This line of stars is real. A little too faint to see with the unaided eye, Kemble’s Cascade of stars inspires awe when seen with binoculars. Like the Big Dipper though, Kemble’s Cascade is an asterism, not a constellation. The asterism is visible in the northern sky toward the long-necked constellation of the Giraffe (Camelopardalis). […]
Look up tonight and see a whole bunch of planets. Just after sunset, looking west, planets Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars will all be simultaneously visible. Listed west to east, this planetary lineup will have Venus nearest the horizon, but setting shortly after the Sun. It doesn’t matter where on Earth you live because this […]
There, that dot on the right, that’s the largest rock known in our Solar System. It is larger than every known asteroid, moon, and comet nucleus. It is larger than any other local rocky planet. This rock is so large its gravity makes it into a large ball that holds heavy gases near its surface. […]
Makemake (sounds like MAH-kay MAH-kay), second brightest dwarf planet of the Kuiper belt, has a moon. Nicknamed MK2, Makemake’s moon reflects sunlight with a charcoal-dark surface, about 1,300 times fainter than its parent body. Still, in 2016 it was spotted in Hubble Space Telescope observations intended to search for faint companions with the same technique […]
At year’s end, Mars still shines bright, In Taurus, headstrong and right, Its yellow hue in the night, Dominates view with all its might. Aldebaran and Hyades, too, Pleiades, a star cluster true, Red giant Aldebaran at the left, But not a member, a surprise bereft. Hyades cluster far away, But Aldebaran’s distance, half that […]
This image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft’s HIRISE instrument on Oct. 23, 2022, of the northern plains of Arabia Terra shows craters that contain curious deposits with mysterious shapes and distribution. via NASA https://ift.tt/18zZFTK
The Horsehead Nebula, famous celestial dark marking also known as Barnard 33, is notched against a background glow of emission nebulae in this sharp cosmic skyscape. About five light-years “tall” the Horsehead lies some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Orion. Within the region’s fertile molecular cloud complex, the expanse of obscuring dust has […]
Charles Messier described the eighty-eight As a spiral nebula, stars unseen But we now know it’s a galaxy bright Filled with stars, gas, and dust in flight M88 is located in the Virgo cluster Some fifty million light-years away, in muster Its spiral arms, blue and young, are easy to trace With pink regions forming […]
The James Webb Space Telescope spies the spiral galaxy NGC 7469, located 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus, in this image released on Dec. 21, 2022. via NASA https://ift.tt/gkYwQs6
Have you ever seen an entire rainbow? From the ground, typically, only the top portion of a rainbow is visible because directions toward the ground have fewer raindrops. From the air, though, the entire 360-degree circle of a rainbow is more commonly visible. Pictured here, a full-circle rainbow was captured over the Lofoten Islands of […]