Thursday, February 7, 2008

Stereoscopic coronal loop reconstruction with STEREO images

While we are waiting from news from Antarctica about today's annular eclipse - so far only pictures of partial phases from Oz (in an Ice in Space forum) or NZ have come to my attention - there is a breakthrough paper from the STEREO scientists out! They observed loops in the solar corona when the two spacecraft were 12° apart in their orbit around the Sun and could reconstruct their 3D shapes from the data. This is the first time this could be done using stereoscopy! "We demonstrate that these data allow to obtain a reliable three-dimensional reconstruction of sufficiently bright loops," the paper concludes.

In other news tomorrow evening an asteroid will occult a 5 mag. star, visible from Europe (because the rock is only 10 km wide, the "probabilities to see a positive event are very small"), the tail of 46P/Wirtanen is now quite evident, yet another dwarf galaxy belonging to the Andromeda Galaxy has been discovered, numerous tools to locate Mars images from various orbiters exist - and a weird story about a meteorite 'shooting down' a goose has appeared in a not entirely reliable UK tabloid newspaper ...

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