NASA released the first images from the Spitzer Space Telescope today:
Launched in August 2003 as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), Spitzer was renamed in honor of Dr. Lyman Spitzer, Jr, the first to propose placing telescopes in space.
I like this one the best of this first batch (caution: 1.3 Megabyte image).
Update: Jay Manifold, A Voyage to Arcturus, has a writeup on the Spitzer Space Telescope here.
Get out your umbrellas,.. well, they might not help for this storm:
A strong dose of space weather is forecast to hit Earth Friday, potentially disrupting satellite communications and posing a threat to power grids on Earth.
The storm of charged particles was unleashed by a dark region on the solar surface called Sunspot 484. The huge spot, about the size of Jupiter’s surface, has been growing for several days and rotating into a position that now points squarely at Earth.
….
The sunspot let lose a storm of energetic particles, known as a coronal mass ejection at 3 a.m. ET Wednesday, according to forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The expanding cloud is expected to arrive midday Friday. It could produce a geomagnetic storm rated G3 on a scale that goes up to G5.
it will probably cause a little chaos with your cell phones as well.
Update: The Apostropher has some more links including this sweet up close and personal look at a sunspot.
Thanks for Helena Montana at Demogogue for the pointer to this Nature article that explains that it is the sun not the moon that is cheesy:
“If strings of magnetic field get tangled around each other, the Sun becomes like a spinning lump of molten mozzarella,” explains Tom McLeish of the University of Leeds, UK.
