T’was the Night after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring …
…because everyone was outside watching the planets align?
It’s true. On Dec. 26th, the night after Christmas, Venus and the slender crescent Moon will gather for a jaw-dropping conjunction in the western sky.
The action begins shortly before sunset. Around 4:30 pm to 5:00 … Read the rest of this article
No team of reindeer, but radio signals flying clear across the solar system from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have delivered a holiday package of glorious images. The pictures, from Cassini’s imaging team, show Saturn’s largest, most colorful ornament, Titan, and other icy baubles in orbit around this splendid planet.
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Titan and Dione: Saturn’s third-largest moon Dione can be seen through the …
International Space Station Commander Dan Burbank captured spectacular imagery of Comet Lovejoy, viewed from about 240 miles above the Earth’s horizon on Wednesday, Dec. 21.
Today Burbank described seeing the comet as “the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space,” in an interview with WDIV-TV in Detroit. Burbank took hundreds of still images of the comet.
NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface, but they are the smallest exoplanets ever confirmed around a star like our sun.
Sky watchers on the Pacific side of Earth should be alert for a total lunar eclipse today. The disk of the full Moon will turn a beautiful shade of copper-red as it passes through Earth’s shadow between 4:45 am and 8:18 am Pacific Standard Time (12:45 to 16:18 UT). For observers in western parts of the USA and Canada, the … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spent the last four years voyaging to asteroid Vesta – and may have found a planet.
Vesta was discovered over two hundred years ago but, until Dawn, has been seen only as an indistinct blur and considered little more than a large, rocky body. Now the spacecraft’s instruments are revealing the true complexity of this ancient world.… Read the rest of this article
RadioAstron, effectively the largest radio telescope ever built, is up and running.
The telescope’s main component, a 10-metre radio dish aboard the spacecraft Spectr-R, launched in July to an oblong orbit that extends between 10,000 and more than 300,000 kilometres from Earth.
By coordinating observations with radio telescopes on Earth in a technique called … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found bright veins of a mineral, apparently gypsum, deposited by water. Analysis of the vein will help improve understanding of the history of wet environments on Mars.
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The vein is about the width of a thumb and about 18 inches long. Opportunity examined it and found it rich in calcium and sulphur, possibly the …
ESA’s Gaia star-mapper has passed a critical test ahead of its launch in 2013: the spacecraft’s sunshield has been deployed for the first time.
Gaia’s sunshield is an essential component of the mission. It keeps Gaia in shadow, maintaining the scientific instruments at a constant temperature of around –110°C.
The Camtasia Studio video content presented here requires a more recent … Read the rest of this article
Nearly 130 years ago , the premier event in astrophysics involved watching a tiny dot slowly sail across the surface of the sun. That dot was our sister planet, Venus, and observing its transit as it passed directly between the Earth and sun was a momentous scientific undertaking.
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This image comes from 1882, when astronomers were very keen to make …
The Sun Now (Visible light)
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
(Northern Hemisphere) |
Aurora Oval
(Southern Hemisphere) |
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