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Explanation: Have you ever seen the Summer Triangle? The bright stars Vega, Deneb, and Altair form a large triangle on the sky that can be seen rising in the early northern early spring during the morning and rising in the northern fall during the evening. During summer months, the triangle can be found nearly overhead near midnight. Featured here, the Summer Triangle asterism was captured last month from Gunma, Japan. In the foreground, sporting a triangular shape of its own, is a flowering 500 year old cherry tree, standing about 15 meters tall. The triangular shape of the asterism is...

Explanation: September's equinox arrives tomorrow as the Sun crosses the celestial equator heading south. The event marks the astronomical beginning of spring in the southern hemisphere and autumn in the north. And though the connection is still puzzling, the equinox seasons bring an increase in geomagnetic storms. So as northern nights grow longer, the equinox also heralds the arrival of a good season for aurora hunters. Recorded on September 20, these colorful northern lights were captured with camera and wide-angle lens near the Norwegian Sea coast outside Tromsø in Northern Norway. Shining at altitudes of 100 kilometers or so, the...

Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, a developer of an early personal computer that inspired Bill Gates to found Microsoft, died Thursday in Georgia. He was 68. Roberts, whose build-it-yourself kit concentrated thousands of dollars worth of computer capability in an affordable package, inspired Bill Gates and his childhood friend Paul Allen to come up with Microsoft in 1975 after they saw an article about the MITS Altair 8800 in Popular Electronics.

The first-ever star surface map reveals a rapidly rotating giant orb with hot poles and a cooler, thickened equator that is radically different from our sun... "Because we have the highest resolution in the world, we are able to image a star a million times farther away than the sun," said John Monnier of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He and several colleagues have published their map of Altair in the May 31 issue of Science Express. The image of Altair appears to defy the current, rather simple, models of how stars work, says Monnier. Those models had...

High-tech infrared sensors mounted on an unmanned aircraft were used to aid firefighters against the recent Esperanza fire in Riverside County. The project was the first practical application of a program by NASA's Dryden Flight Research and Ames Research Center, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and the U.S. Forest Service to utilize unmanned aircraft in mapping and battling wildfires. The aircraft, dubbed Altair, is a high-altitude version of General Atomics' Predator B aircraft and designed specifically for scientific missions. It is equipped with an infrared sensor, developed at NASA Ames Research Center in northern California, used to identify hotspots and map...

A galactic mystery hovers over the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland: How many of the 2,280 global leaders, including 31 heads of state, gathered in this Alpine resort conduct business with extraterrestrials? This is no whimsy for Davosians. It's on the agenda of the annual powwow of the influential and affluent who will ask forum participants such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Coca-Cola Chairman Douglas Daft and De La Rue Chief Executive Ian Much if the aliens have landed and are collaborating with them to concoct government policy, brew soda pop and mint Iraq's new bank notes. "The...