Terry's Astronomy Thread.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
March 22, 2013

-Now that spring is here, Orion is in the southwest after dark and leaning over to slide soon down to the horizon. Orion's three-star belt is turning nearly horizontal. He is framed by the two brightest starlike points in the sky: Jupiter off to his right and Sirius to his left.

-As the Moon waxes toward full, it walks between Leo and mostly-dim Hydra.

Astro Picture of the Day:
March 22, 2013

Source:
The broad dust tail of Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) has become a familiar sight for many northern hemisphere comet watchers, as the comet fades but rises higher above the western horizon after sunset. This view of the popular comet may seem a little fantastic, though. Sweeping away from the Sun and trailing behind the comet's orbit, the curving dust tail also seems to stream away from a shining mountaintop castle. Comet Castle might be an appropriate name in this scene, but its traditional name is Castle Hohenzollern. Taken on March 15 with an extreme telephoto lens, the Comet Castle image was captured in exceptionally clear skies about 80 kilometers away from Stuttgart, Germany.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
March 23, 2013

-Mercury (brightening from magnitude +0.6 to +0.2 this week) is having a poor apparition very low in the dawn. Use binoculars to scan for it just above the east-southeast horizon about 30 minutes before sunrise.

-Left of the Moon this evening are Regulus and the Sickle of Leo, as shown here. Farther lower right of the Moon is Alphard, the heart of Hydra. To the right or upper right of the Moon, can you make out Hydra's dim head?

News Posted Today:
March 21, 2013
Planck: Best Map Yet of Cosmic Creation


Astro Picture of the Day:
March 23, 2013

Source:
Cosmic dust clouds ripple across this infrared portrait of our Milky Way's satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In fact, the remarkable composite image from the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope show that dust clouds fill this neighboring dwarf galaxy, much like dust along the plane of the Milky Way itself. The dust temperatures tend to trace star forming activity. Spitzer data in blue hues indicate warm dust heated by young stars. Herschel's instruments contributed the image data shown in red and green, revealing dust emission from cooler and intermediate regions where star formation is just beginning or has stopped. Dominated by dust emission, the Large Magellanic Cloud's infrared appearance is different from views in optical images. But this galaxy's well-known Tarantula Nebula still stands out, easily seen here as the brightest region to the left of center. A mere 160,000 light-years distant, the Large Cloud of Magellan is about 30,000 light-years across.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
March 24, 2013

-Look above the Moon this evening for Regulus. It's the bottom star of the Sickle of Leo.

-Saturn (magnitude +0.3, in Libra) rises in the east-southeast only about an hour after the end of twilight now. Watch for it to make its appearance well to the lower left of Spica, and farther to the lower right of brighter Arcturus. Saturn shines highest in the south around 3 a.m. daylight saving time — more or less between Spica to its right, and Delta Scorpii and than Antares farther to its lower left. Saturn will come to opposition on the night of April 27th.

News Posted Today:
March 23, 2013
Curiosity Wades Into Mudstone and More


Astro Picture of the Day:
March 24, 2013

Source:
Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The monster, actually an inanimate pillar of gas and dust, measures over a light year in length. The star, not itself visible through the opaque dust, is bursting out partly by ejecting energetic beams of particles. Similar epic battles are being waged all over the star-forming Carina Nebula (NGC 3372). The stars will win in the end, destroying their pillars of creation over the next 100,000 years, and resulting in a new open cluster of stars. The pink dots are newly formed stars that have already been freed from their birth monster. The above image is only a small part of a highly detailed panoramic mosaic of the Carina Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007. The technical name for the stellar jets are Herbig-Haro objects. How a star creates Herbig-Haro jets is an ongoing topic of research, but it likely involves an accretion disk swirling around a central star. A second impressive Herbig-Haro jet is visible across the bottom.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
March 25, 2013

-Look northwest right after dark for W-shaped Cassiopeia standing on end. The brightest part of the W is on the bottom.

-Jupiter (magnitude –2.1, in Taurus) comes into view high in the west after sunset, then descends as night grows late. Lower left of Jupiter is orange Aldebaran. Farther to Jupiter's lower right are the Pleiades. They all set in the west-northwest around the middle of the night.

