Space

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Comet 12P Between Rosette and Cone Nebulas



Small bits of this greenish-gray comet are expected to streak across Earth's atmosphere tonight. Specifically, debris from the eroding nucleus of Comet 21P / Giacobini-Zinner, pictured, causes the annual Draconids meteor shower, which peaks this evening. Draconid meteors are easy to enjoy this year because meteor rates will likely peak soon after sunset with the Moon's glare nearly absent.

Patience may be needed, though, as last month's passing of 21P near the Earth's orbit is not expected to increase the Draconids' normal meteor rate this year of (only) a few meteors per hour. Then again, meteor rates are notoriously hard to predict, and the Draconids were quite impressive in 1933, 1946, and 2011. Featured, Comet 21P gracefully posed between the Rosette (upper left) and Cone (lower right) nebulas two weeks ago before heading back out to near the orbit of Jupiter, to return again in about six and a half years.

Chael2dot0

Another SpaceX launch this morning or something. Tons of people posting vids. Hadn't looked to see if anything was scheduled, but bummed t have missed it!

Chael2dot0

Ahhh....SAOCOM 1A satellite launch out of Vandenberg. Tis wy my SD peeps had such a good view.

cee134

Chael2dot0 wrote: »

Another SpaceX launch this morning or something. Tons of people posting vids. Hadn't looked to see if anything was scheduled, but bummed t have missed it!

You should hit up Meekseeks on IG. She could of let you know that. Also, FYI the launch was the first West coast land landing.

Chael2dot0

cee134 wrote: »

Chael2dot0 wrote: »

Another SpaceX launch this morning or something. Tons of people posting vids. Hadn't looked to see if anything was scheduled, but bummed t have missed it!

You should hit up Meekseeks on IG. She could of let you know that. Also, FYI the launch was the first West coast land landing.

Coolio. Thanks. Haven't had enough time to keep my eyes to the skies lately.

honeybee__12

NASA's Voyager 2 probe may be close to joining its sibling and entering interstellar space.
The vessel has been detecting a five percent increase in cosmic rays since late August, suggesting that it's close to crossing the heliopause (the edge of the solar wind bubble, aka the heliosphere) and entering the interstellar realm. Voyager 1 saw similar increases in May 2012, so its fellow spacecraft may be in for a repeat.
That departure will represent a major milestone.
It'll be just the second human-built object to have entered interstellar space.

solorex

Very cool.

cee134

NGC 1672: Barred Spiral Galaxy from Hubble



Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a modest central bar. Prominently barred spiral galaxy NGC 1672, featured here, was captured in spectacular detail in an image taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

Visible are dark filamentary dust lanes, young clusters of bright blue stars, red emission nebulas of glowing hydrogen gas, a long bright bar of stars across the center, and a bright active nucleus that likely houses a supermassive black hole. Light takes about 60 million years to reach us from NGC 1672, which spans about 75,000 light years across. NGC 1672, which appears toward the constellation of the Dolphinfish (Dorado), is being studied to find out how a spiral bar contributes to star formation in a galaxy's central regions.

honeybee__12

A runaway star, plowing through the depths of space and piling up interstellar material before it, can be seen in this ultraviolet image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer.
The star, called CW Leo, is hurtling through space at about 204,000 miles per hour (91 kilometers per second), or roughly 265 times the speed of sound on Earth.
It is shedding its own atmosphere to form a sooty shell of discarded material.
This shell can be seen in the center of this image as a bright circular blob.

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NGC 289: Swirl in the Southern Sky



About 70 million light-years distant, gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 289 is larger than our own Milky Way. Seen nearly face-on, its bright core and colorful central disk give way to remarkably faint, bluish spiral arms. The extensive arms sweep well over 100 thousand light-years from the galaxy's center.

At the lower right in this sharp, telescopic galaxy portrait the main spiral arm seems to encounter a small, fuzzy elliptical companion galaxy interacting with enormous NGC 289. Of course the spiky stars are in the foreground of the scene. They lie within the Milky Way toward the southern constellation Sculptor.

honeybee__12

Wednesday, October 3, 2018: Vast clouds of atomic hydrogen glow blue among a myriad of distant galaxies in this image from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in northern Chile. Using a supersensitive spectrograph called MUSE, the VLT was able to spot these faint clouds in an otherwise dark and featureless portion of the sky in the Fornax constellation.

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A Soyuz spacecraft carrying three Expedition 56 crewmembers returned to Earth from the International Space Station on Thursday (Oct. 4).
NASA astronauts Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev touched down on the steppe of Kazakhstan after spending 197 days in space.

