Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
July 5, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
July 5, 2014
-First-quarter Moon. The half-lit Moon is quite close to Mars as seen from North America. The Moon occults (hides) Mars during daylight for Hawaii and at dusk or night in parts of Latin America.
-The two most massive objects in the asteroid belt, dwarf planet Ceres and minor planet Vesta, are converging for a close encounter in the night sky on July 4th and 5th. Last night in Italy, Gianluca Masi used a remotely operated telescope to photograph the monster asteroids only 13 arcminutes apart--less than half the width of a full Moon. The line splitting the two is a terrestrial satellite.
At closest approach on July 5th, the two asteroids will be only 10 arcminutes apart in the constellation Virgo. They are too dim to see with the unaided eye, but easy targets for binoculars and small telescopes. Observing tips are available from Sky and Telescope.
Got clouds? You can watch the close encounter online. Choose between Gianluca Masi's Virtual Telescope Project (which begins July 5th at 4:00 p.m. EDT) or Slooh's webcast (July 3rd at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time).
Virtual Telescope Project:
http://www.virtualtelescope.eu/2014/...n-5-july-2014/
Slooh:
http://live.slooh.com/
Quite near the two asteroids on the sky, though utterly invisible, is NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Dawn recently finished visiting Vesta and is now en route to Ceres. The ion-propelled spacecraft will enter orbit around Ceres next March. Cameras on Dawn will resolve the pinprick of light you see this weekend into a full-fledged world of unknown wonders. Stay tuned for that!
Astro Picture of the Day:
July 5, 2014
Source:
The spiral arms of bright, active galaxy M106 sprawl through this remarkable multiwavelength portrait, composed of image data from radio to X-rays, across the electromagnetic spectrum. Also known as NGC 4258, M106 can be found toward the northern constellation Canes Venatici. The well-measured distance to M106 is 23.5 million light-years, making this cosmic scene about 60,000 light-years across. Typical in grand spiral galaxies, dark dust lanes, youthful star clusters, and star forming regions trace spiral arms that converge on a bright nucleus. But this composite highlights two anomalous arms in radio (purple) and X-ray (blue) that seem to arise in the central region of M106, evidence of energetic jets of material blasting into the galaxy's disk. The jets are likely powered by matter falling into a massive central black hole.