Four years ago I set out on a mission to inspire National Geographic readers to care not only about the planet but about *all* planets … and stars, galaxies, black holes, supernovas, and all the other wonders of the cosmos.

Now it’s time for me to say farewell as I move into a new chapter of my space-chasing career. But never fear, because you won’t have to say goodbye to Breaking Orbit.

My fellow Nat Geo space geek and NGM editor extraordinaire, Luna Shyr, will be taking the blogging reigns, and trust me, you all are in for an incredible ride.

I’ll let Luna say hello and give you a taste of what’s to come. But before I sign off, I’d like to offer a globular cluster’s worth of thanks to everybody for being part of the Breaking Orbit astro-community, and I think I’ll leave you with one of my favorite lines from the late, great Carl Sagan:

“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, and the water seems inviting.”

Mostly Harmless.

—image by Norman Kuring, NASA/GSFC/Suomi NPP

The tale is just one example of African cultural astronomy captured by artists and now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

“Untitled” (1989-1990), by Gavin Jantjes of South Africa
—Picture courtesy National Museum of African Art

“African Cosmos: Stellar Arts,” which officially opens Wednesday, is being billed as the first major exhibit at the museum to highlight the connection between art and astronomy, tracing our observations of the heavens as seen reflected in decorative pieces from ancient Egypt to 21st-century Benin.

“The work of an artist is to understand, interpret, and depict the world around us,” Derek Hanekom, deputy minister of Science and Technology for the South African government, said today during a press briefing.

For instance, he said, “in every culture we have a [unique] story of Genesis, of creation. … And other cultures have other names and stories for the stars and constellations in the sky.

“Science builds on those stories and on humanity’s quest to know more about the world.”

Astronomy in particular connects cultures across vast distances, since we largely share the same sky, according to museum director Johnnetta Cole.

“So many miles from the center of our ancestral home, we have very little difficulty relating to these works of art [in the new exhibit],” Cole said.

The collection, for example, combines an ancient Egyptian relief depicting the bright star Sirius, an 18th-century sky map from Timbuktu, 19th-century wooden “moon masks” from Côte d’Ivoire, and several 21st-century light installations by contemporary African artists.

“Art and science have both questioned the nature of reality for centuries, in their own ways,” noted Karel Nel, a professor of fine arts in Johannesburg and one of the show’s featured contributors.

By combining artworks from Africa—the birthplace of modern humans—with one of the oldest sciences, “African Cosmos” offers a long, deep look at how our visions of reality have been changed by the very human pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

“Starkid” (2007), by Owusu-Ankomah of Ghana
—Picture courtesy National Museum of African Art

Jupiter cupcakes, a recipe designed by Jamieanne Hassler for our Planetology cupcake contest.
—Photo courtesy Jamieanne Hassler

The goal is to raise awareness of NASA’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget, which right now calls for a 20-percent cut in spending for planetary science.

In true American tradition, when funds are low and a cause is in need, people hit the streets, grassroots style.

But how will a day of sudsing Chevys and selling lemon bars manage to raise the missing $300 million? Project organizer Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, gave us the skinny:

What inspired you to start a “fundraiser” for planetary science?

There are many things going on across the country to combat these budget cuts, such as major institutions writing letters to Congress or scientists giving talks on the Hill. These efforts are great and I totally support them. But I got to thinking, What about local action? So I got the idea to have events all around the country where planetary scientists would work for their communities and talk about the cuts and how damaging they are.

Okay, so what’s the damage, exactly?

NASA has said that if the budget cuts go through, the Mars exploration program will be drastically cut down, as will the Discovery program, which sends [small, lower cost] spacecraft to the rest of planets. There’ll also be no big flagship mission to the outer solar system. It’s an across-the-board punch in the gut to the planetary program.

Who’s signed up to participate?

We’ve got about 20 groups so far that will be holding events in places around the country—Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, D.C., Orlando. The national fundraiser is a single concept, but each event will be different, based on how local organizers have designed their programs.

Here in Boulder, a couple dozen scientists and students—me included—will be shining shoes [near the Pearl Street Mall]. Other places will wash cars or sell cupcakes or make lemonade … any of the kinds of things that immediately call to mind something small-scale and informal. Some events will also feature celebrities, either someone known in the space community or a local politician.