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Space X Falcon 9 SAOCOM 1A Launch Time Lapse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP4fIwD99gs

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A normally reliable Soyuz FG rocket malfunctioned two minutes after liftoff from Kazakhstan Thursday. The malfunction forced a Russian cosmonaut and his NASA crewmate to execute an emergency abort and a steep-but-safe return to Earth a few hundred miles from the launch site.
Russian recovery crews reported the crew came through the ordeal in good shape.

Ovchinin and Hague blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 4:40 a.m. EDT (GMT-4; 2:40 p.m. local time), kicking off what was expected to be a four-orbit six-hour flight to the International Space Station.  
But two minutes and two seconds after liftoff, just a few seconds after the rocket's four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters separated from the central core stage, something went wrong.
"Failure of the booster," a translator called out.
Moments later, he confirmed the Soyuz had separated from the rocket's upper stage, saying "we are in weightlessness."

Moments after that, as the spacecraft plunged back into the thick lower atmosphere, it rapidly decelerated, subjected the crew to nearly seven times the normal force of gravity at one point.

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The Falcon 9 Nebula



Not the Hubble Space Telescope's latest view of a distant planetary nebula, this illuminated cloud of gas and dust dazzled even casual U.S. west coast skygazers on October 7. Taken about three miles north of Vandenberg Air Force Base, the image follows plumes and exhaust from the first and second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rising through southern California's early evening skies. In the fading twilight, the reddish smoke drifting in the foreground at the right is from the initial ascent of the rocket.

The expanding blue and orange filamentary plumes are from first and second stage separation and the first stage boostback burn, still in sunlight at extreme altitudes. But the bright spot below center is the second stage itself headed almost directly away from the camera, accelerating to orbital velocity and far downrange. Pulsed thrusters form the upside down V-shape at the top as they guide the reusable Falcon 9 first stage back to the landing site.

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IC 2118: The Witch Head Nebula



Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble -- maybe Macbeth should have consulted the Witch Head Nebula. This suggestively shaped reflection nebula is associated with the bright star Rigel in the constellation Orion. More formally known as IC 2118, the Witch Head Nebula glows primarily by light reflected from bright star Rigel, located just off the upper right edge of the full image.

Fine dust in the nebula reflects the light. The blue color is caused not only by Rigel's blue color but because the dust grains reflect blue light more efficiently than red. The same physical process causes Earth's daytime sky to appear blue, although the scatterers in Earth's atmosphere are molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. The nebula lies about 1000 light-years away.

honeybee__12

A huge haul of newfound fast radio bursts (FRBs) may help astronomers finally start to get a handle on these mysterious and powerful blasts from deep space.

A new study reports the detection of 19 previously undiscovered FRBs, including the closest one to Earth and the brightest one ever seen.
The results boost the total tally significantly; just three dozen or so FRBs had been known previously, with the first detection coming in 2007.

FRBs are brief (millisecond-long) but intense emissions of radio light, which can pack as much energy as our own sun produces over the course of nearly a century.
Their source is the topic of much discussion and debate.
For example, some researchers have suggested that FRBs could be generated by advanced alien civilizations, though most astronomers favor natural explanations, such as fast-spinning neutron stars.

The team's analyses show that fast radio bursts are coming from the other side of the universe rather than from our own galactic neighborhood.
The researchers did turn up the nearest known FRB to Earth — an event known as FRB 171020, which originated about 425 million light-years away from our planet.
That's about twice as close as the previous record holder.

cee134

M16: In and Around the Eagle Nebula



From afar, the whole thing looks like an Eagle. A closer look at the Eagle Nebula, however, shows the bright region is actually a window into the center of a larger dark shell of dust. Through this window, a brightly-lit workshop appears where a whole open cluster of stars is being formed. In this cavity tall pillars and round globules of dark dust and cold molecular gas remain where stars are still forming.

Already visible are several young bright blue stars whose light and winds are burning away and pushing back the remaining filaments and walls of gas and dust. The Eagle emission nebula, tagged M16, lies about 6500 light years away, spans about 20 light-years, and is visible with binoculars toward the constellation of the Serpent (Serpens). This picture involved over 25 hours of imaging and combines three specific emitted colors emitted by sulfur (colored as red), hydrogen (yellow), and oxygen (blue).

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Jupiter in Ultraviolet from Hubble



Jupiter looks a bit different in ultraviolet light. To better interpret Jupiter's cloud motions and to help NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft understand the planetary context of the small fields that it sees, the Hubble Space Telescope is being directed to regularly image the entire Jovian giant. The colors of Jupiter being monitored go beyond the normal human visual range to include both ultraviolet and infrared light.

Featured from 2017, Jupiter appears different in near ultraviolet light, partly because the amount of sunlight reflected back is distinct, giving differing cloud heights and latitudes discrepant brightnesses.

