the amount of sunshine in a single day with some accuracy.  The downside, obviously, was the number of bowls which would have to be used to collect a significant amount of data – a year’s worth for example.

There are other versions of this simple device in use around the world. See pictures of them at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Science Museum London)

Today, for the first time in history, humans can see the entire sun.

In October 2006, NASA launched a pair of twin spacecraft into space. Called STEREO — Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory — they traveled in opposite directions, one ahead and the other behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The goal was to get a wide, stereoscopic view of the Sun which would provide 3D information on our star.

Today they reached that goal. After traveling a combined 470 million kilometers (290 million miles) relative to the Earth, they are now on opposite sides of the Earth’s orbit, staring down at opposing faces of the Sun.

The full coverage observation of the sun will last for eight years. Dr. Phil Plait has an explanation of how NASA did this, and why it is important, at Bad Astronomy. Link

Eric Jacqmain covered an ordinary fiberglass satellite dish with 5,800 mirror tiles to create a home-made death ray that can "melt steel, vaporize aluminum, boil concrete and turn dirt into lava" with the intensity of 5,000 suns.

Archimedes would’ve been proud! Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Previously on Neatorama: Melting Steel With The Sun

Astrophotographer Thierry Legault (featured previously at Neatorama) went all the way to Oman to take a picture of a solar eclipse. The shot he wanted was only available for a split second today, and he got it! Not only is the moon moving across the sun, but you can see other things in the picture (see the full-size version at the link). The small spot towards the bottom is a sunspot twice the size of the earth, and toward the top is something that looks like a TIE fighter. That is the International Space Station (ISS)! The Bad Astronomer explains how rare this picture is:

That’s why Thierry sojourned to Oman; due to the geometry of the ISS orbit, it was from there that he had the best chance of getting a picture of the station as it passed in front of the Sun during the relatively brief duration of the actual solar eclipse. But talk about brief; the ISS was in front of the Sun for less than second, so not only did he have one chance at getting this spectacular once-in-a-lifetime shot, but he had only a fraction of a second to snap it!

The ISS was only in front of the sun for .86 seconds during the eclipse. Link

(Image courtesy of Thierry Legault)

Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our solar system.

There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about individuals, she added.

“There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law. I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first.”

Link via J-Walk Blog | Photo: NASA

On July 26th, the Chinese city of Leshan witnessed a phenomenon that’s puzzling experts and led one Chinese paper to ask this morning if it was a UFO: What appeared to be three suns in the sky at once. Assuming this didn’t come from a close encounter of the third kind or a three wolf moon passing through a double rainbow, what could it have been?

Our pal Geekosystem explains: Link

The sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth, and if we think of that distance as a football field, a person starting at one end zone could get about 95 yards before burning up.

That said, an astronaut so close to the sun is way, way out of position. “The technology in our current space suits really isn’t designed to withstand deep space,” says Ralph McNutt, an engineer working on the heat shielding for NASA’s Messenger, a new robotic Mercury probe. The standard space suit will keep an astronaut relatively comfortable at external temperatures reaching up to 248°. Heat coming off the sun dissipates over distance, but a person drifting in space would begin encountering that kind of heat (the five-yard line) some three million miles from the sun. “It would then be a matter of time before the astronaut died,” McNutt says.

The space shuttle, however, has greater heat resistance than a spacesuit, so it could get to the two-yard line before cooking its crew.

Link | Photo: the Sun seen from Skylab, courtesy of NASA

Video Link (Courtesy NASA/Berkeley)

In this quick image compilation, assembled from para-Earth-orbiting spacecraft, a comet can be seen diving into the Sun’s lower atmosphere.

The video above is a compilation of images from the two STEREO spacecraft that orbit with the Earth, one ahead of the planet and the other behind. The configuration allows for nearly full, continuous coverage of the sun, increasing the chance of witnessing something like the kamikaze comet that they spotted in March.

Seeing comets and other small objects approach the sun is difficult because the objects are overwhelmed by the sun’s brightness. Scientists were able to track this one closer to the sun than ever, before it it burned up in the sun’s lower atmosphere.

