This Week's "Where In The Universe" Challenge

By Nancy Atkinson - November 12, 2008 09:10 AM UTC | Observing

Here's this week's "Where In The Universe" challenge. Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. The new way we're doing this challenge is that we'll provide the image today, but won't reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section — if you dare! Check back tomorrow on this same post to see how you did. Good luck!

UPDATE (11/3): The answer has now been posted below. If you haven't made your guess yet, no peeking before you do!!

Nice job on this one, everyone. Yes, its the sun. This image was taken back in July of 2002 of an active region of the sun. The image was produced by the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope on the island of La Palma, Spain. (I apologize, obviously that's not a "spacecraft" and I should not have used the word "spacecraft" in the above paragraph -- habits are hard to break.) These aren't just little bumps on the sun. The structures in the dark sunspots in the upper central area of the image show distinct elevation above the dark "floor" of the sunspot. The height of the structures has been estimated by astronomers to be between 200 and 450 km, and the smallest resolvable features in the image are about 70 km in size! Wow!

I actually saw this image first on the

Boston Globe's The Big Picture

, but here's the

original press release and info

on this great image of the sun.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com