In the near UV, Jupiter's poles appear relatively dark, as does its Great Red Spot and a smaller (optically) white oval to the right. The String of Pearl storms farther to the right, however, are brightest in near ultraviolet, and so here appear (false-color) pink. Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede appears on the upper left. Juno continues on its looping 53-day orbits around Jupiter, while Earth-orbiting Hubble is now recovering from the loss of a stabilizing gyroscope.

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This scene shows the magnificent presence of the Milky Way galaxy, full of nebulous clouds of interstellar gas and dust and sparkling star clusters shining bright in one of the most pristine dark-sky sites in the world.
Located 16,500 feet (5,000 meters) above the sea level is the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an astronomical observatory consisting of 66 radio telescopes in the Atacama desert of northern Chile.

In the bottom right corner of the image, a faint white glow called the Zodiacal Light (a light beam that extends along the ecliptic plane, caused by the scattering of sunlight in cosmic dust particles) can be seen as a backlight behind the antenna of ALMA (DV-21), a telescope dish 39 feet (12 meters) in diameter that captures radio emissions from vast, cold clouds in interstellar space.

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Uncrewed Japanese Vehicle Delivers Supplies to the Space Station



Viewed from a window inside the cupola, the International Space Station's "window to the world," the Japanese Exploration Agency's H-II Transfer Vehicle-7 rendezvoused with the orbital complex after launching from the Tanegashima Space Center.

At the time this image was taken on Oct. 11, 2018, the station was flying at an altitude of about 257 miles off the coast of Canada above the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

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Look at the Moon every night and its visible sunlit portion gradually changes. In phases progressing from New Moon to Full Moon to New Moon again, a lunar cycle or lunation is completed in about 29.5 days. Top left to bottom right, these frames show the range of lunar phases for 25 consecutive nights beginning on January 18, following an almost complete lunation.

They skip the 2 days just after and 2 days before New Moon, when the lunar phase is at best a narrow crescent, close to the Sun and really hard to see. Of course, mostly clear Arizona night skies and a little help from a friend were required to complete this lunar cycle project, imaging in early evening for the first half and late evening and early morning for the second half of the lunation.

For extra credit, the cycle was centered on the Full Moon of January 31. That was the second Full Moon in January, when the Moon was near lunar orbit perigee and took on reddish hues during a total lunar eclipse.

honeybee__12

On October 5th, 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope entered safe mode, owing to the fact that one of the three gyroscopes actively being used to point-and-steady the telescope had failed.
Engineers have fixed problems like this before, from the ground, by firing up another of the on-board gyroscopes and switching which three are used to stabilize the observatory.
The gyroscope that failed wasn’t entirely surprising; it had been showing signs of trouble for about a year.
But there are already two other gyroscopes which had failed of the replaced six, and another which has shown signs of being problematic already.
With two good gyroscopes and one partially-malfunctioning one, it’s a solemn reminder that Hubble won’t live forever, particularly with no ability for humanity to service it again.

That’s why the plan is to attempt to fix the partially-malfunctioning gyroscope remotely.
If you succeed, you have three functioning gyroscopes and Hubble can continue to operate as normal. 
If they cannot cure the partially-malfunctioning gyroscope, they will power-down one of the functional gyroscopes and save it.
You can observe nearly as much of the sky with one gyroscope as you can with two, but you basically double your telescope’s remaining life by using one gyroscope at a time instead of two together.
At a cost of reduced sky coverage and slower pointing times, you can extend Hubble’s life.

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Summer to Winter Milky Way



Taken near local midnight, this autumn night's panorama follows the arch of the Milky Way across the northern horizon from the High Fens, Eifel Nature Park at the border of Belgium and Germany. Shift your gaze across the wetlands from west to east (left to right) and you can watch stars once more prominent in northern summer give way to those that will soon dominate northern winter nights.

Setting, wanderer Mars is brightest at the far left, still shinning against almost overwhelming city lights along the southwestern horizon. Bright stars Altair, Deneb, and Vega form the northern sky's summer triangle, straddling the Milky Way left of center. Part of the winter hexagon Capella and Aldebaran, along with the beautiful Pleiades star cluster shine across the northeastern sky. The line-of-sight along the hikers boardwalk leads almost directly toward the Big Dipper, an all season asterism from these northern latitudes. Follow the Big Dipper's pointer stars to Polaris and the north celestial pole nearly centered above it. Andromeda, the other large galaxy in the skyscape, is near the top of the frame.

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Apollo 12 Visits Surveyor 3



Apollo 12 was the second mission to land humans on the Moon. The landing site was picked to be near the location of Surveyor 3, a robot spacecraft that had landed on the Moon three years earlier. In the featured photograph, taken by lunar module pilot Alan Bean, mission commander Pete Conrad jiggles the Surveyor spacecraft to see how firmly it is situated.

