Remembering Yuri Gagarin

Cosmonautics Day: Remembering Yuri Gagarin (25 photos)

Author Atompunk in April 12, 2012 in History , Space , Holidays / no comments / 1056 view (s / s)

Today - April 12 - Day of astronautics in the CIS and the International Day of human space flight! The date was chosen by chance: it was on this momentous day in 1961 rocket "R-7", created by a Soviet plant "Progress", to give the pilot Yuri Gagarin into orbit. From that moment began the real space age.

Exactly twenty years after the first human space flight, April 12, 1981 launched the first manned flight in the American program "Space Shuttle."

In honor of both events in many cities around the world since 2001, held a party-event "St. George's Night." Is organized Space Generation Advisory Council (Space Generation Advisory Council) - a non-governmental organization that brings together participants from more than 60 countries.

Yuri Gagarin. Fotorestavratsiya.

The Sun

Source :  http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/the_sun.html

The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minimum - in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year - with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm, but are continually monitoring our closest star with an array of telescopes and satellites. Seen below are some recent images of the Sun in more active times. 

A sweeping prominence, a huge cloud of relatively cool dense plasma is seen suspended in the Sun's hot, thin corona. At times, promineces can erupt, escaping the Sun's atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K (over 100,000 degrees F). Every feature in the image traces magnetic field structure. The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures. (Courtesy of SOHO/EIT consortium)

Views of Jupiter

SOURCE :  http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/07/views_of_jupiter.html

Jupiter is in the news again, this time because its "Baby Red Spot" - a storm less than a year old - appears to have been swallowed up by the massive storm known as the Great Red Spot. This is good occasion to share some of the best photographs of Jupiter and its larger system of rings and moons, as seen by various probes and telescopes over the past 30 years. 

Jupiter's moon Io floats above the cloudtops of Jupiter in this image captured January 1, 2001. The image is deceiving: there are 350,000 kilometers - roughly 2.5 Jupiters - between Io and Jupiter's clouds. Io is about the size of our own moon (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)