“We believe this is the first time a comet has been tracked in 3-D space this low down in the solar corona,” Claire Raftery of the University of California, Berkeley said in a press release. The images were presented at the American Astronomical Meeting in Miami May 24.

It’s doubtful the Solar Dynamics Observatory got any footage, but at least we can view a noteworthy event such as this.

Link

Here’s a solar prominence that erupted on March 30:

(Link [Flickr])

The sun’s internal dynamics were the subject of intense interest over the last few years as the normal waxing and waning of solar activity did not follow past cycles as closely as anticipated. The solar minimum of 2008 stretched deep into 2009, raising questions about how well we understand the complex internal dynamics that drive sun spots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

Because solar storms can disrupt human technologies, it’s important to know when we might expect a serious event that could shut down the electrical grid, for example.

Link to Wired Science Article

A NASA spacecraft called the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) took a picture of a previously unknown comet crashing into our sun:

This is the third comet to swing by the sun this year. Known as sun-grazing comets, the icy objects most likely come from the outer solar system, though it is unlikely that any survive their encounters with the sun. [...]

Astronomers estimate that there may be more than 1,600 comets in our solar system that swing through its heart to pass by the sun during their travels. As of 2000, the definitive count for sun-grazing comets passed the 1,000 mark.

Link via Geekologie | Official Website | Photo: NASA

Alan Friedman, a greeting cards-maker by day and astronomer by night, took this amazing photo of the Sun. APOD explains why it’s blue:

Our Sun may look like all soft and fluffy, but it’s not. Our Sun is an extremely large ball of bubbling hot gas, mostly hydrogen gas. The above picture of our Sun was taken last month in a specific red color of light emitted by hydrogen gas called Hydrogen-alpha and then color inverted to appear blue. In this light, details of the Sun’s chromosphere are particularly visible, highlighting numerous thin tubes of magnetically-confined hot gas known as spicules rising from the Sun like bristles from a shag carpet. Our Sun glows because it is hot, but it is not on fire. Fire is the rapid acquisition of oxygen, and there is very little oxygen on the Sun. The energy source of our Sun is the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium deep within its core. No sunspots or large active regions were visible on the Sun this day, although some solar prominences are visible around the edges.

For a larger pic, be sure to check out APOD: Link

Astrophotographer Thierry Legault took what is probably one of the most incredible photographs of the Sun. What’s the big deal about the big yellow ball? Look closely:

OK, so you look at it and say, “So what? It’s a picture of the quiet Sun seen in overcast conditions. Big deal!”

Ah, but a big deal it is. See those spots in the lower left quadrant of our nearest star? Those aren’t sunspots… here, let me show you what those are:
Yes, that is in fact the Space Shuttle Atlantis silhouetted against the Sun. But wait, there’s something else, isn’t there. What’s that spot below the Shuttle?

That, me droogs, is the Hubble Space Telescope. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

Holy Haleakala!

Link – via google

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by mrsmojorisin.

A fascinating video clip depicting the 12 billion years life cycle of a Class G type star in 6 minutes (actually 6:29). From its conception, birth, death – and the deaths of surrounding celestial bodies – and then its remnants contributing to the growth of future stars and planets are all shown. No narration just great music and animation so sit back and relax.

* Interesting note for those who don’t know: our Sun (Latin name Sol) is a Class G type star.

Armando Lee of the Astronomical League of the Philippines, F. Naelga Jr., and 100 Hours of Astronomy took this fantastic photo of a partial eclipse of the Sun over Manila Bay, which was showcased on APOD. I couldn’t resist putting on the obvious googly eyes … Come on, you know you’re thinking it too!

Scientist at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, are getting ready to do something spectacular: ignite a tiny man-made star inside a lab and trigger a thermonuclear reaction!

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.

The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.

"We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun," said Ed Moses, director of the facility. "It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve."

Inside a structure covering an area the size of three football pitches, a single infrared laser will be sent through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers to create a beam more than 10 billion times more powerful than a household light bulb.

Igniting a tiny man-made star, what could go wrong? Seriously though, this is pretty nifty: Link | National Ignition Facility website | video clip at Wired Science

Is it time for an I Survived the Tiny Man-Made Star T-shirt yet? (Much in the line of our I Survived the Large Hadron Collider T-shirt)