Starship Asterisk*

A Solar Ballet

Explanation: Sometimes, the Sun itself seems to dance. On just this past New Year's Eve, for example, NASA's Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft imaged an impressive prominence erupting from the Sun's surface. The dramatic explosion was captured in ultraviolet light in the above time lapse video covering four hours. Of particular interest is the tangled magnetic field that directs a type of solar ballet for the hot plasma as it falls back to the Sun. The scale of the disintegrating prominence is huge -- the entire Earth would easily fit under the flowing curtain of hot gas. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a month, and may erupt in a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) expelling hot gas into the Solar System. The energy mechanism that creates a solar prominence is still a topic of research. As the Sun nears Solar Maximum this year, solar activity like eruptive prominences should be common.

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Hmm... asbestos ballet slippers

Was the Sun too hot for this web site? I see nothing but white for the image.

I am using Windows 7 and the latest version of IE.

The eruption of this range lasts only four hours? That is fast!

That's how I felt after Thanksgiving...

Awesome Solar System we live in.

:---[===] *

Confused wrote:Was the Sun too hot for this web site? I see nothing but white for the image.

I am using Windows 7 and the latest version of IE.

Today's APOD is a video. Can you see other YouTube videos?

I saw first what I assume is the intended video, but then what I presume is a YouTube selection of videos came up on the screen. Some ofthem were also magnificent -but to get back to the original Apod I had to close the browser and reopen it.

Margarita

PS, one of the extra videos (from the University of Oslo) was about how auroras form and was well worth watching if you are a newbie like me.

This awesome video reminds me of a lifelong question of mine. What is the male equivilant of a ballerina ... a balleroo?

Ballerino.

owlice wrote:

Confused wrote:Was the Sun too hot for this web site? I see nothing but white for the image.

I am using Windows 7 and the latest version of IE.

Today's APOD is a video. Can you see other YouTube videos?

Yes I can. Also, if I use "View Source" in IE and copy the HTML iframe into another HTML document then it works; I can see the video in the other document. I just cannot see the video from the APOD page. It is strange; I do not know why. I see nothing in the HTML to cause it; I tried copying the body tag too but that did not make a difference. The HTML has "allowfullscreen" specified incorrectly but it works in the other document.

MargaritaMc wrote:I saw first what I assume is the intended video, but then what I presume is a YouTube selection of videos came up on the screen.

That is normal for YouTube. They constantly offer more suggestions. I think there have been YouTube videos in the APOD in the past that did not do that and if so then there is a way to specify for YouTube not to do that.

Confused wrote:Was the Sun too hot for this web site? I see nothing but white for the image.

I am using Windows 7 and the latest version of IE.

FWIW: It works fine for me on Win7 and IE9

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=30491

Another awesome APOD. Thanks!

This awesome video reminds me of a lifelong question of mine. What is the male equivilant of a ballerina ... a balleroo?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

by owlice » Tue Jan 15, 2013 1:28 pm

Ballerino.

Does that make something in between.... a Neutrino??

Ron-Astro Pharmacist wrote:This awesome video reminds me of a lifelong question of mine. What is the male equivilant of a ballerina ... a balleroo?

My wife was formerly a professional ballet dancer- she trained and performed in England, and was also in an Israeli company. She quite dislikes the term "ballerina" and says it was and is seldom used. In English, at least, what they usually call themselves are ballet dancers. That is usually qualified by rank- Principal Dancer, Soloist, Corps de Ballet, and sometimes others.

Google returns about 59.6 million results for ballerina and about 4.4 million results for ballet dancer. That is not definitive but I think it is indicative. In my opinion, Ballerina is more eloquent than Ballet Dancer.

Also see the Google Ngram.

Confused wrote:Google returns about 59.6 million results for ballerina and about 4.4 million results for ballet dancer. That is not definitive but I think it is indicative. In my opinion, Ballerina is more eloquent than Ballet Dancer.

My point was that the dancers themselves don't generally use the term. Nor do dance companies. I have noticed it is quite popular with young girls, however.

Google hits can be a useful metric, but a high count only reflects popularity, not accuracy. The two sometimes deviate. My recommendation is that if you're talking to a ballet dancer, don't call her a ballerina. And whatever you do, don't call a male dancer a ballerino!

Aspiring ballet dancer camps shared campuses with the camps my son attended during the summer, and the female among them -- the dancers -- were called 'rinas.

owlice wrote:
Aspiring ballet dancer camps shared campuses with the camps my son attended during the summer,
and the female among them -- the dancers -- were called 'rinas.

• So the male dancers were called 'RINOS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Reagan wrote:
<<Ronald Prescott "Ron" Reagan (born May 20, 1958) was expelled from The Webb Schools of California, a private prep school. He commented: "They [the school administration] thought I was a bad influence on the other kids. As I recall, the immediate reason was I went to a dance at a neighboring girl’s school in a classmate’s car. This was an infraction. They had been looking for an excuse. I didn’t get caught at anything."

Reagan dropped out of Yale University in 1976 after one semester to become a ballet dancer. He joined the Joffrey Ballet in pursuit of his lifelong dream. Time wrote in 1980: "It is widely known that Ron's parents have not managed to see a single ballet performance of their son, who is clearly very good, having been selected to the Joffrey second company, and is their son nonetheless. Ron talks of his parents with much affection. But these absences are strange and go back a ways.">>

neufer wrote:So the male dancers were called 'RINOS

No.

owlice wrote:

neufer wrote:So the male dancers were called 'RINOS

No.

Not unless they were also liberal Republicans.

Which is why Ron Reagan may have confused the discussion a bit....