During a late afternoon bathroom break on Feb 27th, I came across this:
As the sun was setting it nearly aligned with the hallway on our building, creating this column of light almost all the way across the building (the next day we got there). I was the only person who noticed, though I did drag a few other folks out to see it.
Cool things like this are happening all the time, but you have to stop and pay attention otherwise you’ll completely miss them as you are rushing your way out of the office, onto the next thing in your busy schedule.
This isn’t a very good picture, but it’s notable for being taken just by putting my EVO up to my solar telescope and taking a picture. It does give you the sense of some of the more spectacular features going on on the Sun on Saturday. The bright spikes coming off the surface of the sun (the bright round disc) are real features, the rest of this is optical artifact. Ironically, Sunday was actually a very quiet day on the Sun. Maybe it needed a day of rest.
One thing I didn’t mention about our Day of Service at the PFP is that we had great photography support from Bill Rooney all day. He was there at 7am when we got started, and stuck around till about 3 in the afternoon. He has a great eye, and captured some great moments for us all. Here is a 36 photo show of the day we had:
That is Earth and Moon taken from the Messenger probe last year, though it’s been wandering the blogosphere this week as Messenger successfully entered Mercury’s orbit. It’s a little brighter than the Pale Blue Dot, but equally cool.
Quoting from Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
This is not photoshopped:
That is the death of 2 stars that you are seeing, as they let off material in their 800 year orbit of each other. Phil Plait has lots more detail over at Bad Astronomy.
This is the Kindle Screen at 400x magnification, taken by Keith Peters with his USB microscope. He also has some pictures of the iPad, Newspaper, Magazines, and Books at similar magnification. Pretty cool.
It's always more complicated 
