A single lightning strike can reach temperatures nearly 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun. At White Sands National Park, that incredible heat can fuse gypsum sand into formations called fulgurites, better known as "fossilized lightning."

🌎🚀 80 YEARS AGO TODAY - OCTOBER 24, 1946 On this day, humanity saw something it had NEVER seen before. The very FIRST photograph of Earth taken from SPACE! 🤯 And here's what makes this story incredible... There were no satellites. No astronauts. NASA didn't even exist yet! Scientists at White Sands, New Mexico, attached a 35mm camera to a captured German V-2 rocket and launched it 65 MILES above Earth. The camera captured black-and-white images of our planet from space for the first time in history. But here's the crazy part... 💥 The rocket CRASHED back to Earth at more than 340 mph! The camera was completely destroyed. BUT THE FILM SURVIVED! 📸 Those grainy photographs gave humanity its first glimpse of Earth from beyond the atmosphere. Fast-forward 80 years to 2026. 🛰️ Thousands of satellites now orbit our planet. 🌎 We can monitor weather systems, track environmental changes, navigate anywhere using GPS, and observe Earth in extraordinary detail. And we're developing technologies that could eventually take humans to Mars. But think about this... 80 years ago, getting ONE photograph from space was a historic achievement. Today, we're working toward becoming a civilization that lives and operates beyond Earth. 🤔 Imagine what the next 80 years could bring. Sometimes, the greatest technological revolutions begin with something as simple as looking at the world from a different perspective. 🚀 The impossible doesn't stay impossible forever.

It’s #SunDay#! Here’s your space weather report for the week of Aug 7 - 13: • 0 M-class flares • 1 C-class flare • 16 coronal mass ejections • 1 geomagnetic storm This video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the week’s activity. It was a quite calm week on the Sun, with a moderate geomagnetic storm occurring on Aug. 8 after several coronal mass ejections arrived at Earth together. There was also a total solar eclipse on Aug. 12. How come SDO didn't see it? SDO follows a “geosynchronous” orbit, orbiting Earth at the same rate as Earth spins. The spacecraft effectively “hovers” over its ground station in White Sands, New Mexico. White Sands was outside of the eclipse’s path, so SDO didn’t see it. Visualize SDO’s orbit: