The answer to this week's Where In The Universe challenge is now available back on the original post. Check it out! And happy 4th of July holiday weekend to everyone in the US!
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Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Are you ready for a Moon-filled weekend? Then let's have a look a some great lunar features as we race Mad Max to the "Megadome"! For some lucky viewers in Japan and Hawaii, there will be an occultation of Antares to enjoy. How about some great double stars… Or a chance to see if you can spot a penumbral lunar eclipse? Then follow me out to the backyard. The stars are waiting… Click to continue…
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Courtesy of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Astronomers working with the Subaru Telescope have released these new images of a "fireworks display" in a near-infrared image of the Helix Nebula, showing comet-shaped knots within.
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This mosaic assembled from Phoenix images show the spacecraft's three landing legs. Splotches of Martian material on the landing leg strut at left could be liquid saline-water. Click for larger version on Spaceflightnow. com Credit: Kenneth Kremer, Marco Di Lorenzo, NASA/JPL/UA/Max Planck Institute and Spaceflightnow.com. Used by permission
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Woohoo! NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken its first images of the Moon! There are two cameras on board which combine to create the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC. They were both activated June 30, and their "first light" images were of a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds).
"Our first images were taken along the moon's terminator — the dividing line between day and night — making us initially unsure of how they would turn out," said LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. "Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts safely explored in 1972. While these are magnificent in their own right, the main message is that LROC is nearly ready to begin its mission."
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For the first time, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted a new group of pulsars using only their gamma-ray emissions, in the absence of radio signals beamed to Earth. The 16 new objects are reported in this week's edition of Science Express, in a study based out of the University of California in Santa Cruz.
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It snows on Mars. This occurs, at least in the northern arctic region where the Phoenix lander set up camp in 2008. Science teams from Phoenix were able to observe water-ice clouds in the Martian atmosphere and precipitation that fell to the ground at night and sublimate into water in the morning. James Whiteway and his colleagues say that clouds and precipitation on Mars play a role in the exchange of water between the ground and the atmosphere and when conditions are right, snow falls regularly on Mars.
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When the giant radio galaxy Messier 87 (M 87) unleashed a torrent of gamma radiation and radio flux, an international collaboration of 390 scientists happened to be watching. They're reporting the discovery in this week's issue of Science Express.
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Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have intentionally driven their engineering rover into soft soil in a sandbox testbed, to simulate how the Spirit rover is stuck on Mars. And they did a good job of it, too, as the test rover, called SSTB1, is stuck, as well, with its wheels spinning and going nowhere. The science team has confirmed a rock on Mars, underneath Spirit is touching the underside of the rover, so engineers have placed a similar looking rock in the test sandbox, as seen above.
"We want to experiment with different extraction techniques down here on Earth before we actually do them for real on Mars," said John Callas, project manager for the Mars rovers. "Our expectation is that it will some time to get Spirit out, so we will be able to get a better feel for that here in this facility to see how well the techniques work and how long it will take for them to work."
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Mike Massimino, AKA Astro_Mike on Twitter, works on his computer during the STS-125 mission. Credit: NASA
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Ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Here's #60! Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.
UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. Don't peek before you make your guess!
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It's the Goldilocks variety of black holes: not too big and not too small.
The new source HLX-1, the light blue object to the top left of the galactic bulge, is the ambassador for a new class of black holes, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun. It lies on the periphery of the edge-on spiral galaxy ESO 243-49, about 290 million light years from Earth.
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All you galactic hitchhikers take note: a new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way was released today, showing thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust — the potential birthplaces of new stars. This new map of the home galaxy was made using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, showing the Milky Way in submillitere wavelengths. “ATLASGAL gives us a new look at the Milky Way. Not only will it help us investigate how massive stars form, but it will also give us an overview of the larger-scale structure of our galaxy”, said Frederic Schuller from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, leader of the ATLASGAL team.
So, grab your towels and let's head out!
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For criminy's sake, I just got one of those "Mars as big as the full Moon in August" emails. For one more time: this is completely false and it couldn't possibly happen. Besides, in 2009 Mars is all but unobservable until the end of the year, and even next year it won't be much better. So can we please see an end to these erroneous emails???
But Mars is coming closer to Earth (it happens like clockwork every 26 months) and the folks at Emory University have created a real-time distance calculator that shows Mars' geocentric distance from us. It's really fun to see how quickly Mars is coming closer to Earth (but pleeeeease it is not going to look as big the full Moon!!!) The distance is calculated in miles (sorry rest of the world) and shows up in blue when Mars is approaching and red when Mars begins to move farther from Earth. Very fun!
And if you need to know why Mars will not look as big as the full moon, see below.
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I'm always amazed at what you can find on You Tube. Type "UFO" in the search panel, and you get all sorts of wacky stuff. But this one is really quite cool. It's called the X-Jet and was created by the US Air Force. It is kind of like your own personal flying Segway. For everyone who has wondered where the flying cars are, here's your answer.
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