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The smiling Sun. (NASA Sun/Twitter) Sometimes an unexpected smile is all it takes to turn your day around. Well, that kind of cheery surprise doesn't get much bigger than this. Astronomers at NASA have spotted the Sun beaming a remarkable, joyous grin, in a sunny spectacle destined to put a smile on your dial. As shared on NASA's Sun Twitter account, this incredible image reveals the Sun looking positively radiant in more ways than one. Of course, the 'smile' we see here isn't actually a real smile. What we're looking at are coronal holes (the dark patches), where fast bursts...

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) this week captured an image of the sun in ultraviolet light featuring three dark patches that look like a smiling face — a face that could signal a solar storm with problems for Earth. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a minor geomagnetic storm watch effective for Saturday. While geomagnetic storms can create beautiful aurora in the sky, they can also disrupt GPS and create harmful currents in the power grid and pipelines. The dark patches, known as coronal holes, are regions where solar wind escapes more quickly and readily...

It’s the job of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to keep an eye on the sun, a job the SDO has presented in a new video showing off three years’ worth of solar activity. “In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle,” NASA said in a release. The observatory captures an image of the sun every 12 seconds and does so on 10 different wave lengths...

One hundred and fifty two years ago, a man in England named Richard Carrington discovered solar flares. Sunspots sketched by R. Carrington on Sept. 1, 1859. © R. Astronomical Society. [more] It happened at 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1st, 1859. Just as usual on every sunny day, the 33-year-old solar astronomer was busy in his private observatory, projecting an image of the sun onto a screen and sketching what he saw. On that particular morning, he traced the outlines of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of white light...

Enlarge Image In the eye of the beholder. Sharper views of the sun at a variety of wavelengths are revealing small jets from the solar surface that are helping heat the overlying corona to 1 million˚C. Credit: Bart De Pontieu The mystery of the solar corona is obvious enough. The vanishingly thin atmosphere of the sun—the wispy stuff that can be glimpsed faintly during total solar eclipses—simmers at 1 million˚C, 200 times hotter than the "fire" beneath it. What gives? Researchers now believe they have caught the sun in the act of heating bits of itself to coronal temperatures...

NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun’s dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth. Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun’s surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. "These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of...

A powerful new solar observatory will spend the next five years recording images of the sun with 10 times better resolution than HD television, peering deep within the sun's layers to reveal just how solar storms erupt. The observations could help scientists build the first effective models for space weather forecasting. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is slated for launch on Feb. 10 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. It carries three instruments that will pierce the mysteries enshrouding the sun's magnetic fields and ultraviolet radiation, which together help shape the Earth's atmosphere every day. "The unique...

Enlarge ImageSnap! Magnetic twisting and tightening beneath the sun's surface can launch a giant solar flare.Credit: NOAA Scientists have detected a consistent pattern in the sun's magnetic behavior that precedes solar flares. If the pattern can be unraveled completely, it could give hours or even days of warning to telecommunications companies, electric power grids, and satellite operators to prepare for these dangerous storms. Solar flares threaten all of the artificial objects orbiting our planet, including GPS and telecommunications satellites, occupied spacecraft and the International Space Station. Every so often the sun emits a gigantic burst that includes highly energized...

 The stars must have been aligned that January morning in 1955 when John G. Roberts Jr. was born in Buffalo, N.Y., because almost everything thereafter led him straight to the Supreme Court of the U.S. He graduated from Harvard College, then excelled at Harvard Law School as well as in his work at the U.S. Attorney General's office. It was there that our paths first crossed, for he helped prepare briefing papers for my confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court in 1981. He was later a successful litigator and partner at the Washington firm of Hogan & Hartson. He argued...

The Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito told us more about the Senators than it did about Judge Alito.First, there were those long-winded preambles to "questions" for the judge. Then there were the Mickey Mouse maneuvers and insinuations, spiced here and there with outright lies.The ridiculousness of the charges was classically illustrated by Senator Joseph Biden's claim that Alito had been part of a group that was trying to keep minorities and women out of Princeton. Apparently wanting everyone to meet the same admissions standards is considered to be the same as being against minorities and women.To dramatize his...

The two names passing through conservative legal circles last week to fill the remaining Supreme Court vacancy were White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Federal Appeals Court Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. Miers, a 60-year-old former Dallas City Council member, is a prominent Dallas lawyer without judicial experience. She is close to President Bush, but the pro-life movement questions her position on abortion. She would be the first non-judge named to the Supreme Court since William Rehnquist in 1972. Nobody questions the conservatism of the 55-year-old Alito. He was named in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush to the 3rd...

DNC Chairman Howard Dean Says Be Prepared For Unprecedented Filibuster Of Next Supreme Court Nominee:"In An Interview, [DNC Chairman Howard] Dean Said Democratic Unity Is Essential In The Upcoming Battle And That The Party 'Absolutely' Should Be Prepared To Filibuster -- Holding Unlimited Debate And Preventing An Up-Or-Down Vote -- Bush's Next High Court Nominee, If He Taps Someone They Find Unacceptably Ideological." (Dan Balz and Amy Goldstein, "Filibuster Showdown Looms In Senate," The Washington Post, 9/28/05) Dean: "A Fight To The Death Is A Filibuster, Which Is The Only Way We Can Reject An Unqualified Nominee -- Because...

The Bush administration has asked the Supreme Court to reinstate a ban on a procedure that critics call "partial birth" abortions, setting up a showdown that could be decided by the president's new choice for the court. The appeal, which had been expected, follows a two-year, cross-country legal fight over the federal law. An appeals court in St. Louis said this summer that the ban on late term abortion is unconstitutional because it makes no exception for the health of the woman. The Supreme Court has already scheduled arguments in November in another abortion case, involving New Hampshire's parental notification...

Replacing Rehnquist before O'Connor makes matters tougher on the Bush administration and guarantees a showdown with liberal interest groups.A FEW MONTHS AGO, most observers expected Chief Justice William Rehnquist's failing health to trigger President Bush's first Supreme Court nomination. But Rehnquist hung on, to the surprise of many, and it was Sandra Day O'Connor whose resignation brought about the first vacancy on the Court since 1994. If that seems like a long time, it is: never before in American history have so many years elapsed between vacancies on the Supreme Court. President Bush nominated Judge John Roberts to replace O'Connor,...

WITH JOHN ROBERTS sailing toward confirmation last week, President Bush had the O'Connor seat "won." The Court was set to move one click to the right (so to speak). Then Chief Justice William Rehnquist died. The president chose to move Roberts over to fill the Rehnquist slot--thereby re-opening the vacancy created by Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement.One understands the attraction of Roberts as chief. But with this action, in one fell swoop, the president deprived himself and his supporters of the easiest argument for his next nominee: that surely a reelected conservative president is entitled to replace a conservative justice--Rehnquist--with another...

We are prepared to release one or two flyers the day or two after President Bush announces his Supreme Court nominee. If you would like to be added to our ping list for flyer distribution, please let us know. Here is the list of flyers distributed by you and others to 10,000s of homes during 2004. Flyers