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 […]
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy IC 4709 located around 240 million light-years away in the southern constellation Telescopium. Hubble beautifully captures its faint halo and swirling disk filled with stars and dust bands. via NASA https://ift.tt/1tkCeag
New stars are born from the remnants of deadstars. The gaseous remnant of the gravitational collapse and subsequent death of a very massive star in our Milky Way created the G296.5+10.0supernova remnant, of which the featured Mermaid Nebula is part. Also known as the Betta Fish Nebula, the Mermaid Nebula makes up part of an […]
“I would say family and part of that ‘first-gen experience’ [shaped me]…It shaped me to be a hard worker and to aspire to large things because not only was it my goal at this point, but it was also my parents’ aspiration.” – Zaida Hernandez, Engineer, Lunar Architecture Team, NASA’s Johnson Space Center via NASA […]
Cosmic clouds form fantastic shapes in the central regions of emission nebula IC 1805. The clouds are sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from massive hot stars in the nebula’s newborn star cluster, Melotte 15. About 1.5 million years young, the cluster stars are scattered in this colorful skyscape, along with dark dust clouds in […]