Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
October 11, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
October 11, 2014
-The Moon late this evening shines near Aldebaran amid the Hyades. Take a look with binoculars. This will be a challenging scene to photograph (use a long lens), what with the Moon's brilliance and the Hyades stars' faintness. By dawn they've moved over to high in the southwest.
-A magnetic filament near the sun's southwestern limb collapsed during the late hours of Oct. 10th. Earth-orbiting satellites detected a C3-class Hyder flare when the filament hit the solar surface: movie. The eruption also hurled a CME into space, but the storm cloud appears set to miss Earth.
Astro Picture of the Day:
October 11, 2014
Source:
As the Moon rose and the Sun set on October 8, a lunar eclipse was in progress seen from Chongqing, China. Trailing through this composite time exposure, the rising Moon began as a dark reddened disk in total eclipse near the eastern horizon. Steadily climbing above the populous city's colorful lights along the Yangtze River, the moontrail grows brighter and broader, until a bright Full Moon emerged from the Earth's shadow in evening skies. Although lunar eclipses are not always total ones, this eclipse, along with last April's lunar eclipse, were the first two of four consecutive total lunar eclipses, a series known as a tetrad. The final two eclipses of this tetrad will occur in early April and late September 2015.
Daily Suspicious0bserver's Weather Post:
October 12, 2014
What's in the sky tonight?
October 12, 2014
-There are only two sunspots visible on the solar disk, and both of them appear to be in a state of decay. NOAA forecasters estimate a waning 20% chance of M-flares and only a 1% chance of X-flares this weekend.
-Orion preview: With fall well underway, the "winter" constellation Orion rises in the east by 11 or midnight, depending on how far east or west (respectively) you live in your time zone. It's well to the lower right of the waning Moon. Orion's Belt will be vertical, as it always is when Orion is rising for mid-northern skywatchers. Orion reaches its highest stand in the south well before the first light of dawn, with the Moon now above it (on the morning of the 13th).
Astro Picture of the Day:
October 12, 2014
Source:
How did a star create the Helix nebula? The shapes of planetary nebula like the Helix are important because they likely hold clues to how stars like the Sun end their lives. Observations by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and the 4-meter Blanco Telescope in Chile, however, have shown the Helix is not really a simple helix. Rather, it incorporates two nearly perpendicular disks as well as arcs, shocks, and even features not well understood. Even so, many strikingly geometric symmetries remain. How a single Sun-like star created such beautiful yet geometric complexity is a topic of research. The Helix Nebula is the nearest planetary nebula to Earth, lies only about 700 light years away toward the constellation of Aquarius, and spans about 3 light-years.