What's in the sky tonight?
September 26, 2013
-Last-quarter Moon tonight (exact at 11:55 p.m. EDT). The Moon rises around 11 or midnight local time, shining in the feet of Gemini. Jupiter is to its lower left, as shown below, and Orion is farther to its right.
-A filament of magnetism curling over the sun's northeastern limb erupted on Sept. 24th around 20:30 UT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the structure hurling part of itself into space. A "canyon of fire" forms as the filament cuts through the sun's lower atmosphere. The glowing walls of the canyon trace the original channel where the filament was suspended by magnetic forces above the stellar surface.
-As erupting magnetic filaments often do, this one launched a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. The cloud does not appear to be heading for Earth.
Astro Picture of the Day:
September 26, 2013
Source:
Separated by about 14 degrees (28 Full Moons) in planet Earth's sky, spiral galaxies M31 ,left, and M33 are both large members of the Local Group, along with our own Milky Way galaxy. This wide-angle, telescopic mosaic captures colorful details of spiral structure in both, while the massive neighboring galaxies seem to be balanced either side of bright Mirach, beta star in the constellation Andromeda. But M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is really 2.5 million light-years distant and M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, is also about 3 million light years away. Mirach, just 200 light-years from the Sun, lies well within the Milky Way, along with the dim clouds of dust drifting through the frame only a few hundred light-years above the galactic plane. Although they look far apart, M31 and M33 are locked in a mutual gravitational embrace. Radio astronomers have found indications of a bridge of neutral hydrogen gas that could connect the two, evidence of a closer encounter in the past. Based on measurements, gravitational simulations currently predict that the Milky Way, M31, and M33 will all undergo mutual close encounters and potentially mergers, billions of years in the future.