Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
August 2, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
August 2, 2014
-The Moon shines about midway between Spica and Mars this evening, as shown below (plotted for the middle of North America).
-This weekend, Jupiter and Mercury are in conjunction. Don't bother looking because the meeting takes place in the noontime sky. What human eyes cannot see, however, spacecraft can. Using an opaque disk to block the glare of the sun, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is monitoring the encounter. At closest approach on August 2nd, the two bright planets will be less than 1o apart. If such an alignment occured at night, it would surely be headline news. At noon, its just spaceweather news.
Astro Picture of the Day:
August 2, 2014
Source:
These clouds of interstellar dust and gas have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile star fields of the constellation Cepheus. Sometimes called the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023 is not the only nebula in the sky to evoke the imagery of flowers, though. Still, this deep telescopic view shows off the Iris Nebula's range of colors and symmetries in impressive detail. Within the Iris, dusty nebular material surrounds a hot, young star. The dominant color of the brighter reflection nebula is blue, characteristic of dust grains reflecting starlight. Central filaments of the dusty clouds glow with a faint reddish photoluminesence as some dust grains effectively convert the star's invisible ultraviolet radiation to visible red light. Infrared observations indicate that this nebula may contain complex carbon molecules known as PAHs. The pretty blue petals of the Iris Nebula span about six light-years.