Nuts about Nature - Passport to the Carden Centre

It was a great day for Kawartha - 29C, some breeze, sunny.
Vicki and I were present to look at the sun with a Coronado H-alpha solar telescope

Weather was good as  I said but there was little activity to be seen. Here are some images from the SOHO solar observatory in space - the very latest images of the sun.

The closest to "white light:

And from activity, similar in appearance to H-Alpha, the 304 Ångström

Surface magnetic fields were also weak:

One can never be sure of the weather - at 40% probability of rain - so I thought maybe I ought to offer an indoor program as well, and make a comet. It turned out that it was out of the heat and welcome.

I do  not have any photos of Comet Courtney fresh from "baking" - maybe I'll receive some in the mail and can include them. However, about an hour later I started cleaning up and noticed several jets had appeared:

And did I say it was a good day for ice cream?

I hope everyone arrived home safely - W O B

Sudbury Impact basin caused by a comet

Comets are becoming more complex the more we get to know them. And now Canada/Sudbury Ontario claims one hit just 1,849.5 million years ago, just circa 100km from where I am "astronomer in residence" for the past 4 years. I wipe the sweat from my brow!Sudbury impact basin

"The findings settle ..." - well, they do not. And science does not work quite that way - rather in a sentence
above: "... was likely formed by an enormous comet  ... suggested ... " is a little better.

We should also bear in mind that while Philae and Rosetta will relay to us much more detail about comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko than we had previously known, it is detail about ONE comet and we have much to learn about how this fits into the general picture of our solar system. We know that there is much variety in composition among comets and even in the same comet - spatially, comet Hartley, or temporarily, comet Hale-Bopp.

                                                                   Comet Hartley:

 

Comet Hale-Bopp:

(The rise and fall of production of the various molecules is not constant  nor parallel.)