Alan Friedman is a photographer who takes amazing pictures of the Sun. While others were out celebrating Cinco de Mayo this past weekend, he was outside taking another jaw-dropping image of the nearest star in the Universe:

Yegads! Click to ensolarnate, and he has a greyscale version, too.

I love the detail and texture of his images. He has an excellent telescopic setup which yields the superb resolution, and he employs an old trick to get the texture: he inverts the image of the Sun’s disk, making black stuff look white and vice-versa. This is a technique that’s been used by astronomers for decades to enhance images; our eyes see details better that way. When Alan does it, I swear it makes the Sun look like a 1.4 million-kilometer-wide shag rug.

All the way on the left, just on the Sun’s edge, you can see a group of sunspots just rotating into view. That’s Active Region 1476, and Alan provided me with a clear picture of them (no tom-foolery) which I’ve put here. That monster group is about 100,000 kilometers (60,000 miles) across, so when I saw them I immediately suspected trouble.

… and sure enough, they had a medium-sized eruption just this morning. At 13:00 UTC they blasted off an M1.4 class flare; big enough to potentially cause some radio disruption and maybe some aurorae. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory got a dramatic view of the eruption:

Flares this size are relatively common; there was one in late March for example. Bigger ones happen less frequently, though again we did see one 50 times this powerful in March as well! We’ll have to see if today’s eruption will cause any aurorae, and either way, we should keep our eyes on AR1476.

Image credit: Alan Friedman, used by permission. Tip o’ the Sun visor to Camilla Corona SDO on Google+ for the video.

I realized today that I have never really directly promoted Felicia Day’s new YouTube Channel, Geek and Sundry. If you don’t know who Felicia is, then a) what are you doing on the internet, and 2) seriously, what are you doing on the internet?

Felicia is an actor, producer, writer, funny person, dork, and all-around cool person. I can’t remember if I first saw her on Doctor Horrible, where she played Penny, or on The Guild, a massively (and deservedly so) successful web comedy series she essentially created herself out of thin air (well, with the awesometastic Kim Evey too, hi Kim! [waves]).

She decided that spending 23.9 hours per day working wasn’t enough, so she started up Geek and Sundry to highlight geek stuff. The channel has several shows on it, including the on-air book club Sword and Laser, and Wil Wheaton’s gaming show Table Top. She has her own short show called The Flog, where honestly it’s just her being adorable, which is apparently in her DNA. I’ve been watching them and they’re great… so imagine my surprise when I got to the 46 second mark of this week’s episode:

Oh my. No humorously false braggadocio here, folks: that’s just plain cool.

Thanks Felicia!

I wrote a few days ago about the disgusting billboards put up by the far-right Heartland Institute, a climate-change denial group that apparently has no lower bounds to what they’ll do. The billboards, which went up in Chicago, likened climate scientists (and anyone who knows global warming is real) to mass murderers and madmen.

It was repulsive and hateful. After an uproar — and in less than a day — Heartland took down the billboards, but didn’t apologize for them. Instead they claimed it was an "experiment", and declared victory in getting attention. This would be why I use the words repulsive and disgusting.

But the damage was done — this tactic has backfired on Heartland. Even before the billboards went up they lost sponsorship from the Diageo liquor company, which makes such brands as Smirnoff and Guiness. In March, General Motors dropped Heartland as well. Even people who support climate change denialism are worried that their own reputations "[have] been harmed".

And now, after a few bloggers wrote to State farm, the insurance company has announced they too will withdraw funding from Heartland Institute. State Farm specifically cites the billboards as the reason in their announcement.

I suspect that Scott Mandia’s open letter to them was the major driver for this. For my part, I tweeted about this on Sunday:

The link goes to a copy of Mandia’s letter. On Monday evening, State Farm tweeted they were severing ties with Heartland.

Besides removing ties from a group with such awful tactics, it’s in State Farm’s best interest anyway. Global warming is having and will continue to have a profound impact, including droughts, floods, rising sea levels, and much more. Insurance companies will need to deal with this, and they need to be thinking about this now.

I want to publicly thank State Farm for doing the right thing here. I already did so on Twitter as well.

Never forget the power we have as consumers to change the world. It worked when it came to American Arlines and antivaxxers, and it’s working here.

[UPDATE: Bernews is reporting the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers will discontinue funding Heartland as well; they gave $125,000 in 2010/11.]

And we’re not done. Heartland still has quite a few corporate sponsors. Brad Johnson has created a list of them on Pinterest, how much they’ve given, and which ones have dropped Heartland due to its shenanigans. Heartland is hemorrhaging donors, but there’s still a long way to go.

- The Heartland Institute sinks to a new low
- Breaking news: a look behind the curtain of the Heartland Institute’s climate change spin
- Hip, hip, hypocrisy!
- A case study of the tactics of climate change denial, in which I am the target
- NASA talks global warming
- The world is getting warmer
- Our ice is disappearing
- Climate change: the evidence

I have got to get to Norway. Last year, on September 25, 2011 from Ifjord, Finnmark, Norway, photographer Tommy Eliassen took this jaw-dropping photo of the night sky:

[Click to enstupefyenate.]

