                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                              2025 September 27

                             A Rocket in the Sun
                  Image Credit & Copyright: Pascal Fouquet

   Explanation: On the morning of September 24 a rocket crosses the bright
   solar disk in this long range telescopic snapshot captured from
   Orlando, Florida. That's about 50 miles north of its Kennedy Space
   Center launch site. This rocket carried three new space weather
   missions to space. Signals have now been successfully acquired from all
   three - NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, NASA’s
   Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and the National Oceanic and
   Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1
   (SWFO-L1) - as they begin their journey to L1, an Earth-Sun lagrange
   point. L1 is about 1.5 million kilometers in the sunward direction from
   planet Earth. Appropriately, major space weather influencers, aka dark
   sunspots in active regions across the Sun, are posing with the
   transiting rocket. In fact, large active region AR4225 is just right of
   the rocket's nose.

                   Tomorrow's picture: spots on the rocks
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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Amber Straughn Specific rights apply.
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                           NASA Science Activation
                             & Michigan Tech. U.

