One of my colleagues at the SETI Institute, Franck Marchis, pointed me to this video from NASA Goddard titled “Pursuit of Light”. This video showcases quite a few recent achievements in the top goals from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate — exploration of the solar system as well as detailed observations of the Earth and Solar activity. If you look at some of the images and animations in this video, it’s clear that we’re living in a great era — we have high-resolution and high-quality observations available covering long timescales and often from different perspecives (we continuously observe the sun from all sides for instance with the STEREO satellites), not only revealing phenomena in great detail, but also how they evolve over time. As scientists, we are part of this amazing endeavour (and often on the front row to see new discoveries), which makes us lucky, lucky people! Let’s try to make sure that this effort to understand our home and our place in the Universe is not cut short!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkHc_3Zrv8s]