Tag Archives: The Sun

“Riding Light” – Animation by Alphonse Swinehart

February 5th, 2015 | Space

Riding Light Vimeo

“Riding Light” is a new, beautiful animation by Alphonse Swinehart. In the 45-minute journey, you will travel with light on its way from the Sun to Jupiter. I love videos like this because they really help me gain a better appreciation for the scale of our Universe. If you watch light travel from Earth to Mars, for example, you will realize how difficult it will be to successfully complete a manned exploration mission to the red planet. There’s just so much emptiness between the planetary masses…

A word from the creators:

“In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it’s unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I’ve taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually “sees” or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I’ve kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

Design & Animation: Alphonse Swinehart / aswinehart.com
Music: Steve Reich “Music for 18 Musicians”
Performed by: Eighth Blackbird / eighthblackbird.org”

-RSB

The Sun from Alan Friedman

February 19th, 2013 | Space

The Sun 1

Sun 2

The Sun 3

“A hibernation project… a warm weather sun set aside to work on during the cold, sunless days of January. Captured June 10, 2012, completed today.
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“

Sun 4

sun-5

sun-6

sun-7

sun-8

sun-9

“Not a mouse, of course, but a mammoth solar filament stretched across the sun today. Filaments are prominences from a different point of view… gigantic splashes of hydrogen plasma seen in front of the disk of the sun rather than against the background of space.”

The Sun 10 (Pastoral Sun)

“The sun is quiet in late August… perhaps on vacation, like everyone else”

Alan Friedman is responsible for these incredible High-Definition photographs of the Sun.  He shoots the images from his backyard in downtown Buffalo with a setup that looks like this:

Alan Friedman Camera

Of course, no images of the sun come out of the camera with such dazzling precision and color.  Alan performs days of post-processing to give the photographs the finished look.
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 You can read more about the process at his blog.

-RSB

[via Visual News]

10 Moons

January 9th, 2012 | Space

Saturn’s Rhea

Jupiter’s Europa

Jupiter’s Callisto

Jupiter’s Io

Earth’s Moon Transiting The Sun

Saturn’s Mimas – aka Death Star

Mars’ Phobos

Neptune’s Triton

Uranus’ Oberon

Jupiter’s Ganymede

Check out this collection of spectacular moon photos I saw on the Mother Nature Network, and learn a bit about our solar system in the process.  A lot of the photos have different filters to make them look extra special, but they are interesting nonetheless.  I thought it would be cool to learn all of the moons of the solar system, but I found out there are more than 170, so that could be quite challenging.  Did you know Jupiter, alone, has 63 moons!?

-RSB