How will you use any profits from the event?

We initially considered charging nominal fees, but we ultimately decided it’d be better if there’s no exchange of funds. We’ll just be shining shoes and cleaning eyeglasses and not asking for any money. What we want is for people’s help in communicating with Congress that the planetary program is important, because of how it promotes science leadership in the U.S. and how it motivates kids in school.

We’re not asking for more money, we’re just asking for the cuts to be repaired.

Fifty years after the fact, details about Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin‘s historic first mission into space are still creeping out from behind a shroud of secrecy.

But there is something we’ll never know about Gagarin’s flight, even in the age of Wikileaks: What did the farmer’s son from Klushino, Russia, see from 200 miles (322 kilometers) above Earth on April 12, 1961?

(Also see “On Yuri Gagarin’s Night, Spy the Space Station Flying Overhead.”)

More concerned about survival than documentary footage, Gagarin brought back sparse imagery of his monumental voyage—and obviously nothing in full-color HD.

“What Gagarin did is something of galactic significance, and it needs marking in some way other than crackly, black-and-white footage,” said film director Christopher Riley.

Now Riley hopes to re-create this piece of history with the worldwide, online premiere of his new Gagarin movie, First Orbit.

Posted on YouTube at midnight GMT on April 12, 2011, the roughly 108-minute film blends a few 1960s historic reels with modern shots taken from the International Space Station (ISS) by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli. His video not only retraces Gagarin’s view from orbit, it shows Earth bathed in sunlight at the same angle the cosmonaut would have seen during his 1961 flight.

We chatted with Riley about his inspiration for the film, the challenges of shooting a movie vicariously from space, and the changes that have happened on Earth since the human race first put a man into orbit.

How did you first get the notion to “refilm” Yuri Gagarin’s flight?

I hadn’t been born when Gagarin went into space—I was minus six. But by the time I was born, people were regularly landing on the moon and sending spacecraft to Mars, so I grew up unable to not be excited about space flight. (Explore a space travel time line.)

However, I was always somewhat disappointed that the first person in space [Gagarin] didn’t film much. (Watch video from the dawn of the space race.)

Then in early 2010 they installed the cupola on the ISS, and it offered this amazing new perspective on Earth from space. So I emailed the European Space Agency and said, What do you think? Could we do it? (See first pictures taken from the ISS cupola.)

Their first action was to put me in touch with one of their orbital mechanics gurus, who worked out whether the ISS covers the same ground as Vostok 1 [Gagarin's spaceship]. It turns out we would have a chance to film every six weeks, but Paolo flew up to the station at the end of November last year, and the crews on the station work very hard—they’re always doing something, so it was a challenge fitting this into his schedule.

We had one shot at this around Christmas last year for Paolo to film before the 50th anniversary.

Do you ever see Paolo during the film?

Not directly, but there is one scene when Paolo slightly appears in reflection in the window as he floats in to adjust the cameras—it’s that Hitchcock moment!

[That scene helped fill in] the problem of what to show as Yuri headed into darkness near the start of the flight, about 30 minutes in.

[For a 40-minute period during his 1961 flight, Yuri passed over parts of Earth where it was night, meaning that what he saw were] dark conditions over the Pacific Ocean. So we had to use shots from an image-intensified camera that NASA flew for us to shoot over the Pacific, and we added a shot of the moon, because Yuri had looked for the moon, but he didn’t get to see it.

How do you think the view of Earth has changed between what Yuri Gagarin saw in 1961 and what Nespoli captured on film in 2010?

When Yuri flew 50 years ago, there was not much human impact you could see from 200 miles up. Today we have double the population as in the 1960s, and there is more of a visible impact.

NASA astronaut John Young—who flew Gemini, Apollo, and space shuttle missions—has said that he’s been going into orbit for about 30 years, and he’s seen the way Earth has changed over that time, especially the atmosphere. (Also see “Apollo 11: Five Little-Known Facts About the Moon Landing.”)

Cities today seem to have their own atmospheres due to pollution. Actual boundaries between countries are also very clear now. Certain counties have overgrazed ground, and big sprawling cities are very visible from space.