-Jupiter is not as bright as it used to be, and in a telescope it has shrunk to 36 arcseconds wide – from 48" around its opposition last December.

Astro Picture of the Day:
March 25, 2013

Source:
What is our universe made of? To help find out, ESA launched the Planck satellite to map, in unprecedented detail, slight temperature differences on the oldest surface known - the background sky left billions of years ago when our universe first became transparent to light. Visible in all directions, this cosmic microwave background is a complex tapestry that could only show the hot and cold patterns observed were the universe to be composed of specific types of energy that evolved in specific ways. The results, reported last week, confirm again that most of our universe is mostly composed of mysterious and unfamiliar dark energy, and that even most of the remaining matter energy is strangely dark. Additionally, Planck data impressively peg the age of the universe at about 13.81 billion years, slightly older than that estimated by various other means including NASA's WMAP satellite, and the expansion rate at 67.3 (+/- 1.2) km/sec/Mpc, slightly lower than previous estimates. Some features of the above sky map remain unknown, such as why the temperature fluctuations seem to be slightly greater on one half of the sky than the other.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
March 26, 2013

-Full Moon tonight (exact at 5:27 a.m. Wednesday morning EDT). The Moon this evening is far below Leo and above Spica and Corvus.

-Mercury (brightening from magnitude +0.6 to +0.2 this week) is having a poor apparition very low in the dawn. Use binoculars to scan for it just above the east-southeast horizon about 30 minutes before sunrise.

News Posted Today:
March 26, 2013
Closest Brown Dwarf System Discovered


Astro Picture of the Day:
March 26, 2013

Source:
If not distracted by the picturesque landscape, waterfalls, stars, and auroras, you might be able to find Comet PANSTARRS. The above image, capturing multiple terrestrial and celestial wonders in a single shot, was taken last week in southwest Iceland. The popular Gullfoss waterfalls are pictured under brilliant auroras that followed a M1-class solar flare and powerful Coronal Mass Ejection two days earlier. Give up on locating the comet? Comet PANSTARRS is faintly visible as a light blip just above the horizon toward the left of the above image. The comet remains more directly visible to northern observers with binoculars looking toward the western sky just after sunset. The photographer's website is found here should you wish to see similar photos.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
March 27, 2013

-With spring under way, Algol in Perseus is heading down in the northwest after dusk. Your last chance to catch Algol in one of its eclipses this season may be the one this evening or the one Saturday evening. Tonight Algol should be at minimum brightness, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours centered on 9:43 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Easterners will have a better shot on Saturday. Algol takes several additional hours to fade and to rebrighten.

Astro Picture of the Day:
March 27, 2013

Source:
Why is this horizon so colorful? Because, opposite the Sun, it is raining. What is pictured above is actually just a common rainbow. It's uncommon appearance is caused by the Sun being unusually high in the sky during the rainbow's creation. Since every rainbow's center must be exactly opposite the Sun, a high Sun reflecting off of a distant rain will produce a low rainbow where only the very top is visible - because the rest of the rainbow is below the horizon. Furthermore, no two observers can see exactly the same rainbow - every person finds themselves exactly between the Sun and rainbow's center, and every observer sees the colorful circular band precisely 42 degrees from rainbow's center. The above image featuring the Eiffel Tower was taken in Paris, France last week. Although the intermittent thunderstorms lasted for much of the day, the horizon rainbow lasted for only a few minutes.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
March 28, 2013

-Once the Moon rises this evening, look upper right of it for Spica and lower left of it for Saturn, as shown below.

