Continuing my series of post covering my talk from last Christmas about the use of lasers in space and astronomy. The topic today is adaptative optics. I'll explain the reason why we need it, and how it works in simple terms. Enjoy....
The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was uncover a few days ago [1]. This is truely an incredible image, showing the galactic cluster SMACS 0723, which is slowly becoming the de-facto target for newly deployed space telescopes as it was imaged by Hubble, Planck and Chandra before JWST. This image in particular took the JWST 12.5 hours of exposure to be able to see these objec...
I wrote last year about the effect of CME on the thermospheric density and what are the effects on satellites inside the thermosphere, typically at the altitude of the Starlink satellites. You can find this post here....
I know, this comet was seen 1 and a half year ago, but I didn't had a blog then, so I have to do it now......
I wrote about Carrington events here, just a few days before the solar cycle 23 unleashed some strong storm with an X1 flare the 28th October and several other CMEs the next days... Fortunately, the impact on earth was minimal: It was a mostly a miss. But it sparked some wonderful display of aurora in the last days of October. See here and here for some nice images....
I am a fan of disaster movies. I have grown in the 90's and 00's, at a time where Hollywood started a trend of summer blockbusters that usually involved alien invasion, or volcanoes and other gigantic threat that was supposed to threaten the existence of Humanity. We had it all: Independence Day, Volcano, Armageddon, Deep Impact, 12 monkeys, etc... Spectacular and frightening....