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 Hi Sierra,   The last total eclipse I saw was in 1991 in Baja California...it was spectacular!     Paulett

Hi Erik,   We have a couple of ways now of telling if a solar storm might come to Earth.   First, if there's a big flare near the center of the solar disk, it may result in a storm that reaches Earth.  Also, a coronal mass ejections (CME), which is a major part of a solar storm, has a certain appearance when seen from the ...

 Dear Melissa,  Yes, we should work towards sending astronauts to Mars!  We can't do it now. Remember, we can't even sent astronauts to the moon anymore! We lost that capability after the Apollo era... And, yes, I'd love to go...   Paulett

Hi Ronald,  Sunspots are BACK!  The Sun has become active again!  Solar activity varies on  an 11 year cycle..and for the past couple of years, we've had a very unusual period of very low solar activity with no sunsports... All sunspots come and go in time..but during the solar minimum, there are fewer and often ...

A magnestar is thought to be a very small, very dense star with an enormous magnetic field.  But this is all a theory so far...there are none close to us. They are thought to be only about 12 miles in diameter, but more massive than our Sun. They have  magnetic field that are hundreds of thousands of times stronger than any man-made ...

Alyssa,  The filter looks black because it filters out most of the light.  But when you look at the Sun, it is SO bright that some of the sun's light makes it through the filter.  It looks red (not yellow) because more of the yellow and other colors are filtered out than the red.  Do you have red-blue glasses? Look at a ...

Dear Shelly,   My favorite planet is Saturn because it is so beautiful...and I worked on NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn for several years... But I definitely wouldn't want to live there....and life can't exist there anyway--it is a big ball of gas with maybe a small solid core.  I'd like to visit Saturn's moon ...

 Hi Carol  I haven't been there, but I'd sure love to go... I looked at the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines) and there doesn't seem to be much evidence that the figures were any kind of observatory..solar or otherwise....  But who knows what we'll learn in the future...   Paulett ...

 Hi Chris  We can tell the temperature of the surface of the Sun from the peak in the distribution of the colors that are in sunlight.  The Sun emits electromagnetic radiation at a whole range of wavelenths, but the distribution of this radiation peaks in the visible wavelength...in yellow light. That's why the Sun looks ...

 Hi Jeff  A sunspot occurs where magnetic field, generated inside the Sun, breaks through the Sun's surface. The size of the spot is determined bythe strength and the amount of magnetic field pushing through.  The magnetic field at the surface then dissipates through a variety of processes: Solar flares, coronal mass ejections ...