Astro Picture of the Day:
March 28, 2013

Source:
Bright spiral galaxy NGC 3169 appears to be unraveling in this cosmic scene, played out some 70 million light-years away just below bright star Regulus toward the faint constellation Sextans. Its beautiful spiral arms are distorted into sweeping tidal tails as NGC 3169 (left) and neighboring NGC 3166 interact gravitationally, a common fate even for bright galaxies in the local universe. In fact, drawn out stellar arcs and plumes, indications of gravitational interactions, seem rampant in the deep and colorful galaxy group photo. The picture spans 20 arc minutes, or about 400,000 light-years at the group's estimated distance, and includes smaller, dimmer NGC 3165 at the right. NGC 3169 is also known to shine across the spectrum from radio to X-rays, harboring an active galactic nucleus that is likely the site of a supermassive black hole.

[Bluearrowll]

Happy Easter! I'm going somewhere that may have little to no internet connectivity at all so here's the weekend's posts in one:

What's in the sky tonight?
March 29, 2013

-The waning Moon rises in the east quite late this evening. Look above it for the planet Saturn.

-This is the time of year when the dim Little Dipper juts to the right from Polaris (the Little Dipper's handle-end) during evening hours. The much brighter Big Dipper curls over high above it, "dumping water" into it.

Astro Picture of the Day:
March 29, 2013

Source:
Orbiting in the plane of Saturn's rings, Saturnian moons have a perpetual ringside view of the gas giant planet. Of course, while passing near the ring plane the Cassini spacecraft also shares their stunning perspective. The thin rings themselves slice across the middle of this Cassini snapshot from April 2011. The scene looks toward the dark night side of Saturn, in the frame at the left, and the still sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. Centered, over 1,500 kilometers across, Rhea is Saturn's second largest moon and is closest to the spacecraft, around 2.2 million kilometers away. To Rhea's right, shiny, 500 kilometer diameter Enceladus is about 3 million kilometers distant. Dione, 1,100 miles wide, is 3.1 million miles from Cassini's camera on the left, partly blocked by Saturn's night side.


What's in the sky tonight?
March 30, 2013

-Early Sunday morning, telescope users south of a line from central Florida through Oregon can watch the double star Beta Scorpii, magnitudes 2.6 and 4.8, emerge from behind the dark limb of the waning gibbous Moon. Map and timetables are found at the end of this post (for the bright component; the faint one emerges up to a minute or two earlier. Times are in Universal Time. Be sure to scroll down there to find the Reappearance timetable.) http://lunar-occultations.com/iota/bstar/0331zc2302.htm

Astro Picture of the Day:
March 30, 2013

Source:
The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its haunting symmetries are seen in the very central region of this stunning false-color picture, processed to reveal the enormous but extremely faint halo of gaseous material, over three light-years across, which surrounds the brighter, familiar planetary nebula. Made with data from the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands, the composite picture shows extended emission from the nebula. Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. Only much more recently however, have some planetaries been found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier active episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years.


What's in the sky tonight?
March 31, 2013

-The red carbon stars U and V Hydrae, and the Ghost of Jupiter planetary nebula (magnitude 7.7), all reside within a few degrees of each other in central Hydra.If you have binoculars, this is a good time of year to view them.

Astro Picture of the Day:
March 31, 2013

Source:
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies collided. But the stars in the two galaxies cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 don't collide in the course of the ponderous, billion year or so long event. Instead, their large clouds of molecular gas and dust do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, this stunning view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. Of course, the visual appearance of the far-flung arcing structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 1, 2013

-Happy April Fools! The red carbon stars U and V Hydrae, and the Ghost of Jupiter planetary nebula (magnitude 7.7), all reside within a few degrees of each other in central Hydra.

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 1, 2013

Source: My Camera
While visiting Wasaga Beach for Easter, I couldn't help but notice the remarkably clear weather that lasted the vast bulk of the weekend. On my first night up I decided to camp at the beach from sunset to about 9:30pm. I captured some panoramic sunset shots, as well as close ups of certain constellations such as Orion and Taurus - featuring the Orion Nebula and the Hyades and Pleiades plus Jupiter, moons et al. But what really caught my attention was when I was just about to pack up - a grey cloud spontaneously appeared to the north west, despite the forecasts saying that there shouldn't be any clouds in the sky. So I readied my camera and confirmed my suspicion - the Northern Lights had made their way all the way down to Wasaga Beach, just 150km from Toronto. As a bonus, Comet PANSTARRS is also visible as a badminton-birdie shaped object just above the horizon halfway to centre from the left, as well as the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. The constellation Cassiopeia centres the top of the image.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 2, 2013

-As spring advances, wintry Orion tilts farther over as it declines in the west-southwest after dark. Orion's Belt in its middle is almost horizontal. Orion is brightly framed between Jupiter on its right and Sirius on its left.

