 Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast. Today's picture for February 19th of 2024 is titled Looking Sideways from the Parker Solar Probe. So, what do we see here? Well, here we see an image or a set of images, in fact a video clip, put together from the Parker Solar Probe, which is traveling closer and closer to the sun, studying in detail what goes on that close to the sun, and trying to help us better understand the star that we know the best and still do not know a whole lot about. Now, it is in a very interesting orbit that brings it in a little bit closer every time during its orbit, so each time it will be a little bit closer. So, this is eleven days worth of images that we're going to look at here, compressed down to about one minute. So, let's take a look at this and play the video, and what we see is, first of all, what we're getting are the images there, and we can see, of course, stars out in the distance, and as we come down, we'll start to see some of the parts of the solar corona. So, those streamers going back, and there we saw the planet Mars, but some of those streamers going back are actually material from the solar corona, being expelled out into space, and we'll see a number of those. And, of course, we see some of the planets, there is Venus that just went by, the plane of our galaxy and our Earth, as we're still looking at those streamers from the sun. So, helping us to really better understand our sun, there we just saw Saturn, as we get a little bit further down here, and again, this is not looking directly at the sun. The whole idea is to be able to study around it, as we see one mass bright object Jupiter there. So, the idea of the Parker Solar Probe is to really study in more detail this object, again, this star that really gives us everything we need here on Earth for life. Now, the material we see being expelled from the sun is what gives us the aurora here on Earth. Aurora occur, wind, those charged particles that are leaving the sun, head towards Earth and strike Earth's atmosphere, and they get funneled along toward the poles and hit the atmosphere and cause it to glow, and that gives us that glow that we see as the aurora. If you noted that little bit where it was kind of wavy and overly intense, that was part of a coronal mass ejection. Particles, lots of particles of material being expelled out. Those can also head out in any direction and can come close to Earth, and in fact they can cause major disruptions in Earth, especially in our electronics, because of the intense amount of energy there. The last major one that struck Earth was back in the mid-1800s and caused damages to the telegraphs. It's quite possible that one of those striking Earth now would cause various damage to many of the satellites in orbit as well as electronics down here on the surface of Earth. So perhaps the Parker Solar Probe will give us a better understanding of these and help us to be able to understand more when and why they occur. So that was our picture of the day for February 19th of 2024. It was titled Looking Sideways from the Parker Solar Probe. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture, previewed to be Galactic Pearls. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow. And until then, have a great day, everyone, and I will see you in class.