The lunar module is visible in the distance. Apollo 12 brought back many photographs and moon rocks. Among the milestones achieved by Apollo 12 was the deployment of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, which carried out many experiments including one that measured the solar wind.

honeybee__12

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Hyperion: Largest Known Galaxy Proto-Supercluster



How did galaxies form in the early universe? To help find out, astronomers surveyed a patch of dark night sky with the Very Large Telescope array in Chile to find and count galaxies that formed when our universe was very young. Analysis of the distribution of some distant galaxies (redshifts near 2.5) found an enormous conglomeration of galaxies that spanned 300 million light years and contained about 5,000 times the mass of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Dubbed Hyperion, it is currently the largest and most massive proto-supercluster yet discovered in the early universe. A proto-supercluster is a group of young galaxies that is gravitationally collapsing to create a supercluster, which itself a group of several galaxy clusters, which itself is a group of hundreds of galaxies, which itself is a group of billions of stars. In the featured visualization, massive galaxies are depicted in white, while regions containing a large amount of smaller galaxies are shaded blue.

Identifying and understanding such large groups of early galaxies contributes to humanity's understanding of the composition and evolution of the universe as a whole.

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Newborn Stars Blow Bubbles in the Cat's Paw Nebula



This image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Cat's Paw Nebula, so named for the large, round features that create the impression of a feline footprint. The nebula is a star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy, located in the constellation Scorpius. Estimates of its distance from Earth range from about 4,200 to about 5,500 light-years.

Framed by green clouds, the bright red bubbles are the dominant feature in the image, which was created using data from two of Spitzer's instruments. After gas and dust inside the nebula collapse to form stars, the stars may in turn heat up the pressurized gas surrounding them, causing it to expand into space and create bubbles.

The green areas show places where radiation from hot stars collided with large molecules called "polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons," causing them to fluoresce.

In some cases, the bubbles may eventually "burst," creating the U-shaped features that are particularly visible in the image below, which was created using data from just one of Spitzer's instruments.



Spitzer is an infrared telescope, and infrared light is useful to astronomers because it can penetrate thick clouds of gas and dust better than optical light (the kind visible to the human eye). The black filaments running horizontally through the nebula are regions of gas and dust so dense, not even infrared light can pass through them. These dense regions may soon be sites where another generation of stars will form.

The Cat's Paw star-forming region is estimated to be between 24 and 27 parsecs (80 and 90 light years) across. It extends beyond the left side of these images and intersects with a similar-sized star-forming region, NGC 6357. That region is also known as the Lobster Nebula – an unlikely companion for a cat.

The top image was compiled using data from the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) aboard Spitzer. MIPS collects an additional "color" of light in the infrared range, which reveals the red-colored features, created by dust that has been warmed by the hot gas and the light from nearby stars. The second image is based on data from IRAC alone, so this dust is not visible.

The images were pulled from data collected for the Galactic Legacy Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire project (GLIMPSE). Using data from Spitzer, GLIMPSE created the most accurate map ever of the large central bar of the galaxy and showed that the galaxy is riddled with gas bubbles like those seen here.

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On Sept. 25, 2018, Parker Solar Probe captured a view of Earth as it sped toward the first Venus gravity assist of the mission. Earth is the bright, round object visible in the right side of this image, taken by Parker Solar Probe's Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument. The elongated mark toward the bottom of the panel is a lens reflection from the WISPR instrument.

In order to unlock the mysteries of the Sun's atmosphere, Parker Solar Probe will use Venus’ gravity during seven flybys over nearly seven years to gradually bring its orbit closer to the Sun. The spacecraft will fly through the Sun’s atmosphere as close as 3.8 million miles to our star’s surface, well within the orbit of Mercury and more than seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before. The primary science goals for the mission are to trace how energy and heat move through the solar corona and to explore what accelerates the solar wind as well as solar energetic particles.

honeybee__12

This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region.
Evidence from radio, optical and ultraviolet telescopes suggests that the hot cloud, which is about 100 light years across, is the remnant of a supernova explosion that occurred thousands of years ago.

Here we see the spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it. Both objects, captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are found in the constellation of Sagitta and lie 15 000 light-years away.
The star Hen 2-427 shines brightly at the very centre of this explosive image and around the hot clumps of gas are ejected into space at over 150 000 kilometres per hour.
Hen 2-427 is a Wolf–Rayet star, named after the astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet. Wolf–Rayet are super-hot stars characterised by a fierce ejection of mass.
The nebula M1-67 is estimated to be no more than 10 000 years old.