Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is now visible in the early morning sky. Diving into the inner Solar System at an odd angle, this large dirty iceberg will pass its closest to the Sun — between the orbits of Mercury and Venus — in just two days. Long camera exposures are now capturing C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS), sometimes abbreviated […]
STS-128 mission specialist José Hernández waits his turn to enter space shuttle Discovery at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the background are mission specialists Patrick Forrester (left) and Christer Fuglesang (back to camera). via NASA https://ift.tt/dgrWjqf
This dusty region is forming stars. Part of a sprawling molecular cloud complex that resembles, to some, a rampaging baboon, the region is a relatively close by 500 light-years away toward the constellation Corona Australis. That’s about one third the distance of the more famous stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. Mixed with bright […]
NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson is seen smiling and holding a gifted matryoshka doll outside the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft after she landed with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. Dyson is returning to Earth after logging 184 days in […]
What will happen as this already bright comet approaches? Optimistic predictions have Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) briefly becoming easily visible to the unaided eye — although the future brightness of comets are notoriously hard to predict, and this comet may even break up in warming sunlight. What is certain is that the comet is now […]
Chicago, in a way, is like a modern Stonehenge. The way is east to west, and the time is today. Today, and every equinox, the Sun will set exactly to the west, everywhere on Earth. Therefore, today in Chicago, the Sun will set directly down the long equatorially-aligned grid of streets and buildings, an event […]
The defining astronomical moment of this September’s equinox is at 12:44 UTC on September 22, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator moving south in its yearly journey through planet Earth’s sky. That marks the beginning of fall for our fair planet in the northern hemisphere and spring in the southern hemisphere, when day and […]
Joylette Hylick, left, and Katherine Moore, daughters of Katherine Johnson, accept the Congressional Gold Medal on behalf of Katherine Johnson from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) during a ceremony recognizing NASA’s Hidden Figures, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. via NASA https://ift.tt/szq32MF
For northern hemisphere dwellers, September’s Full Moon was the Harvest Moon. On September 17/18 the sunlit lunar nearside passed into shadow, just grazing Earth’s umbra, the planet’s dark, central shadow cone, in a partial lunar eclipse. Over the two and half hours before dawn a camera fixed to a tripod was used to record this […]
Spanning light-years, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula floats in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, dark nebula is part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 […]