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We promise not to post every single one of the videos the astronauts shoot from the International Space Station, but they’ve been capturing some nice scenes lately in High-Definition, including this trip up the East Coast of the United States.

And, of course, this beautiful moonset, which was filmed over the North Atlantic ocean on January 9.  The video is sped up: the sequence covers 10 minutes as the station orbited from northeast of the Caribbean to just west of Europe.

Click on the image to watch the video.

January 22, 2012 solar flare. Photo courtesy NASA/SDO/AIA.

Despite being the strongest solar storm since 2005, this week’s flareup appears to have caused few disruptions on Earth. (As Space.com reports, the Coronal Mass Ejection “hit Earth at an angle, so the electromagnetic burst was largely shielded by the planet’s magnetic field.”)

But the storm did lead some airlines—including Delta, Qantas, and Air Canada—to alter their transpolar routes to reduce potential disruptions to high-frequency radio communication along the way. At least one Qantas flight, reports AvWeb, carried an extra five tons of fuel in order to fly a less southerly route.

We may have gotten off easy. The remarkable electrical effects of solar storms have been recorded in newspapers since British astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a solar eruption in 1859 while sketching sun spots seen through his telescope. Just days later, the northern lights—seen as far south as Cuba—damaged telegraph systems, even setting offices on fire and melting wires. On August 30, 1859, the New York Times included this observation from the superintendent of the Canadian Telegraph Company:

I never, in my experience of fifteen years in the working of telegraph lines, witnessed anything like the extraordinary effect of the Aurora Borealis, between Quebec and Further Point last night. The line was in most perfect order, and well-skilled operators worked incessantly from 8 o’clock last evening till 1 o’clock this morning, to get over in even a tolerably intelligent form about four hundred words of the steamer Indian‘s report for the Associated Press, and at the latter hour so completely were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis, it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line was closed for the night.

Another solar storm, nearly as strong as what has come to be known as the Carrington event, occurred in 1921. On May 16, 1921, the Los Angeles Times reported that “electrical influences exerted by the Aurora Borealis…continued today to play havoc with telegraph traffic throughout the United States…. For more than an hour before midnight Saturday nearly every telephone wire leading from New York and Chicago was out of condition.”

The New-York Tribune hoped to calm its readers by noting that the sun would soon “turn [its] spotted face away and end earthly wire troubles,” while the New York Times reported disturbances in France: “The operators at the central transmission stations came to the conclusion that a strange force had got into their instruments, for nothing would go right. Morse instruments, instead of making dots and dashes, recorded one long line. Hughes instruments produced words in what might have been an unknown language, and Baudot, of which French telegraphers are proud because it is very intricate, seemed possessed by evil spirits.”

Newcomb Carlton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, was quoted in the New York Times as saying: “The magnetic disturbances were much the worst ever experienced. A great many fuses were blown out on our land lines and we had great difficulty with the submarine cables.” The story also reports that the solar storm burned out a telephone station in Sweden, which then contributed to a short circuit in the New York Central signal system, which was followed by a fire in the Fifty-seventh Street signal tower.

In 1989, the Washington Post reported on December 18 that a solar storm—or “titanic temper tantrum”—set off radiation alarms aboard the supersonic Concorde in flight, damaged orbiting satellites, and caused a nine-hour power blackout in most of Canada’s Quebec province.

In comparison, Space.com reports, this week’s solar flare caused “minor disruptions to spacecraft and power grids.”

For the last 12 years, astronomers have been using a dedicated telescope in New Mexico to make the most detailed map of our universe as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Last week, at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, the scientists presented a mesmerizing visual of the matter that makes up, well, everything.

Don’t worry if the 3D animation is confusing; it’s not so much a Thomas Guide (Take the 405 to the Pegasus Galaxy) as a statistical representation of how mass is distributed through the universe. It’s the clumps and lack of clumps that are important. Astronomers took measurements of nearly a million galaxies, and by graphing them out are able to learn about the structure of the universe, including how it evolved over time, back to the inflationary epoch — the moment just after the Big Bang when the universe rapidly expanded. In the animation, each green dot represents one galaxy. The image covers a redshift range from 0.25 to 0.75, reaching back to six billion years ago.

