Venus and Jupiter may have caught your attention lately. The impending close conjunction of the two brightest planets visible in clear evening skies has been hard to miss. With Jupiter at the top, starting on February 21 and ending on March 2, their close approach is chronicled daily, left to right, in these panels recorded […]
A NASA ER-2 high-altitude aircraft soars upward at the L.A. county airshow in this image from Mar. 25, 2023. via NASA https://ift.tt/mtiY8xf
In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism. That part of the sky is identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts. The new star was visible to the naked-eye for months, and is now thought to be the earliest recorded supernova. This deep telescopic […]
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carries the company’s Dragon spacecraft with NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission members aboard in this five-minute long exposure taken on Thursday, March 2, 2023. via NASA https://ift.tt/US6gxJH
Spiral galaxy NGC 3169 looks to be unraveling like a ball of cosmic yarn. It lies some 70 million light-years away, south of bright star Regulus toward the faint constellation Sextans. Wound up spiral arms are pulled out into sweeping tidal tails as NGC 3169 (left) and neighboring NGC 3166 interact gravitationally. Eventually the galaxies […]
Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly snapped this photo of the Earth’s crescent, the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter (from top to bottom) on Aug. 6, 2015, while he was aboard the International Space Station. via NASA https://ift.tt/0WXmKk6
Is star AE Aurigae on fire? No. Even though AE Aurigae is named the Flaming Star and the surrounding nebula IC 405 is named the Flaming Star Nebula, and even though the nebula appears to some like a swirling flame, there is no fire. Fire, typically defined as the rapid molecular acquisition of oxygen, happens […]
Why is a thin crescent moon never seen far from a horizon? Because the only geometry that gives a thin crescent lunar phase occurs when the Moon appears close to the Sun in the sky. The crescent is not caused by the shadow of the Earth, but by seeing only a small part of the […]
What’s causing that unusual ray of light extending from the horizon? Dust orbiting the Sun. At certain times of the year, a band of sun-reflecting dust from the inner Solar System appears prominently after sunset or before sunrise and is called zodiacal light. The dust was emitted mostly from faint Jupiter-family comets and slowly spirals […]
What would make a moon look like a walnut? A strange ridge that circles Saturn’s moon Iapetus’s equator, visible near the bottom of the featured image, makes it appear similar to a popular edible nut. The origin of the ridge remains unknown, though, with hypotheses including ice that welled up from below, a ring that […]