What's in the sky tonight?
November 21, 2012
-Algol is at minimum light again, for a couple hours centered on 7:34 p.m. EST. Algol takes several additional hours to rebrighten.
-Venus (magnitude –3.9, in Virgo) rises in the east an hour before the first glimmer of dawn. By dawn it's shining brightly in the east-southeast, as shown above.
Look for much-fainter Saturn lower left of Venus, and Spica to Venus's right or upper right.
Astro Picture of the Day:
November 21, 2012
Source:
As the total phase of last week's solar eclipse came to an end, sunlight streaming past the edge of the Moon created the fleeting appearance of a glistening diamond ring in the sky. And while most eclipse watchers did not consider clouds a welcome sight, a view through thin clouds north of Cairns in Queensland, Australia also revealed these remarkable flickering shadow bands. Projected onto the cloud layer, the bands are parallel to the sliver of emerging sunlight. Caused by turbulence in Earth's atmosphere refracting the sliver of sunlight, the narrow bands were captured in this brief, 1/1000th second exposure.