Logging after a long gap

Hectic schedule and bit of travels between kept me away from the blog.  I am leading a nomadic life. Recently had a chance to get my hands dirt on my Point & Shoot camera. Took some snaps of our campus which I am posting here. 

Want to share few quick bits that lingers in top of my head currently as well....

• New Horizon will reach Pluto by 2015 after a travel for 9 years ( launched in 2006). This is also the fastest man made object currently
• VY Canis Majoris is the largest known star to us. To compare its size, assume Sun as your first and a mustard is Earth. Now replace Sun with VYCanis Majoris (will henceforth call it as VY) and Earth with Sun.  

• VY when replaced with Sun, will occupy till Jupiter - which means Earth will go inside its body
• The giant red eye in Jupiter is almost equal to size of Earth. Ideally it is bigger than that. This is a storm that is always present in Jupiter. Imagine a storm that is to size of Earth:-(
• The solar flare is a ring created by fire as it gets erupted on the sun surface and get back to it like a ring. A typical solar flare can hold 100 Earths inside its ring. 

About SUN

Well - i have been reading and seeing so many things in the recent past which i never blogged. I will see to do it one by one.

I was (am) little fascinated about the power of SUN which I see is a form of GOD. Few things i remember about the sun - i want to write this time. I am not sure about the references where i read these things but certainly you can find more info in the internet. Here is the gist of my observations about the sun.

Sun has flares - which are kind of flames that comes out the boundary of sun. These flares go to a distance of ~ 200 kms from the boundary. They also do have some cold areas ( areas which have relatively lesser temperature) than the rest. These are called black spots because of its black appearances on the surface of the sun.

Sun also rotates on its own but not sure whether it revolves some where. It takes 8 min for sunlight to reach earth and it takes roughly 8 hours to reach the planet Pluto ( the ninth in our solar system).

Sun has the power to glow for another billion years and at the end it becomes a giant start where almost all the planets will be consumed by it because of its gravitational pull.

Hope you know that most of the space crafts and satellites survive using sun light.

Sun's corona is a kind of outer atmosphere of sun. This is visible only during full lunar eclipse. Some might ask - how moon fully covers the sun during eclipse. It is a rare phenomena and our luck to say that sun and moon size remains the same due to their distance and the size. But mostly the eclipses will be annular where the moon could not hide the sun completely . Annular occurs when moon is smaller in size than the sun. Why this happens is because of moons inclined and elliptical orbit around the earth.

Coming back to corona again, you can ask the question why can't one see the sun's corona by just hiding it fully with hand like how the moon does. To my knowledge the reason is our atmosphere. The sun's light is dispersed by our atmosphere and hence you can't see the corona from our earth. So this gives a clue that once you go out of atmosphere and hide the sun with your hand, you should be able to see the sun's corona.