The Old Astronomer’s Milky Way arcs through this peaceful northern sky. Against faint, diffuse starlight you can follow dark rifts of interstellar dust clouds stretching from the galaxy’s core. They lead toward bright star Antares at the right, almost due south above the horizon. The brightest beacon in the twilight is Jupiter, though. From the […]
Hitching a ride on the Mars Pathfinder mission, the Sojourner rover arrived on Mars on July 4, 1997. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-6Zr
On June 26, 2020, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Chris Cassidy conducted the first of two spacewalks to swap batteries and upgrade power systems on the International Space Station. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-6Zp
Has your world ever turned upside-down? It would happen every day if you stay fixed to the stars. Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show the stars and sky moving above a steady Earth. Here, however, the camera has been forced to rotate so that the stars remain fixed, and the Earth rotates around […]
June 30 is Asteroid Day. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-6Yn
What created this unusual planetary nebula? NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in […]
Spacewalkers Bob Behnken (left) and Chris Cassidy (right) in the Quest Airlock on June 26, 2020, before beginning a spacewalk to replace batteries on one of two power channels on the International Space Station. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-6X8
When the lake calmed down, many wonders of the land and sky appeared twice. Perhaps the most dramatic from the dark sky was the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, visible as a diagonal band. Toward the right were both the Small (SMC) and Large (LMC) Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of our Milky Way. […]
What are those spots on Jupiter? Largest and furthest, just right of center, is the Great Red Spot — a huge storm system that has been raging on Jupiter possibly since Giovanni Cassini’s likely notation of it 355 years ago. It is not yet known why this Great Spot is red. The spot toward the […]
The dark shadow of the New Moon reached out and touched planet Earth on June 21. A high definition camera outside the International Space Station captured its passing in this snapshot from low Earth orbit near the border of Kazakhstan and China. Of course those along the Moon’s central shadow track below could watch the […]