Tag: Crystals

A Sunny Cold Sunday is a Good Day to Find Sun Dogs

ryan2 Comments
When the temperature is just right, and the sky is clear, you can see some amazing phenomenon from the Sun.  It isn’t your eyes playing a trick on you, it just means you’re seeing the right conditions for a really amazing experience. Sun Dogs, known scientifically as Parhelia, typically appear as two bright patches on either side of the Sun.  Occasionally they reveal rainbow colours in their pattern, but can be quite bright.  They are most easily visible when the Sun is low in the sky. Sun Dogs are made from the refraction of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere....

Heavy Metal Frost on Venus?

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Venus is the most hellish place I know of in the Solar System, and maybe even the broader Universe.  Even though Venus looks pretty harmless and is named for the Roman goddess of Love, beneath the soft looking clouds lies sulphuric acid rainfall, 450 degree surface temperatures, and crushing pressure 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level. How do we get the surface picture of Venus above? NASA’s Magellan probe in 1994 finished mapping the surface by looking at Radio wavelengths emitted by the planet and using radar to bounce waves off the surface to measure features....