Cool Movies of Polar Crown Prominences

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Sept. 17, 2008: Warning: Material contained in this story may make you
wish to become a solar physicist.

Japan's Hinode spacecraft, launched in 2006 on a mission to study the
sun, is beaming back movies that astonish even seasoned investigators.
snip
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/images/polarcrown/pcp_strip.jpg
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/images/polarcrown/2006_11_30_CaH_prom_le
v1_rotated_short.mov

"That was a polar crown prominence recorded by Hinode on Nov. 30,
2006," says Dr. Thomas Berger of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology
Center in Palo Alto, California. "It is a curved wall of 10,000 degree
plasma about 90,000 km long and 30,000 km tall." A stack of planets
three Earths high would barely make it to the top.
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How time flies.

I was cleaning the garage and trying to recycle some of the magazines
I have collected since 1983 when I got out of the Navy and walked
around Moffett Field to go to work with Bendix Field Engineering
supporting the Pioneer missions.

On the back of one of the magazines, "Silicon Valley TechWeek, dated
June 12, 2000, it says in an ad for COM 21 - "One day soon, broadband
will carry voice, video, and data around the world.  Imagine where it
could take you."

Yesterday, the grandson was playing with the "SPORE" Creature Creator
http://www.spore.com/ and I was trying to figure out if any of my
three active computers had the video cards fast enough to handle the
full game of "SPORE".

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http://www.sporeev.com/info/system-requirements/
for windows xp 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent 512 MB RAMA 128 MB
Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 At least 6 GB of hard
drive space

for windows vista 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent 512 MB RAMA 128
MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 At least 6 GB of hard
drive space

mac system requirements Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher Intel Core
Duo Processor 1024 MB RAM ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of
Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100 At least 4.7GB of hard drive
space for installation, plus additional space for creations
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And I am wondering what kind of adjustments will I need to make for
this old brain computer of mine to adapt to the rapid changes being
made.
It already seems to have an overactive feedback mechanism in its
hearing channels with a ringing in the ear, 24/7, that beats in
amplitude with my pulse.
All system checkouts seem to be in order, just some miss adjustment in
the feedback to those hairs in the inner ear.

You may have heard the question asked, "If a tree falls in the forest
and no one was there, did it make a sound when it crashed to the
ground?"
In my case, one might turn that around a bit and ask, "If I hear a
sound in my ear, is it really there?"
Which leads you to the thought, "What REALLY is out there?"

And then you look at the pictures from Japan's Hinode spacecraft and
we wonder just what is the Sun doing and how will I explain them to
the grandson in the sixth grade who is watching You Tube videos from
around the world.  Or maybe I will need to ask him just what is going
on.   hmmmmm.

Already there are millions of creatures that have been created by
viewers like you and copies of them are populating the Solar System in
the game SPORE.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/will_wright_makes_toys_that_make_worlds.html
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/games/news/article.cfm?c_id=38&objectid=10527879
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/02/will.wright
http://eu.spore.com/whatisspore/article.cfm?id=25662

Soooooh, what WILL we find when we go there?

Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
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If you have a subscription to NASA Science News you probably got this. - LRK -
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NASA Science News for September 17, 2008

Japan's Hinode spacecraft is beaming back must-see movies of a
spectacular solar phenomenon known as 'polar crown prominences.'

FULL STORY at

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/17sep_polarcrown.htm?list965414

Check out our RSS feed at http://science.nasa.gov/rss.xml!

Cool Movies of Polar Crown ProminencesCool Movies of Polar Crown Prominences

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Hinode credits: Led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA),
Hinode is a collaborative mission that also includes the space
agencies of the United States, Great Britain and Europe. Its three
primary instruments – the Solar Optical Telescope, the X-ray Telescope
and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer – are observing the
different layers of the solar atmosphere ranging from the sun's
visible surface to the corona, the outer atmosphere that extends
outward into the solar system. The movies highlighted in this story
come from the Solar Optical Telescope developed by the National
Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo with focal plane
instruments provided by the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center
of Palo Alto, CA.

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http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/solar_b/index_e.html

December 7, 2007 Updated

Hinode Featured in Science (NAOJ)

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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

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