-Last-quarter Moon tonight (exact at 12:37 a.m. Wednesday morning EDT).

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 2, 2013

Source
Do you see the horse's head? What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper imaging. The main part of the above imaged molecular cloud complex is a reflection nebula cataloged as IC 4592. Reflection nebulas are actually made up of very fine dust that normally appears dark but can look quite blue when reflecting the light of energetic nearby stars. In this case, the source of much of the reflected light is a star at the eye of the horse. That star is part of Nu Scorpii, one of the brighter star systems toward the constellation of the Scorpion Scorpius. A second reflection nebula dubbed IC 4601 is visible surrounding two stars on the upper right of the image center.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 3, 2013

-Jupiter's moon Io crosses Jupiter's face from 7:56 to 10:08 p.m. EDT, followed by its tiny black shadow (much more visible) from 9:03 to 11:15 p.m. EDT.

-This evening Comet PanSTARRS, fading every day, is passing 2° west (lower right) of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. They may appear about equally dim low in the northwest just as twilight is ending, for observers at fairly high northern latitudes. Think photo opportunity.

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 3, 2013

Source
Currently, comet PANSTARRS is passing nearly in front of the galaxy Andromeda. Coincidentally, both comet and galaxy appear now to be just about the same angular size. In physical size, even though Comet PANSTARRS is currently the largest object in the Solar System with a tail spanning about 15 times the diameter of the Sun, it is still about 70 billion times smaller than the Andromeda galaxy (M31). The above image was taken a few days ago near Syktyvkar, Russia. As C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) on the lower left recedes from the Sun and dims, it is returning to the northerly direction whence it came. When the comet will return is currently unknown.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 4, 2013

-Venus and Mars remain hidden in the glare of the Sun

-Jupiter (magnitude –2.1, in Taurus) comes into view high in the west after sunset, then descends as night grows late. Lower left of Jupiter is fainter orange Aldebaran. Farther to Jupiter's lower right are the Pleiades. They all set in the west-northwest around the middle of the night. In a telescope, Jupiter has shrunk to 36 arcseconds wide.

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 4, 2013

Source
This beautiful, bright, spiral galaxy is Messier 64, often called the Black Eye Galaxy or the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy for its heavy-lidded appearance in telescopic views. M64 is about 17 million light-years distant in the otherwise well-groomed northern constellation Coma Berenices. In fact, the Red Eye Galaxy might also be an appropriate moniker in this colorful composition of narrow and wideband images. The enormous dust clouds obscuring the near-side of M64's central region are laced with the telltale reddish glow of hydrogen associated with star forming regions. But they are not this galaxy's only peculiar feature. Observations show that M64 is actually composed of two concentric, counter-rotating systems of stars, one in the inner 3,000 light-years and another extending to about 40,000 light-years and rotating in the opposite direction. The dusty eye and bizarre rotation is likely the result of a billion year old merger of two different galaxies.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 5, 2013

-The huge, bright Winter Hexagon is still in view after dark, filling the sky to the southwest and west. Start at bright Sirius in the southwest. It marks the Hexagon's lower left corner. High above Sirius is Procyon. From there, look upper right to Pollux and Castor, lower right from Castor to Menkalinen and Capella, lower left to Aldebaran (with brighter Jupiter hogging the limelight near it!), lower left to Rigel at the bottom of Orion, and back to Sirius.

