AAVSO Alert Notice 485Dr. Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), has requested AAVSO monitoring of the symbiotic variable AG Draconis from now through at least September 2013 for correlation with upcoming Chandra x-ray and HST ultraviolet observations.
Dr. Dupree writes that as a symbiotic variable, AG Dra “exhibits both … Read the rest of this article
A billion-pixel view from the surface of Mars, from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, offers armchair explorers a way to examine one part of the Red Planet in great detail.
The first NASA-produced view from the surface of Mars larger than one billion pixels stitches together nearly 900 exposures taken by cameras onboard Curiosity and shows details of the landscape along … Read the rest of this article
On July 19, 2013, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will photograph Saturn and its entire ring system during a total eclipse of the sun. Cassini has done this twice before during its previous 9 years in orbit, but this time will be different.
“This time, the images to be collected will capture, in natural color, a glimpse of our own planet next … Read the rest of this article
The most detailed record of cloud motion in the atmosphere of Venus chronicled by ESA’s Venus Express has revealed that the planet’s winds have steadily been getting faster over the last six years.
Read the rest of this article
Examples of cloud features identified in Venus Express images and used to monitor wind speeds. Long-term studies based on tracking the motions of several hundred thousand cloud …
With the exhaustion of its helium coolant, Herschel’s science mission ended on 29 April. But the stalwart satellite continued providing value to the end, serving as an orbiting testbed for control techniques that can’t normally be tested in flight.
Read the rest of this article
Martin Kessler, Head of ESA’s Science Operations Department, sends the final command to Herschel at 12:25 GMT (14:25 CEST), 17 June …
The ESA’s mission to Mars in 2016 has entered the final stage of construction with the signature of a contract today with Thales Alenia Space at the Paris Air & Space Show.
ExoMars will fly two missions, in 2016 and 2018, in a partnership between ESA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. Its main goal is to answer one of … Read the rest of this article
Valentina Tereshkova was born in Maslennikovo, near Yaroslavl, in Russia on 6 March 1937. Her father was a tractor driver and her mother worked in a textile factory. Interested in parachuting from a young age, Tereshkova began skydiving at a local flying club, making her first jump at the age of 22 in May 1959. At the time of her … Read the rest of this article
Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have discovered an unprecedented bonanza of black holes in the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the nearest galaxies to the Milky Way.
Using more than 150 Chandra observations, spread over 13 years, researchers identified 26 black hole candidates, the largest number to date, in a galaxy outside our own. Many consider Andromeda to … Read the rest of this article
Alien planets are out there and Planetary Resources needs your help to find them! That’s right, the same high-powered telescope technology being used by Planetary Resources to identify near-Earth asteroids can also be used to hunt for what scientists call extrasolar planets or “exoplanets” – which are very much alien worlds. For the first-time ever, this capability will be placed … Read the rest of this article
Researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have found that temperatures in the Martian atmosphere regularly rise and fall not just once each day, but twice.
“We see a temperature maximum in the middle of the day, but we also see a temperature maximum a little after midnight,” said Armin Kleinboehl of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is … Read the rest of this article
The Sun Now (Visible light)
|
The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
|
|
Aurora Oval
(Northern Hemisphere) |
Aurora Oval
(Southern Hemisphere) |
|