Still, Yuri’s route around Earth was over very sparsely populated areas that are largely unchanged 50 years later, so we see little change in human terms.

The movie sounds like a massive effort! What sparked you to release it on YouTube?

Right from the beginning we wanted to share the film with as many people as possible for free, in the same way Yuri’s flight was done.

It’s true world militaries and governments were scared and anxious about the space race, but most of the public was just jubilant about it. As a species we’d sent a human being into space, and how fantastic was that, and it didn’t matter what country he was from.

When Yuri landed, the streets were packed with people who thought he was the greatest man in history. We kind of wanted to instill the same reaction, and allow people to watch from anywhere and show it wherever they want.

Right now we know of 600 screenings taking place around world, from museums to people’s backyards, and we’re hoping to see upward of a million viewers in the next 24 hours.

But in a new twist, astrophotographer Babak Tafreshi has aimed his lens at the people who scan dark skies for their treasures with the same gusto as foodies shopping in a farmer’s market.

Tafreshi’s newest video is described on his Vimeo page as “a tribute to to all skygazers around the world who enjoy exploring the night sky with their telescopes.” It was released today to celebrate April 2012 as Global Astronomy Month.

The video captures the frenetic bustle as people participate in star parties, compete in observing marathons, and engage in their own astrophotography—while the glittering cosmos sails serenely above.

Footage for the film was taken between 2007 and 2011 in Iran, Austria, Germany, Nepal, and La Palma.

One event Tafreshi features is a Messier Marathon, which was started in the U.S. in the 1970s as a challenge for dedicated deep-sky observers. The observing competition is now an annual activity held by astronomy clubs around the world.

During a marathon, “people race to see all the Messier 110 deep-sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, clusters),” Tafreshi said in an email.

[The widely used Messier Catalog of "nebulous objects" was compiled by French astronomer Charles Messier in the late 1700s. The original list of 103 items was published in 1781, with updates bringing the number to 110 by the 1970s.]

For some groups the marathon is “just a group observing night, and everyone does it for fun and they check their own list,” Tafreshi said. But “in some other occasions, like the one I founded in Iran in 2001 … it’s a national level [event] and there are judges for each of several observers. So it could be a serious competition.”

The idea is that “observers only have a few minutes to locate each object, and most of these are too faint to see by unaided eye, so finding them in a telescope or binoculars needs experience with sky navigation. So people who win such competitions know every corner of the sky very well!”

In addition to the marathon and several similar gatherings shown in the new video, “the two images in Nepal from 5:10 to the end was a very interesting event I was involved with,” Tafreshi said.

“On a TWAN trip to the country we also had some outreach programs. Together with the Nepal Astronomical Society we organized a public star party in the middle of the [Kathmandu Valley World Heritage center's] Durbar Square of Bhaktapur, surrounded by temples, and this Dobsonian telescope was the highlight of the night,” he said.

“Many young people who never had a chance to look through a telescope were standing on a very long line across the square to see the moon. This was the longest line behind a telescope I have ever seen.

“A look to the moon through a small telescope changed my life forever when I was 13, and this might happen to few of these people too!”

See more of Tafreshi’s pictures from the Nepal trip on TWAN.org, and find out how to participate in sky-watching events during Global Astronomy Month 2012.

Saturn‘s moon Titan is unique in our solar system, being the only natural satellite to boast a significant atmosphere, somewhat like Earth’s.

Also like Earth, Titan has bodies of liquid on its surface that support processes akin to our water cycle—the huge moon has clouds, spring rains, and fog—and even shows signs of a lake effect similar to the one seen over North America’s Great Lakes.

The key difference, of course, is that the liquid on chilly Titan is methane, a carbon-based chemical that, on our world, is the prime component in natural gas.

Still, Titan’s hydrocarbon haze is exciting to scientists who are hoping to get a glimpse of how life might have been sparked on Earth: Lab experiments, for example, suggest that the moon’s atmosphere may be flush with the building blocks of life, such as amino acids and DNA bases.

And now, for the first time, scientists say they have proof that early Earth had a very Titan-like atmosphere … at least periodically.

