Famed in festival, story, and song the best known full moon is the Harvest Moon. For northern hemisphere dwellers that’s a traditional name of the full moon nearest the September equinox. Seen from Saunderstown, Rhode Island, planet Earth, this Harvest Moon left a broad streak of warm hues as it rose through a twilight sky […]
Lucy will be the first space mission to study the Trojan asteroids. via NASA https://ift.tt/3hY2k9t
When does the line between night and day become vertical? Today. Today is an equinox on planet Earth, a time of year when day and night are most nearly equal. At an equinox, the Earth’s terminator — the dividing line between day and night — becomes vertical and connects the north and south poles. The […]
Space Station Commander Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency conducts research using DNA sequencing. via NASA https://ift.tt/3lQMTkS
Is this giant orange ball about to roll down that tree-lined hill? No, because the giant orange ball is actually the Sun. Our Solar System’s central star was captured rising beyond a hill on Earth twelve days ago complete with a delightfully detailed foreground. The Sun’s disk showed five sunspots, quite a lot considering that […]
Acquired by the Landsat 7 satellite more than 20 years ago on Sept. 3, 2000, this image is of Greenland’s western coast. via NASA https://ift.tt/39kwvD9
Stars are forming in Lynds Dark Nebula (LDN) 1251. About 1,000 light-years away and drifting above the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, the dusty molecular cloud is part of a complex of dark nebulae mapped toward the Cepheus flare region. Across the spectrum, astronomical explorations of the obscuring interstellar clouds reveal energetic shocks and […]
On Saturn, the rings tell you the season. On Earth, Wednesday marks an equinox, the time when the Earth’s equator tilts directly toward the Sun. Since Saturn’s grand rings orbit along the planet’s equator, these rings appear most prominent — from the direction of the Sun — when the spin axis of Saturn points toward […]
In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp focus beyond is UGC 2885, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant. Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way’s diameter of […]
There has been a flash on Jupiter. A few days ago, several groups monitoring our Solar System’s largest planet noticed a two-second long burst of light. Such flashes have been seen before, with the most famous being a series of impactor strikes in 1994. Then, fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter leaving dark patches […]