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| Image credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF |
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| What's Up This Week - Nov 22 - 28, 2004 |
Nov 22, 2004 - Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! For those of you who like observing challenges, this week will provide many interesting opportunities to view occultations of bright stars by asteroids as well as three observable comets. We will explore lunar features for both binoculars and telescopes and look into "The Eye of the Bull". Although the Moon goes full this week, we can still have fun by learning to observe satellite passes and even chase the ISS! We will begin an in-depth look at the constellation of Cassiopeia by viewing and discussing some of its bright double stars and a galactic cluster. Just as predictable as the morning planets, there's always something fun to do, a bit of history and things to learn. So open your eyes...
Because here's what's up! (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Scaled |
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| Private Spaceflight Legislation Passes |
| Nov 22, 2004 - The US House of Representatives approved legislation on Saturday that would make regulations easier for companies looking to provide rides on private spacecraft. The vote for HR 5382 passed 269-120, which allows it to now go on for Senate approval, and finally to be signed by the President. This bill would streamline space tourism, allowing passengers to fly at their own risk, instead of forcing operators to take on excessive risk and insurance. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Chandra |
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| Supermassive Black Holes Early On |
| Nov 22, 2004 - Astronomers now believe that all large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their centre, but it was believed that these black holes formed after the galaxy. The evidence is starting to point the other way, that these black holes formed soon after the Big Bang, and then the galaxies built up around them. New observations from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory show a distant quasar that formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, and was already producing the same amount of energy as twenty trillion Suns. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Rhea Shows Off a Big Impact |
| Nov 22, 2004 - Cassini took this image of Rhea, Saturn's second largest moon, on October 24, 2004 when it was about 1.7 million km (1 million miles) away. The photo clearly shows a bright bright impact crater near its eastern limb. Cassini will get another view of Rhea in January 2005 - but with 10 times better resolution - just after it releases the Huygens probe which will land on Titan. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Boeing |
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| Swift Launches to Search for Cosmic Explosions |
| Nov 20, 2004 - After several days of delays, NASA's Swift observatory was finally launched Saturday at 1716 UTC (12:16 pm EST) atop a Boeing Delta II rocket. Swift's job will be to scan the heavens for elusive Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs), which astronomers think could be the birth cries of new black holes. GRBs are short-lived, lasting only seconds - a few minutes at most. Swift can locate an explosion, and turn the entire spacecraft in about a minute to focus sensitive instruments on the fading afterglow. If everything works as planned, the spacecraft should be able to find more than 100 of these explosions every year. (Full Story) |
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