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 5, 2013

Source
It looks like a double comet, but Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) is just offering skygazers a Messier moment. Outward bound and fading in this starry scene, the well-photographed comet is remarkably similar in brightness to M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Tracking through northern skies just below the galaxy, the comet was captured as local midnight approached on April 3. Both comet and galaxy were visible to the eye and are immersed in the faint glow of northern lights as our own Milky Way galaxy arcs over a snowy field near Tänndalen, Sweden. Double star cluster h and chi Persei can be spotted along the Milky Way's arc high above the comet/galaxy pair. Follow the arc to bright Deneb, alpha star of the constellation Cygnus, at the right edge of the frame.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 6, 2013

-Look for Arcturus, the "Spring Star," low in the east-northeast in twilight and higher in the east after dark. The constellation Bootes extends to its left. High to Arcturus's upper left is the Big Dipper.

-Just before dawn on April 4th, Sky&Telescope's Sean Walker took this image of Comet PanSTARRS passing 2.4° from M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. The galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away; the comet was 11 light-minutes away. Shooting from latitude 43° north in New Hampshire, Walker stacked 12 minutes of exposures (11 x 70 seconds) taken with a 180-mm lens at f/4 on a Canon 1000D camera at ISO 800.

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 6, 2013

Source
No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth. Instead, the shadow line or terminator is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight. With the Sun illuminating the scene from the right, the cloud tops reflect gently reddened sunlight filtered through the dusty troposphere, the lowest layer of the planet's nurturing atmosphere. A clear high altitude layer, visible along the dayside's upper edge, scatters blue sunlight and fades into the blackness of space. This picture actually is a single digital photograph taken in June of 2001 from the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of 211 nautical miles.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 7, 2013

-From bright Arcturus in the east, look lower right by about three fists at arm's length for Spica and, lower down as evening grows late, Saturn. To the right of Spica by a little more than a fist is the four-star quadrilateral of Corvus, the Crow.

-Jupiter is on its way to passing directly above Aldebaran and the Hyades. (The blue 10° scale is about the width of your fist at arm's length.)

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 7, 2013

Source
Just days after sharing the western evening sky with Venus in 2007, the Moon moved on to Saturn - actually passing in front of the ringed planet Saturn when viewed in skies over Europe, northern Africa, and western Asia. Because the Moon and bright planets wander through the sky near the ecliptic plane, such occultation events are not uncommon, but they are dramatic, especially in telescopic views. For example, in this sharp image Saturn is captured emerging from behind the Moon, giving the illusion that it lies just beyond the Moon's bright edge. Of course, the Moon is a mere 400 thousand kilometers away, compared to Saturn's distance of 1.4 billion kilometers. Taken with a digital camera and 20 inch diameter telescope at the Weikersheim Observatory in southern Germany, the picture is a single exposure adjusted to reduce the difference in brightness between Saturn and the cratered lunar surface.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 8, 2013

-As spring advances, wintry Orion tilts farther over as it declines in the west-southwest after dark. Orion's Belt in its middle is now almost horizontal. Orion is brightly framed on its right by Jupiter and on its left by Sirius.

-Jupiter is on its way to passing directly above Aldebaran and the Hyades. (The blue 10° scale is about the width of your fist at arm's length.)

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 8, 2013

Source
How far away is "redshift six"? Although humans are inherently familiar with distance and time, what is actually measured for astronomical objects is redshift, a color displacement that depends on exactly how energy density has evolved in our universe. Now since cosmological measurements in recent years have led to a concordance on what energy forms pervade our universe, it is now possible to make a simple table relating observed cosmological redshift, labeled "z", with standard concepts of distance and time, including the extrapolated time since the universe began. One such table is listed above, where redshift z is listed in the first and last columns, while the corresponding universe age in billions of years is listed in the central column. To find the meaning of the rest of the columns, please read the accompanying technical paper here. Although stars in our galaxy are effectively at cosmological redshift zero, the most distant supernovae seen occur out past redshift one, which the above chart shows occurred when the universe was approximately half its present age. By contrast, the most distant gamma-ray bursts yet observed occur out past redshift six, occurring when the universe was younger than one billion years old, less than 10 percent of its present age.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 9, 2013

-The upright Sickle of Leo, with Regulus on the bottom of its handle, crosses the meridian high in the south these evenings. It's shaped like a backward question mark, and it stands about 1½ fist-widths tall.

