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Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
January 14, 2014

What's in the sky tonight?
January 14, 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 have downgraded the chance of X-flares on Jan. 14th to 15% as giant sunspot AR1944 rotates off the solar disk. The odds on Jan. 15th are even lower: 1%. A spell of quiet appears to be in the offing.

-When the sun goes down tonight, step outside and look east. The waxing full Moon is having a close encounter with Jupiter. Stojan Stojanovski sends this picture of the meeting from Velmej-Ohrid, Macedonia.

-In Stojanovski's photo, the Moon has circumscribed Jupiter inside a luminous ring. It's a 22o halo, caused by ice crystals in high cirrus clouds. Lunar ice halos are most often seen when the Moon is high and bright. With Jupiter so close to the bulls-eye, tonight is a great time to look!

Astro Picture of the Day:
January 14, 2014

Source:
Is the night sky darkest in the direction opposite the Sun? No. In fact, a rarely discernable faint glow known as the gegenschein (German for "counter glow") can be seen 180 degrees around from the Sun in an extremely dark sky. The gegenschein is sunlight back-scattered off small interplanetary dust particles. These dust particles are millimeter sized splinters from asteroids and orbit in the ecliptic plane of the planets. Pictured above from last year is one of the more spectacular pictures of the gegenschein yet taken. Here a deep exposure of an extremely dark sky over Las Campanas Observatory in Chile shows the gegenschein so clearly that even a surrounding glow is visible. Notable background objects include the Andromeda galaxy, the Pleiades star cluster, the California Nebula, the belt of Orion just below the Orion Nebula and inside Barnard's Loop, and bright stars Sirius and Betelgeuse. The gegenschein is distinguished from zodiacal light near the Sun by the high angle of reflection. During the day, a phenomenon similar to the gegenschein called the glory can be seen in reflecting air or clouds opposite the Sun from an airplane.