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

-The team flying NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission is among the select few at the space agency who have exemptions allowing them to work during the government shutdown. Early this morning, October 6th, they fired LADEE's main engine in a braking maneuver known as the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn. This slowed the spacecraft's velocity enough for it to be captured by the Moon's gravity. This critical burn went flawlessly and LADEE is now in lunar orbit. Two more main engine burns, on October 9 and 12 will adjust LADEE's trajectory, settling it into its commissioning orbit. LADEE is on a mission to study the diaphanous lunar atmosphere, which is mightily affected by space weather.

-Jupiter is at western quadrature this week, 90° west of the Sun in the morning sky. This is when, in a telescope, the western edge of Jupiter is most clearly dimmer than its eastern, more sunward-facing edge.

Astro Picture of the Day:
October 6, 2013

Source:
The Gegenschein is an elliptical glow in the night sky in the antisolar point. Not to be confused with the Zodiacal Light which is a reflection of sunlight from dust directly reflecting Earth, the Gegenschein is a much fainter reflection of light reflecting back from the Zodiacal Light towards Earth. The image was captured by Yuri Beletsky in October 2007 using a digital camera with a wide-angle 10 mm and installed on a portable equatorial mount lens. The sky in this picture is about as good as it gets in regards to transparency, which helped captured the fine structure of the Gegenschein. The image was taken at the Cerro Paranal Observatory, located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, at an altitude of 2635 m.