NASA Brings the Dark Side of the Sun to Your iPhone

[n2doc]

By Betsy Mason February 17, 2010 | 9:28 pm | Categories: Space, Tech


As the sun reawakens from an anomalously quiet period, keep track of solar flares, sunspots and coronal mass ejections with a new iPhone app that puts the real-time status of the sun in your hand.

“This is more than cool,” Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, said in a press release. “It’s transformative. For the first time ever, we can monitor the sun as a living, breathing 3-dimensional sphere.”

With the free 3D Sun app, you can set your phone to alert you when a new solar flare erupts, watch video of a solar prominence or a comet heading into the sun. You can manipulate an image of the sun in three-dimensions with your finger.

The data is streamed to Earth by NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft which monitor the sun from two different spots, one ahead of Earth in its orbit and one behind, giving stereoscopic images to give a sort of three-dimensional view, similar to the way our two eyes do.





Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/nasa-3d-sun-iphone-app/

[zbdent]

1. so what shows on your phone when the sunspots mess with

the system?