On February 17, 2026, the moon passed directly in front of the sun, creating a solar eclipse. You had to be in Antarctica to get the full effect (a partial eclipse was seen from points a bit north)… unless you were in space. Here’s what the ESA’s PROBA-2 space-based observatory saw:

That is so cool! I love eclipses from space.

PROBA-2 is a small satellite (only 130 kilograms!) designed to test various technologies to observe the sun. One instrument is SWAP, the Sun Watcher using Active Pixel System Detector and Image Processing. It has a camera that observes extreme ultraviolet light, centered at a wavelength of 17.4 nanometers (the bluest light the human eye can see is at about 400 nm). This light is emitted by high-energy events like solar flares, and waves that travel through the sun’s corona — its ethereal outer atmosphere — right before a coronal mass ejection. The sun’s surface roils and seethes at these wavelengths, which are artificially colored gold in the image.

The fact that you can see the sun’s surface at all is because this was an annular eclipse (annular means ring-shaped). The moon orbits Earth on an elliptical path, and this eclipse happened when the moon was farther from Earth than usual, so it appeared a bit smaller than the sun; on average and by coincidence the two are about the same size in our sky.

PROBA-2 is on a polar orbit, meaning it moves north/south and passes over Earth’s poles. It actually saw this eclipse four times as it passed over Antarctica over four successive orbits, seeing it in partial phase three times. Here’s a video of those events.

I finally saw my first solar eclipse in 2017 in Wyoming, but I’ve never seen an annular one. I’d love to; I can only imagine how eerie and awesome they must be. There’s one nearly every year for the next decade, though for me it would involve travel. Still, I can hope! And don’t forget the next total eclipse on August 12. I’d love to go to Spain to see it…

Our Milky Way galaxy is huge, and grew that way by colliding and merging with other galaxies. Most of that happened billions of years ago, but it still happens today. For example, the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal galaxy is a small elliptical galaxy that is currently getting torn apart by our galaxy’s gravity as it plunges through the Milky Way’s disk every few hundred million years.

In a new paper, a team of astronomers presents evidence of another collision, but on a far smaller scale [link to journal paper]. Earlier work by other astronomers found some strange structures in the disk located about 13,000 light-years from us. There’s a lot of hydrogen gas floating around the galaxy, but in this location there’s a void, a hole in the gas, as if something has pushed its way through. There’s also a shell of carbon monoxide at that same spot that may also have a similar or shared origin. On top of that is a long narrow filament of hydrogen gas that really does look as if something plowed vertically through the galactic disk and excited the gas there.

All of this points toward the collision by a very small galaxy indeed. In the new work, the astronomers looked at the velocities of stars in that region (using data from Gaia) to see if there was any indication of such a galaxy. What they found is a bunch of stars with velocities that indicate they’re moving through the disk in a vertical direction! They called it a vertical velocity anomaly (in this case, “anomaly” means a deviation from the average velocities of the stars in that region, as opposed to the more vernacular meaning of something strange).

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