Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
July 17, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
July 17, 2014
-The Big Dipper, high in the northwest after dark, is beginning to turning around to "scoop up water" through the nights of summer and early fall.
-The waning Moon, nearly at last quarter, rises around 11 or midnight and climbs high in the early-morning hours. Far in its background is Uranus, magnitude 5.8.
-The European Space Agency's Rosetta probe is now less than 10,000 km from its target: 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta is expected to reach and begin orbiting the comet's nucleus on August 6th. Long-range images suggest that the comet is a contact binary. This could present some interesting challenges for Philae, the probe's lander, which is slated to touch down on the comet's surface in early November.
A contact binary occurs when two celestial objects, such as asteroids or comets, slowly move towards each other until they are touching.
The slow approach of the two means they will form a single-oddly shaped body, rather than rebounding of one another.
Nine near-Earth objects are known to be contact binaries.
However, it is estimated that as many as 15 per cent of all near-Earth asteroids more than 650 feet (200 metres) in size are actually contact binaries.
Astro Picture of the Day:
July 17, 2014
Source:
If you're looking for something to print with that new 3D printer, try out a copy of the Homunculus Nebula. The dusty, bipolar cosmic cloud is around 1 light-year across but is slightly scaled down for printing to about 1/4 light-nanosecond or 80 millimeters. The full scale Homunculus surrounds Eta Carinae, famously unstable massive stars in a binary system embedded in the extensive Carina Nebula about 7,500 light-years distant. Between 1838 and 1845, Eta Carinae underwent the Great Eruption becoming the second brightest star in planet Earth's night sky and ejecting the Homunculus Nebula. The new 3D model of the still expanding Homunculus was created by exploring the nebula with the European Southern Observatory's VLT/X-Shooter. That instrument is capable of mapping the velocity of molecular hydrogen gas through the nebula's dust at a fine resolution. It reveals trenches, divots and protrusions, even in the dust obscured regions that face away from Earth. Eta Carinae itself still undergoes violent outbursts, a candidate to explode in a spectacular supernova in the next few million years.