Also today, there is a new press release from NASA, talking about the Japanese solar telescope Hinode. This international mission has captured a solar flare exploding from the sun.

The press release begins:

Astronomers are calling the Japanese Hinode spacecraft a "Hubble for the sun." Watch this movie and you'll see why:

The footage, gathered by Hinode's Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) on Dec. 13, 2006, shows sunspot 930 unleashing a powerful X-class solar flare. It's one of the most detailed movies of a flare solar physicists have ever seen. The SOT has a resolution of 0.2 arcseconds or 0.00006 degrees. Putting those numbers into perspective, the telescope can see features on the sun as small as 90 miles wide from its orbit 93 million miles away…

Read the full press release and watch the solar flare move here.