Posted on by Fraser Cain

Weekly Space Hangout – May 6, 2016: Paul Reichert – Photography in Space!

Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain)

Special Guest:
Paul Reichert is a Photo Instructor, NASA Johnson Space Center; International Space Station Mission Lead and Astronaut Technical Imaging Instructor (LM); Project lead for crew imaging operations on the International Space Station. Imaging operations for the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle.

Guests:
Paul M. Sutter (pmsutter.com / @PaulMattSutter)
Morgan Rehnberg (MorganRehnberg.com / @MorganRehnberg)
Kimberly Cartier (@AstroKimCartier )
Dave Dickinson (www.astroguyz.com / @astroguyz)

Their stories this week:
Comet X1 PanSTARRS

This Week in Musk

New details on ultra-luminous x-ray sources

Three potentially habitable worlds discovered around nearby star

ExoMars Phase 2 delayed to 2020

We’ve had an abundance of news stories for the past few months, and not enough time to get to them all. So we’ve started a new system. Instead of adding all of the stories to the spreadsheet each week, we are now using a tool called Trello to submit and vote on stories we would like to see covered each week, and then Fraser will be selecting the stories from there. Here is the link to the Trello WSH page (http://bit.ly/WSHVote), which you can see without logging in. If you’d like to vote, just create a login and help us decide what to cover!

We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Friday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Google+, Universe Today, or the Universe Today YouTube page.

You can also join in the discussion between episodes over at our Weekly Space Hangout Crew group in G+!

Posted on by David Dickinson

A Summer Comet: Our Guide to Observing X1 PanSTARRS

Comet X1 PanSTARRS
Comet C/2013 X1 PanSTARRS from early January 2016, shortly after a reported outburst. Image credit and copyright: Hisayoshi Kato.

Ready for one of the better binocular comets of 2016? Emerging from behind the Sun and a surprise outburst in January, Comet C/2013 X1 PanSTARRS is about to put on its summer show. The waning crescent Moon just crossed paths with the comet in the dawn sky on its way to New on May 6th, and the time to start tracking it is now as it plunges southward across the ecliptic this weekend. Continue reading “A Summer Comet: Our Guide to Observing X1 PanSTARRS”

Posted on by David Dickinson

The Top 101 Astronomical Events for 2016

Camping out under dark skies. Image credit and copyright: Michelle Nixon/MNixon Photography

Here it is… our year end look at upcoming events in a sky near you. We’ve been doing this “blog post that takes four months to write” now on one platform or another every year since 2009, and every year, it gets bigger and more diverse, thanks to reader input. This is not a top 10 listicle, and not a full-fledged almanac, but hopefully, something special and unique in between. And as always, some of the events listed will be seen by a large swath of humanity, while others grace the hinterlands and may well go unrecorded by human eyes. We’ll explain our reasoning for drilling down each category, and give a handy list of resources at the end.

Click on any of the graphics included for the top events for each month to enlarge.

Continue reading “The Top 101 Astronomical Events for 2016”