Pic of the Week: Annular Solar Eclipse Over Antarctica

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Image (Credit): The’ solar eclipse as seen from the Concordia research station in Antarctica on February 17, 2026. (ESA/IPEV/PNRA-A. Traverso)

This week’s image comes from the European Space Agency (ESA). It shows the “Ring of Fire” solar eclipse earlier this month from Antarctica. It was captured over the French and Italian Concordia research station.

Here is more from ESA on this image and the Concordia research station:

Peaking at 19:47 local time (12:47 CET), the Moon passed directly in front of the Sun’s centre, leaving only a thin, glowing annulus of sunlight visible. Astronomers call this moment annularity, and it lasted just two minutes, though the full partial eclipse spanned around two hours…Concordia sits 1100 km inland at an altitude of 3200 m. It is currently summer at the station: today, the Sun stayed above the horizon for nearly 20 hours, with temperatures reaching a comparatively mild –29 °C. But soon the light will fade: from May to August, the Sun will not rise at all, plunging the station into four months of continuous darkness where temperatures can fall below –80 °C. During this polar winter, the crew must live in complete isolation and full autonomy.

Now We Know the Rest of the Story about that ISS Medical Emergency

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Image (Credit): An earlier photo of NASA astronaut Edward Michael “Mike” Fincke. (European Space Agency)

While NASA had kept it quiet for a while, we now know that the medical evacuation of Crew-11 from the International Space Station (ISS) last month related to NASA astronaut Mike Fincke (age 58).

While we still do not know the underlying medical condition, and maybe never will, it appears Fincke is still recovering given that he has stated:

I’m doing very well and continuing standard post-flight reconditioning at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Spaceflight is an incredible privilege, and sometimes it reminds us just how human we are…Thank you all for your support.

It is good that he reminds us of human frailty as we send manned spacecraft to the Moon again, while also contemplating the daunting task of sending humans to Mars.

We were reminded of human frailty again this past weekend when a US Navy sub had to resurface near Greenland because of crew member’s medical condition. A submarine submerged for months at a time is probably as close as you will get to the conditions and isolation of a spacecraft going to Mars.

Note: An interesting fact about Mike Fincke is that he appeared as a guest star on the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2025. He played the part of Lt. M. Fincke.

Space Quote: SETI and the Swimming Pool

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Image (Credit): Illustration of the Drake Equation. (University of Rochester)

“My inner eight-year-old, my inner Star Trek nerd, started putting this together that we should use the data that we have and try to figure out how to pull the knowledge from 60 years of radio astronomy and apply it into this optical, visible-light astronomy. My hope in pushing this from the radio into the visible light, into the infrared, and other domains of astronomy that are so active is that we can actually push this from a hot tub to maybe an Olympic swimming pool.”

-Comment by James Davenport, an astronomer from the University of Washington, discussing the ongoing search for intelligent life (SETI) with Regina Barber, host of NPR’s Short Wave podcast. They were discussing how the SETI efforts to date equate to searching a hot-tub worth of water compared to the entire ocean. You can hear more in the episode titled “The Serious Hunt for Alien Life.”

Space Stories: More Artemis II Delays, Starliner a Type A Mishap, and James Webb Space Telescope Studies Atmosphere of Uranus

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Credit; NASA

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—NPR: “NASA’s Artemis II Lunar Mission May Not Launch in March After All“

Just one day after NASA said it was eyeing a potential March 6 launch date for the Artemis II lunar mission, the space agency said Saturday that complications with the rocket could delay all launch attempts in March from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida...In a blog post, NASA said it is “taking steps to potentially roll back the Artemis II rocket and Orion spacecraft to the Vehicle Assembly Building,” after technicians observed an “interrupted flow of helium” to the rocket system. NASA says its teams are “actively reviewing data” and taking steps to “address the issue as soon as possible while engineers determine the best path forward.”

—Astronomy Magazine:“NASA Report Declares Starliner Incident a Type A Mishap“

On Thursday, NASA released sobering results from an independent investigation into the 2024 crewed Boeing Starliner test flight that left two astronauts stranded in space for months, placing blame not only on hardware failures, but the agency’s own leadership and culture. In a press conference, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency had now categorized the incident as a type A mishap — the same classification applied to the Columbia and Challenger shuttle disasters — something he believes should have happened from the start.

—European Space Agency: “Webb Maps Uranus’s Mysterious Upper Atmosphere“

For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, uncovering how temperature and charged particles vary with height across the planet. Using NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRSpec instrument, the team observed Uranus for nearly a full rotation, detecting the faint glow from molecules high above the clouds. The results offer a new window into how ice-giant planets distribute energy in their upper layers.

Americans May Be a Bit Too Optimistic About Space Travel

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The latest Harper’s Index from Harper’s magazine had a few interesting statistics related to space travel and alien encounters (something discussed in Friday’s post).

Here are the two stastistics:

  • Portion of Americans in 1998 who believed that space travel would be common for ordinary Americans by 2025:  3/10
  • Portion of Americans in 1998 who believed that humans would make contact with extraterrestrial life by 2025:  1/4

Both come from a Gallup poll conducted back in 1998. You can read more about the various survey results in this Gallup story.

Given that the Artemis II mission is still struggling to get to the Moon, and the only new life we seem to have encountered was created in a laboratory by OpenAI and others, I would say we are far from this mark. However, Americans were a little better at predicting some of the social trends, including the 69 percent who expected the country would elect a Black president by 2025.

It is also good that some of the predictions were off, particularly those related to disease, disaster, and war (shown below). Then again, the respondents (76 percent) who predicted the emergence of a deadly new disease were spot on regarding COVID.