On today’s Earth, dry air contains roughly 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, with trace amounts of other gases. But ancient rocks show that, before about 2.5 billion years ago, atmospheric oxygen was a scarce commodity on our planet.

The widely held theory has been that before the so-called Great Oxygenation Event, Earth’s atmosphere was dominated by Titan-esque organics—but no one had yet found evidence for such a chemical makeup in the planet’s rocky history.

In a study published online yesterday in Nature Geoscience, Aubrey Zerkle of Newcastle University in the U.K. and colleagues report their analyses of rocks from South Africa that date to between 2.65 and 2.5 billion years ago.

Core samples from these rocks contain microbial mats, which show that some of the tiny creatures in shallow seas were producing oxygen long before the Great Oxygenation of our atmosphere.

The rocks also contain carbon and sulfur isotopes—chemicals that would have reacted with oxygen. The levels of the different kinds of isotopes present indicate that sometimes oxygen production was happening when the atmosphere was thick with methane—but other times the atmosphere must have been haze-free.

The clarity of the early atmosphere seems to flip flop roughly every few million years, Zerkle and co. report, hinting at a push and pull between microbes that generated oxygen and those that belched methane.

At last, though, *something* happened about 2.5 billion years ago to trigger the planet’s permanent oxygen high. (What that “something” was is still a mystery, although theories abound.)

Of course, this pattern has so far been seen only in the South African rocks, so more research on samples from around the world will be needed to truly tell whether Earth was once a Titan—atmospherically speaking.

Victoria Jaggard is a senior editor for National Geographic News, specializing in all things space. You can follow Victoria on Twitter @vmjaggard99.

The Eagle Nebula, a grand old bird roughly 6,500 light-years away.
Image courtesy T. A. Rector & B. A. Wolpa, NOAO, AURA

Green pigs across the cosmos should start looking for places to hide, because the Angry Birds are headed to space.

In partnership with NASA and National Geographic, series creator Rovio is bringing the popular game to the final frontier with Angry Birds Space, scheduled for launch on March 22.

Today [March 8] attendees at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, are getting the first taste of this spacey new game, which features new, astronomy-themed mechanics such as zero gravity, slow-motion puzzles, and “lightspeed” destruction.

Even more exciting, from this blogger’s perspective, is that saving those precious eggs will involve increasing your space savvy—you and your birds will have to know all about planets, gravity, nebulae, and other astronomical wonders to finish your quest.

To lend gamers a helping wing, National Geographic today also announced its official companion book for the game. Author Amy Briggs deftly guides humans and birds alike from our familiar “home base” here on Earth, through the solar system, and beyond, into mysterious corners of the universe filled with black holes, exploding stars, and alien worlds.

The book goes on sale March 20, giving you a few days to mentally prepare for your epic trek with the space-bound birds. (Click here or on the image of the book cover to find out how to get the book.)

In the meantime, astronaut Ron Garan—who’s currently down at SXSW for the official announcement—has given us a sneak peek at some of the things we’ll need to know to conquer the Angry universe:

The Angry Birds are about to boldly go where they’ve never gone before. How does an astronaut get suited up for a trip to space?

Very carefully, of course, and exactly how you put on the suit depends on the spacesuit. For the U.S. spacesuit that we use when we go outside for a spacewalk, you first put your “Space Pants” on and then slither and squeeze yourself up into the torso, the mid-section, pushing your head out the top of that section and your arms out the sides. Then you attach the gloves and your helmet, and you are ready to go. For the Russian spacesuit that also is used for spacewalks from the International Space Station, you open a hatch in the back and climb inside — it is all one piece, except for gloves that you attach. Either way, getting into a spacesuit is a lot easier when you can “fly” in zero gravity than it is to practice it on Earth. By way of explanation, I will just say that in zero gravity, you really can put your pants on both legs at a time. Oh, and I forgot to mention the long underwear you put on first with miles of tubes that water flows through to keep you cool and acts as your personal climate control in the suit. The birds could probably use a pair of those…

Can travel via slingshot actually get someone from Earth into space?

Author and engineer Jules Verne, in his novel From the Earth to the Moon, envisioned a giant space gun that could fire a bullet-shaped projectile carrying people to the moon. Later, German rocket scientist Hermann Oberth explained that living things could not survive the initial acceleration needed to get Verne’s bullet to the moon.

