The American Astronomical Society is having its summer meeting this week in Miami. While usually the smaller, if not lesser, of the society’s two meetings, the conference seems to have drawn some media attention. Must be the beaches.

• The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is snapping some pretty pictures of the warm gossamer shrouds of dust that surround nebulae (Wired). It’s got to get its work done before its refrigerators run out, as an extended ‘warm’ mission was recently ranked last among currently operating missions by a committee of NASA advisers.

• Texan astronomers have found a Texas-sized exoplanet that doesn’t want to play by the rules! Its orbit is inclined 30 degrees to the plane of the system in which one of the other planets lies (National Geographic).

• The Sun is a sensitive, interconnected system — just like mother Gaia! The Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been producing detailed, pretty pictures of the Sun since its launch in February, is finding that even small ruptures at its surface have knock-on effects elsewhere on the star (UniverseToday).

Image: infrared mosaic of the Heart and Soul nebulae from NASA’s WISE / NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.