Ocala.com Bloggers
- Broken News
- Bill Thompson
- Digital Editor
- Eric Barnes
- Frame 37
- Ocala.com Multimedia
- Marion Politics
- Newsroom
- Observations
- Naseem S. Miller
- OcalaDay
- Joe Byrnes
- Read My E-Mail
- Allen Parson
- Running Wide Open
- Joe Vanhoose
- Speaking of Business...
- Dr. Philip R. Geist
- The Bowling Blog
- Debbie Whitten
- The Green Zone
- Dave Rhea
- The Sports Blog
- Gregory Broome
- What is that?
- Newsroom
 |
Search Blogs
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Blog Archives
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Looking at the sun – in depth, and safely!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
 |
| Posted by: Emory Schley |
4/25/2007 5:50 AM |
There are a couple of spacecraft whooshing around out there in the area between us and the sun, taking photos of our star. The two spacecrafts are part of the STEREO program which is an attempt to gather 3-D pictures of that flaming orb which makes all life on Earth possible. Launched together, they separated and took up different paths, one in front of the Earth, and the other trailing behind the Earth. The Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory is the third mission in NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes program, according to a NASA Web-site,
The two ships are separated by quite a bit of distance, in terrestrial terms, enough to make 3-D imaging of the sun possible. Normally, the two photos in a stereo pair are taken from a distance of just inches apart, mimicking the action of human eyesight, but as distances to the subject increase, so distances between the two photos must also increase in order to maintain the depth effect. The sun is about 93 million miles from the Earth, so a pretty generous amount of space is required between the two cameras.
So we have these two ships out there, zooming along with the Earth and taking stereo photos of our sun. Why is NASA committing tax dollars to such a project? Well, the sun spews out Coronal Mass Ejections from time to time. These CMEs can propel a billion tons (!) of the sun’s fiery material into space, and sometimes those massive assaults are aimed directly at the Earth, travelling at a mind-numbing velocity of one million miles per hour. Even so, it takes two to four days to reach the Earth’s surface, whereas some effects can be detected here on Earth in as little as 20 minutes. Some CME events aimed in our direction can impact artificial satellites like those that comprise our GPS system, power grids here on Earth, radio communications, cell-phones, and lots of other technical innovations that we use on a daily basis. Scientists want to study these more closely so that they can more accurately predict their occurrences.
One purpose of the 3-D photos is to give space weather specialists a better idea of the configuration of these massive upheavals. The first photos from the STEREO program went on-line yesterday, and you can download a few of them and see what our sun looks like in stunning 3-D. You’ll need some of the 3-D comic book glasses, or the ones you may have kept from a showing of “Spy Kids: 3-D,” but if you don’t have any around, they are widely available on the Internet – and for free!
Just call up Google and type in “free anaglyph glasses” and take your choice of sites. Anaglyph (ANNA-glif) is the technical name for those red and cyan 3-D images. There are lots of other neat sites on the Internet where you can use your 3-D glasses as well, including a 3-D view of the Face on Mars, which shows it doesn’t really look like much of a face when you see it in 3-D.
Get a pair of those 3-D glasses and keep them in a spot where you can easily find them. They’ll come in handy!
SITES TO CHECK:
For 3-D glasses, search on Google for “free anaglyph glasses”.
For 3-D photos of the sun: www.nasa.gov/stereo
For 3-D movies of the sun: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/multimedia/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo3D_press.html
For Face on Mars in 3-D: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070421.html
More space photos in 3-D: Search Google for “NASA Anaglyph,” take your choice of 866,000 sites! |
|
| Permalink |
Trackback |
Comments (1)
Add Comment
|
Re: Looking at the sun – in depth, and safely! |
By Tommy F Thompson on
4/24/2007 9:16 AM |
Sly,
And what those pictures are going to show us is that the sun is one large, fried egg (over easy.) We have known that for a long, long time. |
|
|
|
|
|