The same is true with a slingshot. If you had one big enough and strong enough to accelerate an object to the speed that’s necessary to stay in orbit (17,500mph) it could work. Unfortunately people couldn’t survive the acceleration the slingshot would need to produce to get them into space. Angry Birds are pretty tough though and they might be able to make the trip.

I’ve heard that a “gravitational slingshot” can help a spacecraft travel faster—how does that work?

A gravity assist maneuver uses the relative movement and gravity of a planet (or other celestial body) to alter the direction and speed of a spacecraft. As a spacecraft nears the planet, it begins to gain speed from the tug of the planet’s gravitational pull. Because the planet and spacecraft are traveling in the same direction, if everything is just right, the spacecraft won’t be pulled into the planet and crash. Instead the spacecraft will slingshot past it. The idea is that using a gravity-assist maneuver, the spacecraft comes up and steals some angular momentum of a planet’s orbit around the Sun, removing a small amount of momentum from that planet. A slingshot maneuver can therefore be used to change the spaceship’s trajectory and speed relative to the Sun. Gravity assist is like a Ping-Pong ball hitting the revolving blade of a ceiling fan and being thrown further and faster than before it hit the blade.

We use gravity-assist maneuvers to shave time of a spacecraft’s trip. Each Voyager mission, for example, used the enormous gravity field of Jupiter to be hurled on to Saturn, experiencing an increase in speed of roughly 35,700 mph. Voyager 2 did slingshots around Saturn and Uranus to reach Neptune, and those maneuvers reduced Voyager 2′s trip by nearly 20 years.

For more detailed information on how gravitational slingshots work, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/gravitationalslingshot

Was a bird the first animal to travel to space?

No. To the best of our knowledge, no birds have flown in space. It seems that Angry Birds are the first.

The first animals to go into space were fruit flies aboard a U.S.-launched V-2 rocket on Feb. 20, 1947. On June 11, 1948, Albert I, a rhesus monkey, became the first primate to fly in space when he launched from White Sands, N.M., also aboard a V-2 rocket. Laika became the first animal to orbit Earth on Nov. 3, 1957, when Russia launched Sputnik 2 with the dog aboard.

Is it true our moon was born from Earth’s collision with a large, round object?

The origin of the moon is now commonly believed to be the result of a Mars-sized object that impacted the Earth 4.5 billion years ago. This impact put a large amount of material into Earth’s orbit that ultimately formed into our moon.

Red Bird is probably most excited about visiting the red planet—which other explorers have made it to Mars?

NASA’s first successful Mars mission was Mariner 4, launched on Nov. 28, 1964. Since then, we have sent 15 other missions to the Red Planet. The most recent, the Mars Science Laboratory, launched on Nov. 26, 2011, and is due to arrive at Mars on Aug 5.

For more information about all of our missions to Mars, visit http://go.nasa.gov/mars-missions

Saturn’s hazy moon Titan seems like a good place to hide eggs—what’s under that dense atmosphere?

Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 62 moons, has an icy surface with lakes made of, and channels cut by, liquid hydrocarbons. It is probably not the best place to hide eggs.

As a fan of all birds great and small, I’d love to know more about the Eagle Nebula.

The Eagle Nebula, cataloged as Messier 16 or M16, and as NGC 6611, is a young, open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens. It was discovered by Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux in 1745-46. It received its name from its shape, which resembles an eagle. It’s the subject of the famous Hubble Space Telescope photograph called “Pillars of Creation” that shows pillars of star-forming gas and dust within the nebula.

What exactly is an exoplanet, and could one harbor little green piggies?

An exoplanet is simply a planet found outside of our solar system. Sorry, we have not found any little green piggies…yet.

Click here for full information about the National Geographic Book Angry Birds Space.

Victoria Jaggard is a senior editor for National Geographic News, specializing in all things space. You can follow Victoria on Twitter @vmjaggard99.

It’s cold, it’s dry, the air is thin. The nearest city is miles away across a barren landscape of boulder-strewn hills. At night, the only lights to guide you are the stars in the sky. Astronomers, welcome to paradise.