-Jupiter is on its way to passing directly above Aldebaran and the Hyades. (The blue 10° scale is about the width of your fist at arm's length.)

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 9, 2013

Source
It's the dim star, not the bright one, near the center of NGC 3132 that created this odd but beautiful planetary nebula. Nicknamed the Eight-Burst Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, the glowing gas originated in the outer layers of a star like our Sun. In this reprocessed color picture, the hot purplish pool of light seen surrounding this binary system is energized by the hot surface of the faint star. Although photographed to explore unusual symmetries, it's the asymmetries that help make this planetary nebula so intriguing. Neither the unusual shape of the surrounding cooler shell nor the structure and placements of the cool filamentary dust lanes running across NGC 3132 are well understood.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 10, 2013

-By 10 p.m. or later (depending on where you live), the bright "Summer Star" Vega is rising in the northeast, beginning a long evening apparition that will continue for the rest of the year.

-New Moon (exact at 5:35 a.m. EDT).

-Jupiter is on its way to passing directly above Aldebaran and the Hyades. (The blue 10° scale is about the width of your fist at arm's length.)

News Posted Today:
April 9, 2013
A New Type of Supernova


Astro Picture of the Day:
April 10, 2013

Source
If you glanced out a side window of the International Space Station, what might you see? If you were Expedition 34 flight engineer Chris Hadfield, and you were looking out one of windows of Japan's Kibo Research Module on February 26, you might have seen the above vista. In the distance lies the darkness of outer space and the blueness of planet Earth. Large ISS objects include long solar panels that stretch diagonally from the upper left and the cylindrical airlock of the Pressurized Module that occupies the lower right. Numerous ports and platforms of the space station are visible and labeled on an annotated companion image. Of particular note is what looks to be a washer - dryer pair toward the image left, which are really NASA's HREP (near) and JAXA's MCE (far) research platforms. The gold foil covered experiment in the rear of HREP is the Remote Atmospheric and Ionospheric Detection System (RAIDS) that monitors atmospheric airglow, while MCE includes the Global Lightning and Sprite Measurements (JEM-GLIMS) instrument that monitors atmospheric electrical discharges. The current Expedition 35 crew is now commanded by Colonel Hadfield and scheduled to stay aboard the space station until May.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 11, 2013

-Jupiter's moon Io reappears out of eclipse from Jupiter's shadow around 10:23 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Europa emerges from Jupiter's shadow around 10:11 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Both reappear just east of the planet.

Astro Picture of the Day:
April 11, 2013

Source
In a haunting vista you can never see, bright stars and the central Milky Way rise over the dark skyline of metropolitan Pudong in Shanghai, China. Looking east across the Huangpu River, the cityscape includes Pudong's 470 meter tall Oriental Pearl Tower. The night sky stretches from Antares and the stars of Scorpius at the far right, to Altair in Aquila at the left. To create the vision of an unseen reality, part of a series of Darkened Cities, photographer Thierry Cohen has combined a daytime image of the city skyline with an image matched in orientation from a dark sky region at the same latitude, just west of Merzouga, Morocco. The result finds the night sky that hours earlier also arced over Shanghai, but drowned in the lights of a city upon the sea.

[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
April 12, 2013

-As twilight fades in the west this evening, look far to the lower left of Jupiter for the crescent Moon. Less far above the Moon, you can see the Pleiades emerging into view.

News Posted Today:
April 11, 2013
Has the Mars 3 Lander Been Found?


Astro Picture of the Day:
April 12, 2013

Source
On another April 12th, in 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human to see planet Earth from space. Commenting on his view from orbit he reported, "The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very clearly". On yet another April 12th, in 1981 NASA launched the first space shuttle. To celebrate in 2013, consider this image from the orbiting International Space Station, a stunning view of the planet at night from low Earth orbit. Constellations of lights connecting the densely populated cities along the Atlantic east coast of the United States are framed by two Russian spacecraft docked at the space station. Easy to recognize cities include New York City and Long Island at the right. From there, track toward the left for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and then Washington DC near picture center.