This Planet Endlessly Fascinates Viewers

When I was a little kid, I found a book in the Time-Life series about planets. I could barely understand most of the words, but the pictures spoke loudly. In particular, one image of a strange-looking planet with a ring around it caught my imagination. It seemed like the most alien thing, the embodiment of alien worlds and far-off places. I later learned that was the planet Saturn. Wow!  I couldn’t even think of how such a thing could exist. And I had SO many questions about it. How a planet with rings around it. How did it come about?  How far away was it? Could we live on it?  Would we ever get to explore it?

Later, of course, I found out much more about Saturn and its rings and moons. The Voyager 2 mission flyby of Saturn was the first one I ever covered as a science writer, and I was like that little kid all over again. I still have the images I carefully collected during the press conferences, and somewhere in my archives, I have a tape of me interviewing some of the project scientists.  It was my first “up close” encounter with the Saturn People and the planet that so fascinated me as a kid.

Saturn was the first REALLY alien world I “discovered” on my own, and so I still look at it with some mixture of that old awe and childlike wonder. This is why the constant stream of images from the Cassini Solstice Mission is such a delight. They are, like the images from the rovers and orbiters at Mars (my other most favorite planet), providing an almost real-time look at a distant world. The rings, in particular, still boggle my mind. They stretch out from Saturn so far that if you plopped the planet between Earth and the Moon, they’d cover nearly 3/4 of the distance between the two. Yet, this expansive set of rings is less than a mile thick! The rings are made of countless particles of ice and dust, and they’re threaded by the orbits of small moons.

Continue reading Saturn: King of the Rings and Moons →

Watch the Skies — if You Can!

In case you haven’t heard, the Sun emitted an extremely strong flare and a huge coronal mass ejection our way a couple of days ago.  Here’s what it looked like (left). Currently space weather experts — the folks who track and try to understand solar storms — expect that we should be able to see increased auroral activity even down to the mid-latitudes. This means that folks who don’t normally see the northern and southern lights might have a chance to see them as the material from this outburst slams up against our upper atmosphere (the ionosphere).

Aurorae are just one of the effects of space weather. When a geomagnetic storm spurred by the the Sun’s activity rages around our planet, it can also affect everything from telecommunications to travel. Some years ago, I worked on a project for MIT’s Haystack Observatory that produced a video series explaining about space weather. You can check it out here. The series introduces the concepts of space weather and its effects, and has been used by educators and outreach professionals to talk about our sometimes stormy relationship with our star.

Also, check out my article at About.com going into more detail about this phenomenon. It’s called When Space Weather Attacks!

I’ll be checking my skies for aurorae starting late tonight (Thursday) and over the next couple of nights. If it isn’t storming at your location, do the same. You might be rewarded with a look at what happens when the Sun gets active!

If you do go out stargazing, here’s this month’s Our  Night Skies segment from Astrocast.TV. And, enjoy whatever views you DO get!