The Solar Dynamics Observatory hit one year on mission yesterday, in honor of which NASA has released a video of some of the more visually interesting observations it has made. Hard to believe something this spectacular was made with no special effects. Also, Wired has posted their Best Sun Images collection from the first year of the orbital telescopes output.
Besides the Yuri’s Night App I mentioned yesterday, another great way to track all your best Space buddies on tonight’s 50th anniversary of man in space is using NASA Connect. On that link you will find all the best Social Media interfaces to them, including Twitter, Facebook, UStream, Foursquare, and MySpace. There are also links to their YouTube, Flickr, and Gowalla sites you should bookmark and visit. They have some in house communication resources like NASA Tweetup and NASA Chat where you can sometimes find entire gatherings of people during various events. And that is without mentioning NASA Apps, NASA Blogs, and NASA e-Books. Bottom line, this is the single place you need to be able to find to connect and collaborate with NASA.
When the clock hits midnight we kick off Yuri’s Night, celebrating 50 years of manned space flight. April 12th, 1961 is when Yuri Gagarin became the first human to leave this planet, and there are parties all over the world to celebrate, as there are every year. You can check out what events are close to you at the Yuri’s Night Web Page, or through your phone. For the phone, the Apple App can be found here, or just search the apps store. With any other flavor got to the Yuri’s Mobi pages.
This amazing chunk of video is a set of time lapsed filming done of the skies over (and near) Kirkenes, Norway. They had an unusually active Aurora Borealis this past month, and it only promises to get better in the next few years, as solar activity peaks. This and many other similar incredible images can be found at the APoD, the Astronomy Picture of the Day at NASA.
The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.
This is just one of a series of edutainment videos put together by IRrelavent Astronomy staring a ton of Sci-Fi actors; in this episode, Ed Wasser is the robot, while Wil Wheaton is The Professor. This series is presented by the Spitzer Science Center, and you will find a lot of fun videos there.
No, not postcards to your favorite actors, but actual electronic post cards you can send into space. These cards are delivered to the ISS, or International Space Station, and more specifically to the members of Expedition 26 who currently live there. Or if that’s too retro for you (I built my first electronic postcard page with a Perl Script batch file that tied an image selector, a text entry GUI, and an email server command string bundle around 1995 or so), you can always opt to Tweet the Astronauts your holiday greetings instead. Contrariwise, if both methods of communicating seem too newfangled and hi-tech for your comfort zone, you can find out when they will be visible in your neighborhood and smile and wave at them while they go passing by. Just understand that while you will have no problem seeing them if the cloud cover is favorable, they will probably only notice you if a camera with a sufficient lens assembly is pointed in exactly the right direction, and that only after they have taken and then examined the image in detail.