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| Annular Solar Eclipse |
Annular Solar Eclipse
Tomorrow, May 20,
the Moon's shadow will race across planet Earth.
Observers within the 240-300 kilometer wide
shadow track will be able to witness
an annular solar
eclipse as the Moon's apparent size is presently too small to
completely cover the Sun.
Heading east over a period of 3.5 hours,
the shadow path will begin in southern China,
cross the northern Pacific, and reach well into North America, crossing
the US west coast in southern Oregon and northern California.
Along
the route, Tokyo residents will be just 10 kilometers
north of the path's center line.
Of course a
partial
eclipse will be visible from a much larger area
within North America, the Pacific, and eastern Asia.
This safely filtered telescopic picture was taken
during the annular eclipse of January 15, 2010 from
the city of Kanyakumari at
the
southern tip of India.
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| Herschel's Cygnus X |
Herschel's Cygnus X
The Herschel Space Observatory's
infrared view of Cygnus X
spans some 6x2 degrees across one of the closest, massive star
forming regions in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy.
In fact, the rich stellar nursery already holds the
massive star cluster known as the Cygnus OB2
association.
But those stars are more evident by
the region cleared by
their energetic winds and radiation
near the bottom center of this field, and are not detected by
Herschel instruments operating
at long infrared wavelengths.
Herschel does reveal the region's complex filaments of cool gas
and dust that lead
to
dense locations where new massive stars are forming.
Cygnus X
lies some 4500 light-years away toward the heart
of the northern constellation of the Swan.
At that distance this picture would be almost 500 light-years wide.
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Space Views 
A floral fleur to make the celebration count
