#January2011

More Solar Eclipse Porn, Courtesy of Hinode. [Video.]

Hinode, NASA’s solar observatory caught the solar eclipse. Oh goodness, it’s a stunning sight. Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait puts it into perspective,  saying the “cool thing is the size difference between the Sun and the Moon. The Sun is roughly 400x bigger than the Moon and 400x farther away, so they look about the same size in the sky. But the Moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse, and can change its distance to us by quite a bit, well over 10% – that means its apparent diameter as seen on Earth can change by 10% too.”

Hit the jump for the video. It’s sexy.

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