What's in the sky tonight?
April 28, 2013
-The classic small-scope binary star Gamma Virginis, or Porrima, shines upper right of Spica, 14° from it (about a fist and a half at arm's length) these evenings. Porrima's two equal components were almost unresolvably close together for much of the last decade, but this spring they've widened to 2 arcseconds apart. Use high power.
-Venus (magnitude –3.9) is just beginning an evening apparition that will continue for the rest of the year. How soon can you first pick it up? Use binoculars to look for Venus a mere 15 or 20 minutes after sunset, barely above the west-northwest horizon. It's far to the lower right of Jupiter for viewers at mid-northern latitudes.
Astro Picture of the Day:
April 28, 2013
Source
It was one of the largest and longest lived storms ever recorded in our Solar System. First seen in late 2010, the above cloud formation in the northern hemisphere of Saturn started larger than the Earth and soon spread completely around the planet. The storm was tracked not only from Earth but from up close by the robotic Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn. Pictured above in false colored infrared in February, orange colors indicate clouds deep in the atmosphere, while light colors highlight clouds higher up. The rings of Saturn are seen nearly edge-on as the thin blue horizontal line. The warped dark bands are the shadows of the rings cast onto the cloud tops by the Sun to the upper left. A source of radio noise from lightning, the intense storm was thought to relate to seasonal changes when spring emerges in the north of Saturn. After raging for over six months, the iconic storm circled the entire planet and then tried to absorb its own tail - which surprisingly caused it to fade away.
This set of images from NASA's Cassini mission shows the evolution of a massive thunder-and-lightning storm that circled all the way around Saturn and fizzled when it ran into its own tail. The storm was first detected on Dec. 5, 2010.
