Congratulations Team Canada on the gold medal this morning ##
Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
February 23, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
February 23, 2014
-The asteroid 2 Pallas, barely past opposition, is a few degrees southeast of Alphard in Hydra. It remains at magnitude 7.0 all week as it creeps northward, visible in binoculars and small telescopes.
-NOAA forecasters estimate a 50% chance of minor geomagnetic storms on Sunday, Feb. 23rd, in response to glancing blows from one or two incoming CMEs. Arctic sky watchers should remain alert for auroras.
-On the night of Feb. 20/21, photographer Dennis Mammana was stationed on Pedro Dome near Fairbanks, Alaska, in hopes of recording the Northern Lights. "I caught this instead—a tiny and bright cloud that rose from the western sky and spread slightly and faded over an hour or so," says Mammana. Here is a composite of two of his shots. The cloud resembles a rocket fuel dump. Scientists from the University of Alaska frequently launch rockets from the nearby Poker Flat Research Range to study auroras. But on this night there were no rocket launches on Poker Flat. There was, however, a launch thousands of miles away. A Delta 4 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a GPS satellite.
Veteran satellite watcher Marco Langbroek says this is it: "The mystery object on the Mammana photo from Pedro Dome near Fairbanks, Alaska, is a fuel vent from the Feb 20 launch of GPS 2F-05 (USA 248, 20114-008A, #39533). Although the satellite is in an orbit with a 54.98 degree inclination, that does not mean it was not visible from Mammana's location at 65N," he continues. "It is in a very high orbit and was at an altitude of over 20,000 km at that moment. At such an altitude it is visible from 65 N, low in the west in this case."
The attached sky map prepared by Langbroek shows the position of the satellite (labeled "Object A") in the sky above Alaska at the time Mammana photographed the cloud. The sky map and the photo are a good match.
News Posted Today:
February 21, 2014
Mapping a Supernova's Radioactive Glow
Astro Picture of the Day:
February 23, 2014
Source:
If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn's "appendages" disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn's unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear. This is because Saturn's rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade. In modern times, the robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn now also crosses Saturn's ring plane. A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro. Pictured above, digitally cropped and set in representative colors, is the striking result. Saturn's thin ring plane appears in blue, bands and clouds in Saturn's upper atmosphere appear in gold. Details of Saturn's rings can be seen in the high dark shadows across the top of this image, taken back in 2005. Moons appear as bumps in the rings.