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This stunning portrait of the sun spread like hot plasma all over the internet yesterday. Wired.com spoke with artist and astrophotographer Alan Friedman to find out how he made it. Friedman shoots the sky from his backyard in downtown Buffalo, New York. That means the usual celestial candidates - galaxies, nebulae, distant star clusters - are washed out by the glow of the city. But the sun is fair game, as long as the sky is clear and turbulence-free.

"A US photographer has captured incredible photographs of a storm as it unleashed a torrent of rain on a Montana field. The images were taken by Montana photographer Sean Heavey earlier this year during a storm chasing expedition. "I just felt that if you could stand in the middle and looked up you would have been looking into the eye of God,"

Awesome storm photograph

BREMEN, Germany - In three years, the European Space Agency will become the owner of what is possibly the most dangerous piece of space debris circling the Earth for the next 150 years: the 17,636-pound Envisat Earth observation satellite.

"A Jupiter-like world orbiting a star 150 light-years away has searing temperatures and winds blasting at speeds up to 10,000 kilometres per hour, according to astronomers. The storm stems from the planet's blindingly close and rotationally synched orbit around its parent star."

Amazing to think of a storm, even on this distant star! All those currents, all those clouds, wow!