Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
January 12, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
January 12, 2014
-Jupiter shines left of the nearly full Moon early this evening. Ganymede, the largest and brightest moon of Jupiter itself, slowly emerges out of eclipse from Jupiter's shadow around 10:21 p.m. EST. With a telescope, watch for this happening just off Jupiter's eastern limb.
-NOAA forecasters estimate a 35% chance of X-class solar flares on Jan. 12th, most likely from AR1944. The brooding sunspot has been quiet for days, but still poses a threat for strong eruptions.
-This weekend Venus is at inferior conjunction. That means it is passing almost directly between Earth and the sun. With its nightside facing Earth (almost perfectly), Venus looks like an incredibly slender crescent. On Jan. 11th in Targoviste, Romania, amateur astronomer Maximilian Teodorescu photographed Venus only 5 degrees from the sun.
-"Taking extreme care not to point any unfiltered optics at the sun, I started to look for Venus through my 11-inch Celestron telescope," says Teodorescu. "The thin but very large crescent suddenly appeared into the field of view. It was surreal to watch the boiling atmospheric arc of the planet just above the sun in plain day. My wife immortalized the moment by taking a panoramic view from our clear-sky location."
Observing Venus through a telescope can be dangerous. Even a quick inadvertent glimpse of magnified light from the nearby sun can cause serious eye damage. Anthony J. Cook of the Griffith Observatory has some advice for observers: "I have observed Venus at conjunction, but only from within the shadow of a building, or by adding a mask to the front end of the telescope to fully shadow the optics from direct sunlight. This is tricky with a refractor or a catadioptric, because the optics start at the front end of the tube. Here at Griffith Observatory, I rotate the telescope dome to make sure the lens of the telescope is shaded from direct sunlight, even through it means that the lens will be partially blocked when aimed at Venus. With our Newtonian telescope, I add a curved cardboard mask at the front end of the tube to shadow the primary mirror."
Around the world, many people are applying these techniques to photograph Venus as it passes by the sun.
Astro Picture of the Day:
January 12, 2014
Source:
What does the universe look like on small scales? On large scales? Humanity is discovering that the universe is a very different place on every proportion that has been explored. For example, so far as we know, every tiny proton is exactly the same, but every huge galaxy is different. On more familiar scales, a small glass table top to a human is a vast plane of strange smoothness to a dust mite -- possibly speckled with cell boulders. Not all scale lengths are well explored -- what happens to the smallest mist droplets you sneeze, for example, is a topic of active research -- and possibly useful to know to help stop the spread of disease. The above interactive flash animation, a modern version of the classic video Powers of Ten, is a new window to many of the known scales of our universe. By moving the scroll bar across the bottom, you can explore a diversity of sizes, while clicking on different items will bring up descriptive information.