This week’s collection of pictures includes some bonus material, the last of which doesn’t qualify as astronomy unless you believe we stole it from the Klingons…
- 12 must-see sky watching events in 2012
- Cool animation of a massive CME erupted on 1/19 and hit Earth 1/21.
- Top Scientific Discoveries of 2011
- First demonstration of time cloaking
Invisibility cloaks are the result of physicists’ newfound ability to distort electromagnetic fields in extreme ways. The idea is steer light around a volume of space so that anything inside this region is essentially invisible.
The effect has generated huge interest. The first invisibility cloaks worked only at microwave frequencies but in only a few years, physicists have found ways to create cloaks that work for visible light, for sound and for ocean waves. They’ve even designed illusion cloaks that can make one object look like another.
Today, Moti Fridman and buddies, at Cornell University in Ithaca, go a step further. These guys have designed and built a cloak that hides events in time.
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- Crack for nerds: a temporal cloaking device.
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- Artist’s conception of Milky Way, based on Spitzer survey. Sun @ center of coordinate grid
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- Painted Moon: Saturn’s Iapetus
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- Betelgeuse, Orion Nebula, and Rigel show their “true” colors. (I see fractals… everywhere!)
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- The Dark River to Antares
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- Leo 1 – one of the dwarf spheroidal galaxies orbiting our Milky Way
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- Saturn’s North Pole, with inexplicable hexagonal cloud system
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- Milky Way in arch, Magellenic Clouds under, Zodiacal Light to the R (compressed image)
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- Wolf Moon: the first Full Moon in January