I know, seriously, right?

The northern lights play along the right while the Milky Way itself hangs vertically next to it; parallel structures seemingly adjacent but separated by thousands of trillions of kilometers…

And to top it off, a meteor plinks across the sky between them. Meteors burn up about 100 km or so above our planet’s surface, which is at just about the same altitude that’s the lower limit of green aurorae. Amazingly, that meteor is probably the closest thing you can see in this picture above the clouds^*.

You can see more of Eliassen’s amazing aurora pictures on his Facebook page or on 500px, where I originally found his work. Trust me, it’s time well spent.

Image credit: Tommy Eliassen, used by permission.

^* Since it cuts across the two parallel background objects at an angle, it must be a skewting star.

You know why astronomy is cool? Because of things like this:

Galaxy clusters are collections of galaxies held together by their own gravity. We see clusters all over the place, and they’re among the largest structures in the Universe. We can find them at large distances, which means we see them as they (and the Universe) were young — it takes light a long time to travel across the cosmos. Astronomers went looking to find extremely distant clusters of galaxies, and found one at a staggering distance: 12.7 billion light years away!

Here’s an image showing the central part of the cluster:

[Click to bigbangenate.]

Each of those circled red dots is a young galaxy, so distant that the light has been on its way here for more than 90% of the current age of the Universe! And they’re almost lost among all those other stars and galaxies in the image (though their intense red color helps… as to why they’re red, read on).

Finding this cluster was a magnificent achievement. The astronomers used the massive 8.2 meter Subaru telescope to look at large swaths of the sky. They looked at the colors of the galaxies they found (PDF); distant objects would be so far away their light is significantly redshifted by the expansion of the Universe itself (I explain how this works here and here).

Galaxies are distributed throughout space, so you expect to see them scattered across the sky as well as in redshift (distance). When looking at one part of the sky, however, they found an unusually high concentration of galaxies that were very red. Using a different camera on Subaru, they took spectra of those galaxies — breaking the light up into very fine divisions of colors, like a rainbow with hundreds of colors in it — to accurately measure the redshifts of those galaxies. Spectroscopy of objects that faint is no easy task, but Subaru is a big ‘scope, and collect a lot of light even from faint objects at the remote reaches of the Universe,

The astronomers confirmed that many of the galaxies in their sample were at the same redshift (z = 6 for those in the know — which is a mighty big redshift). The odds of these galaxies all being at the same distance happening by chance is extremely small: only about one in a billion! So it’s pretty clear these galaxies really are physically associated with each other.

That is, clustered together.

This makes the cluster the most distant ever found that has been confirmed spectroscopically — one other has been found that might be farther away, but it hasn’t been confirmed yet. At 12.7 billion light years away, that means we see this cluster as it was a mere one billion years after the Universe itself formed! That provides key information about conditions in the early Universe, which are critical to understanding how it formed and changed as it aged.

The cluster itself is vast — it’s something like 50 million light years across. The team of astronomers used various methods to determine its mass, and their best guess is that its total mass is several thousand times the mass of our entire Milky Way galaxy! The estimation methods they used are fairly fuzzy, so it’s not clear how accurate this number really is. Still, the cluster is clearly huge, and massive. If we could see it today, it would probably rank among the largest structures in the Universe.

That’s not terribly surprising, if you think about it: only the biggest monster clusters can be seen at such a mind-crushing distance. The smaller ones will be harder to detect, so we’re likely to find the biggest.

Still, holy cow. I have read and written about extremely distant objects many, many times over the years, and have no doubt: I get chills every single time I think about this stuff. It wasn’t that long ago when the entire human race couldn’t be bothered to look beyond the tip of its collective nose. Now we can look into the fires of the Universe’s birth, into that forge itself, and tease out the secrets of how we came to be.

That’s why astronomy is cool.

Hmmmm… the astronomer in today’s xkcd comic looks familiar, even as a stick figure.

At least he didn’t draw me as a zombie. But I’m no Feynman.

And hey, together with SMBC I think this makes me king of the four-letter comics. I mean, um. Well.

[N.B. And yes, it really is me, I got word from The Man himself. Funny how a minimalist drawing with some context invokes recognition; I've been getting notes from people all morning.]

Well, now I feel bad: when I deflated the Supermoon stuff over the weekend, I swear I didn’t mean it literally!

This amazing shot was taken by astronaut André Kuipers from the International Space Station on May 5, 2012, as the perigee full Moon set behind the Earth’s limb. The Earth’s atmosphere bends light from the Moon, acting like a lens, pushing the bottom part of the Moon up into the top.

Science once again saves me from embarrassment. I was pretty sure the Moon wouldn’t take it personally.

Image credit: ESA/NASA