Known as the driest place on Earth, Chile’s Atacama Desert has long been recognized as an ideal spot for ground-based telescopes. The skies are free of light pollution, and the high plains enjoy long stretches of steady atmospheric conditions, allowing astronomers to peer deeply into the cosmos without having to worry about turbulence distorting the data.

(Related blog: “The Dry Edge of Life—Studying ‘Martians’ in Chile.”)

In the new time-lapse movie above, photographers Christoph Malin and Babak Tafreshi (founder of The World at Night, or TWAN, program) offer a rarely seen glimpse of Cerro Paranal, one of the high hills in the Atacama that houses instruments for the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Made by invitation from the ESO, the video includes more than 7,500 still images taken between October and November 2011. It shows the beauty of the dark Atacama skies, sometimes framed by the four main domes of the Very Large Telescope, as well as a brief “behind the scenes” look at what telescope operators see from inside one of the domes.

Photograph by Babak Tafreshi

In an email to National Geographic, Tafreshi says of the Atacama:

There are not many locations left on this planet where you can still experience a dark sky like this. I have been to similar dark skies in other continents, from the heart of Sahara in Algeria to Himalayas or islands in the Pacific. But what makes Atacama beat others is being dry and clear for so many nights per year.

It’s not permitted for tourists and regular visiting groups to stay on Paranal at night time, as it might affect the expensive work time of the ultrahigh-precision telescopes. However, to enjoy the stunning night sky of Atacama it’s not necessary to be on this mountain or exactly this region. … [You] just need to be far from the few main cities in the area and the dusty mine industry. Some of our footage in this video is also made from mountains and desert areas some kilometers away from Paranal.

Walking on the desert near Paranal between the scattered stones and boulders on the pale red dust feels like being on Mars, but under the Earth sky.

One of the most astonishing experiences under such a starry sky is the view of the Milky Way. In several scenes of the film, the setting arc of the Milky Way is captured over the cloud-covered Pacific coastline. The band of the Milky Way is bulged and becomes most brilliant toward the galactic center in the constellation Sagittarius, which is prominent in these scenes. Watching the arc of the Milky Way near the desert horizon is a true scene of science fiction.

Photograph by Babak Tafreshi

Malin adds:

It is of course kind of sad that Paranal is not open to the public, but it is a remote place, operated in a very extreme desert environment. … Safety precaucions are omnipresent at Paranal—the place is extremely well organized. … Paranal is organized down to the minute for every day and hour, 365 days per year, to utilize the instrument research time the best possible.

That said, it is still sad, because this magic place shows … how the nights on our planet can truly look like if there is no light pollution. Those are silent, peaceful nights. In pauses when all equipment is running, and you have a moment off, you get immediately thrown back to yourself and to your role in the universe, in a direct, straightforward way just by watching that beautifully glowing night sky. In fact, if you stand there, you see a shadow of your feet just from the light of the Milky Way.

In Europe you have to climb some remote, distant peaks, hike into the most remote, hidden valleys, search for dark places in national parks, fly to the islands to experience such a raw, unspoiled beauty of the starry skies. In this respect, it is a good movement that the Chilean government/tourism board is actively marketing their beautiful night skies and trying to protect them at the same time. I hope that other countries will also start to work on those topics.

Astronomer’s Paradise is just the first installment in Tafreshi and Malin’s “Atacama Starry Nights” series. The next time-lapse movie, to be released in March, will focus on the northern Atacama, the Valley of the Moon, and another major observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA.

Photograph by Babak Tafreshi

Video and photos are copyright Christoph Malin and/or Babak Tafreshi. Used with permission.

The eruption shot out of active region 1401, a large sunspot that’s been spitting flares about once a day since satellites saw it advancing onto the sun’s Earth-facing disk.

As seen in the new video, the latest flare was followed by a coronal mass ejection, or CME, that was aimed right at Earth.

Scientists predict this cloud of solar particles could reach our planet on Saturday, giving weekend sky-watchers a better than average chance of witnessing some glorious auroras.

(See photos: “Multicolored Auroras Sparked by Double Sun Blast.”)

Meanwhile, the video itself shows the sun in a bevy of brilliant hues because SDO is able to capture pictures in ten wavelengths every ten seconds.