The measurements are ongoing, and will eventually include around 1.5 million galaxies, which the researchers hope to be finished with sometime this year. They’re already making interesting finds: Their data shows that dark matter makes up 73% of the density of the universe.

An artist rendering of the gas cloud being pulled towards Sgr A*. Courtesy ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann

Not long from now, astronomers are going to witness something they’ve never seen before: a black hole chowing down on a feast. Although scientists have a short list of probable black holes, there’s only one close enough for us to observe with any detail, and that’s the one in the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics confirmed this week in Nature that they’ve discovered a gas cloud plowing straight for it.

Sgr A* is a “supermassive” black hole, with the mass of about four million Suns. Although these still mysterious objects are difficult to observe directly, since they absorb all light that gets too close, there are a few ways to gather data. One is by studying the accretion disk; the extreme gravitational forces coming from the black hole compress material as it falls ever closer, and this causes an emission of electromagnetic radiation. With black holes, that radiation is usually in the x-ray range. Studying this radiation can tell astronomers a lot about the black hole itself.

So why is the discovery of this gas cloud so exciting? Because Sgr A* is a fairly quiet black hole. There’s not a lot of nearby material for it to feast on, and so not a lot of data for astronomers to collect. But this gas cloud is barreling down a path almost straight toward Sgr A*. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert, the astronomers have been able to track the cloud’s path and determine its size and mass — it covers an area about the size of our solar system, with the mass of just three Earths.

Even more exciting, in a universe where human life spans are mere blips in astronomical time, it turns out this gas cloud is going to reach Sgr A* in just about 18 months. The same Max Planck scientists who authored the Nature paper will be the ones collecting data from the VLT in mid-2013. That has to be high on the list of astronomer dreams.

The cloud is already close enough to start being stretched apart by gravitational forces, which are pulling it toward the black hole faster and faster — the speed of the cloud has doubled in the last seven years, and it is now moving over 5 million miles per hour. In this short film, astronomer Stefan Gillessen says the cloud “will be elongated and stretched, it will become essentially like spaghetti, and… fall into the black hole.” Or, as one of the best lines we’ve read in a science article in a long time puts it, “The inevitable doom of such a blob of gas is its inexorable tendency towards fragmentation.”

Pretty, pretty outer space. Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

As Oscar Wilde said, “Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.” So what better place to turn the lens of aestheticism than images from our universe?

Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have been doing just that though the Aesthetics and Astronomy project. They hoped that by studying how the public reacts to the beauty of nebulas and far-off galaxies, they can foster fascination with the science behind the images as well.

Turns out, however, that people don’t always choose beauty over science.  From The Harvard Crimson:

People responded more positively to images that were accompanied by an explanation, suggesting curiosity about the nature of the celestial event or object pictured, according to [Randall] Smith.

“There is a devaluing when you separate out function and form,” [Kimberly Kowal] Arcand said.

The A&A researchers said they believe that an understanding of the scientific nature of astronomical imagery can let people more fully appreciate its beauty—and conversely, that its aesthetic appeal can increase appreciation of the science.

The group’s research is ongoing, as they try to develop the best ways to convey scientific information through astronomical images, like using the “Cocktail Format” in captions — quick, memorable facts instead of lengthy, descriptive text.

Detail of "Underwater" by Stanley Goldstein, featured in Celestial Matters

And while we’re talking about pretty things in space, we should mention an unusual art exhibit appearing next weekend. Celestial Matters features ten artworks that spent time on the International Space Station. Well-known space tourist Richard Garriott de Cayeux, who hitched a ride on a Soyuz up to the ISS in 2008, commissioned a handful of artists to create pieces for the trip.  They were given weight, size, and material restrictions, but otherwise just instructed to “present a compelling interpretation of space and how it impacts and inspires the human perspective.” The exhibition is by Zero G Art and supports the Challenger Center.

You have to head to the Lower East Side to see it in person, but at least it’s a bit more doable than low-Earth orbit.  (You can see the works online, too.)  The exhibit is on display at the Charles Bank Gallery at 196 Bowery, New York City, from Friday through Sunday, Oct. 14-16, 12 to 7 p.m.