You can take a free online course in Asteroid Defense 101 courtesy of the Planetary Society. It is one of the first in a series of courses they will be offering, with this one taught by Bruce Betts, author and Planetary Scientist. The course is free, and presented on line.
Over at Deviant Art the creator Breath Art has posted some excellent images of the Planets as Stained Glass in his Solar System series. I am putting a few here to give you the idea, you can click one to go directly to that images page. These are absolutely amazing, you should go take a look at the entire collection.
solar system:Saturn by breath-art on DeviantArt
solar system:Jupiter by breath-art on DeviantArt
Damian Peach took a series of images of Jupiter between March 18th to 22nd this year, and put them together to create this video he calls The Entire Face of Jupiter. He posted it earlier this week, so I thought I would share it here.
Posted by the World Science Festival, this presentation is part of The Big Idea Series, and I could not stop watching it once I started. From the Big Bang to the Multiverse, they explore a wide range of ideas, all theoretically supported to some greater or lesser extent, and some of them even have some experimental results that support the possibility that they exist. This is fascinating stuff, and the implications keep getting more numerous the longer you think about them. The original panel and gathering happened as part of the 2009 World Science Festival, and was posted in 2015; enjoy.
The Perseid Meteor Shower is already under way, with peak viewing on the 12th and 13th of August. During the peak you can see one or two a minute, although even this far outside of the peak there will be a handful per hour, with the frequency going up steadily the closer we get. Meteor showers are named after the constellation they appear to be coming from, but the Perseids appear to be coming from a large chunk of the sky. Generally speaking if you face the Big Dipper or Plow from late in the evening until just before dawn you should have an excellent show. For more detailed information and instructions see the Meteor Watch web site linked at the start of this article.
NASA assembled this amazing video of the Sun in Ultra-HD (4K) from footage generated by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, and added some tasty music by Lars Leonhard to it. On top of that, the folks at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center decided to make this video public domain, posting it so it can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12034, along with several others. If they keep doing this, I might have to break down and buy myself a TV suitable for watching these on, and download the entire collection.