In this composite footage, each color represents a different temperature region of the sun, which corresponds to one of our star’s layers.

For instance, in the picture here, data from SDO is used to “paint” several layers onto the sun.

Picture courtesy NASA/SDO

The “flat” yellow at the far left is the sun’s surface, or photosphere, which is a mere 10,800 degrees F (6,000 degrees C). Pictures of the relatively cool photosphere allow us to see the even colder, darker blobs called sunspots that signal magnetic activity on the sun’s surface.

The turbulent gold region is the layer between the chromosphere (lower atmosphere) and the corona (upper atmosphere). This mid-temperature zone is around 1.8 million degrees F (a million degrees C).

Next, swirling blues and greens represent three different wavelengths from the corona, where temperatures can soar up to 3.6 million degrees F (two million degrees C).

Finally, the far right panel includes an illustration of the sun’s magnetic field lines, which spring from and connect the active regions on the photosphere.

Scientists can use SDO’s penetrating gaze to try and solve a number of solar mysteries, such as why the star’s upper atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface—the reverse of the situation on Earth.

(Related: “Comet Seen Vaporizing in Sun’s Atmosphere—A First.”)

In addition, solar experts can use SDO to examine the link between activity on the sun’s surface and the often abrupt discharges of material from the corona. When aimed at Earth, CMEs can not only trigger auroras but, if they’re intense enough, they can also damage satellites and the power grid.

Artist’s concept of the Milky Way galaxy. Picture courtesy NASA/JPL

There’s certainly no shortage of gorgeous pictures of the Milky Way as seen from Earth, many of which show our home galaxy in shades of purple, pink, blue, and cream.

But what we see in these pictures can be colored by two big factors:

• Many astrophotographers use filters to capture different wavelengths of light not visible to the naked eye, which are then colorized into hues our eyes can recognize.
• Also, what we see of the Milky Way from Earth is a view looking edge-on, which means lots of light gets blocked by dense dust—embedded as we are in one of our galaxy’s spiral arms, we can see only a thousand to two thousand light-years in any direction.

To the naked eye at night, the arc of the Milky Way appears to glow white, but that’s only because our eyes aren’t sensitive enough to grasp color in low-light conditions.

(Related: “Voyager Probes Detect ‘Invisible’ Milky Way Glow.”)

So if we had an outsider’s perspective floating a few light-years away from our galaxy, what color would the Milky Way actually be?

A Hubble Space Telescope picture of the galaxy M104. Picture courtesy NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA

It turns out “the Milky Way has the right name for the wrong reasons,” researcher Jeffrey Newman, an astronomer at the University of Pittsburgh, said this week during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

According to a new study by Newman and colleagues, the Milky Way really is milky white—or, more precisely, it’s the color of “fine-grain, new spring snow in the early morning or late evening, about an hour away from dawn or sunset.”

(Also see “Pictures: Best Astronomy Photos of 2011 Named.”)

The trick to figuring this out was to look at the color and brightness of other, known galaxies using the vast catalog collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The researchers could then compare the Milky Way to galaxies that should be very similar, in terms of the amount of stars present and the rate of new star formation.

These factors are known to affect galaxies’ color and brightness because stars of different ages tend to fall into well-defined color groups: younger stars are bluer while older stars are redder.

Galaxies forming lots of new stars look bluer from a distance, while galaxies where star formation is tapering off will look redder.

(Also see “Mysterious Structures Balloon From Milky Way’s Core.”)

In their new study, the Pittsburgh team found a set of hundreds of galaxies with well known colors that essentially match the other stellar properties of the Milky Way.

Based on these Milky Way analogs, the scientists could infer our galaxy’s color: a snowy white that’s right on the dividing line between the redder and bluer galaxies.

But that means the Milky Way won’t be white for long, in cosmic terms.

The rate of star formation in our galaxy is slowing, and “a few billion years from now, our galaxy will be a much more boring place, full of middle-aged stars slowly using up their fuel and dying off, but without any new ones to take their place,” Newman said in a statement.

Eventually, “the Milky Way’s spiral arms will fade into obscurity when there are no more blue stars left.”

(Related: “New Milky Way Map Created; Shows Fewer Main Arms.”)