Space

LittleLionHeart1

honeybee__12 wrote: »

The Latest: Three of the world's largest radio telescopes team up to show a rare double asteroid. 2017 YE5 is only the fourth binary near-Earth asteroid ever observed in which the two bodies are roughly the same size, and not touching.

This is better than a double rainbow..

LittleLionHeart1

cee134 wrote: »

Reddened by scattered sunlight, the Moon in the center is passing through the center of Earth's dark umbral shadow in this July 27 lunar eclipse sequence. Left to right the three images are from the start, maximum, and end to 103 minutes of totality from the longest lunar eclipse of the 21st century. The longest path the Moon can follow through Earth's shadow does cross the shadow's center, that's what makes such central lunar eclipses long ones.

But July 27 was also the date of lunar apogee, and at the most distant part of its elliptical orbit the Moon moves slowest. For the previous lunar eclipse, last January 31, the Moon was near its orbital perigee. Passing just south of the Earth shadow central axis, totality lasted only 76 minutes. Coming up on January 21, 2019, a third consecutive total lunar eclipse will also be off center and find the Moon near perigee. Then totality will be a mere 62 minutes long.

Everlasting Gobstoppers.

cee134

Messier 20 and 21



The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (bottom right). Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself is about 40 light-years across and a mere 300,000 years old.

That makes it one of the youngest star forming regions in our sky, with newborn and embryonic stars embedded in its natal dust and gas clouds. Estimates of the distance to open star cluster M21 are similar to M20's, but though they share this gorgeous telescopic skyscape there is no apparent connection between the two. In fact, M21's stars are much older, about 8 million years old.

honeybee__12

This artist's concept illustrates the hottest planet yet observed in the universe. The scorching ball of gas, a "hot Jupiter" called HD 149026b, is a sweltering 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit (2,040 degrees Celsius) -- about 3 times hotter than the rocky surface of Venus, the hottest planet in our solar system. The planet is so hot that astronomers believe it is absorbing almost all of the heat from its star, and reflecting very little to no light. Objects that reflect no sunlight are black. Consequently, HD 149026b might be the blackest known planet in the universe, in addition to the hottest.

The temperature of this dark and balmy planet was taken with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. While the planet reflects no visible light, its heat causes it to radiate a little visible and a lot of infrared light. Spitzer, an infrared observatory, was able to measure this infrared light through a technique called secondary eclipse.

HD 149026b is what is known as a transiting planet, which means that it crosses in front of and passes behind its star -- the secondary eclipse -- when viewed from Earth. By determining the drop in total infrared light that occurs when the planet disappears, astronomers can figure out how much infrared light is coming from the planet alone.

cee134

Planetary nebula NGC 3918

honeybee__12

cee134

Time-lapse Sequence of Jupiter’s North



Striking atmospheric features in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere are captured in this series of color-enhanced images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

solorex

Awesome!

JetJaguar

A bit of an aside, but I've been trying to get a good look at Mars in the telescope lately, and it is simultaneously cool and disappointing.

It's cool because it's close to Earth right now so you can get a pretty good view, but disappointing because all you see is a featureless, orange-red ball. Normally you can see at least the white poles, and make out lighter and darker features on the surface (at least in my 'scope). But the reason you can't see anything is because of a global sandstorm, and that's pretty cool. I understand the storm is starting to subside, though.

honeybee__12

A recent study out from Leiden Observatory and Cornell University may shed light on the curious case of one of the solar system's more exotic objects: 90377 Sedna.

A team led by astronomer Mike Brown discovered 90377 Sedna in late 2003. Provisionally named 2003 VB12, the object later received the name Sedna from the International Astronomical Union, after the Inuit goddess of the sea.

From the start, Sedna was an odd-ball. Its 11,400 year orbit takes it from a perihelion of 76 astronomical units (for context, Neptune is an average of 30 AUs from the sun) to an amazing 936 AUs from the sun. (A thousand AUs is 1.6% of a light year, and 0.4% of the way to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system). Currently at a distance of 86 AU and headed towards perihelion in 2076, we're lucky we caught Sedna as it 'neared' (we use the term 'near' loosely in this case!) the sun.
But this strange path makes you wonder what else is out there, and how Sedna wound up in such an eccentric orbit.

cee134

Lights of Java



Astronauts get to observe the Earth in all her beauty from aboard the International Space Station. A member of the Expedition 56 crew currently onboard the station took this nighttime image of Java, Indonesia's largest island.

cee134

The NGC 6914 Complex



A study in contrasts, this colorful skyscape features stars, dust, and glowing gas in the vicinity of NGC 6914. The complex of reflection nebulae lies some 6,000 light-years away, toward the high-flying northern constellation Cygnus and the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Obscuring interstellar dust clouds appear in silhouette while reddish hydrogen emission nebulae, along with the dusty blue reflection nebulae, fill the cosmic canvas.

Ultraviolet radiation from the massive, hot, young stars of the extensive Cygnus OB2 association ionize the region's atomic hydrogen gas, producing the characteristic red glow as protons and electrons recombine. Embedded Cygnus OB2 stars also provide the blue starlight strongly reflected by the dust clouds. The nearly 1 degree wide telescopic field of view spans about 100 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 6914.

honeybee__12

Shortly after midnight Eastern Time on Jan. 1, 2019, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will buzz by the most primitive and most distant object ever explored. New Horizons’ encounter with Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, which orbits a billion miles beyond Pluto, will offer the first close-up look at such a pristine building block of the solar system.
New Horizons will fly about three times closer to MU69 than it did to Pluto in July 2015, allowing the spacecraft’s cameras to provide a more detailed look at the object’s surface.
Both 2014 MU69 and Pluto are in the Kuiper Belt, is a disc-shaped region beyond Neptune that extends from about 30 to 55 astronomical units (compared to Earth which is one astronomical unit, or AU, from the Sun). Comets from the Kuiper Belt, known as short period comets, take less than 200 years to orbit the Sun and travel approximately in the plane in which most of the planets orbit the Sun. There may be hundreds of thousands of icy bodies and a trillion or more comets in this distant region of our solar system.

cee134

Still bright in evening skies, Mars was just past opposition and closest to Earth on July 31, a mere 57.6 million kilometers away. Captured only a week later, this remarkable image shows the Red Planet's disk near its maximum size in earthbound telescopes, but still less than 1/74th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon.

Broad regional surface shadings are starting to reappear in the tantalizing view as the latest planet-wide dust storm subsides. With the bright south polar cap at the bottom, the Valles Marineris extends along the center of the disk. Just below it lies the roughly circular Solis Lacus region sometimes known as the Eye of Mars. In a line, three prominent dark spots left of center are the volcanic Tharsis Montes.

honeybee__12

This is kinda long but VERY cool.
https://youtu.be/2aCOyOvOw5c

honeybee__12

The next time you point your telescopes to the sky, look for the Eagle Nebula. Turn your telescope a little bit to the northwest and you’ll see a bright, reddish spot in the sky. That is not any ordinary star – it is the largest star we have ever seen.
It is UY Scuti.

9500 light years away, UY Scuti is in a dense star field in the so-called Zone of Avoidance in space – the area of space obscured by the Milky Way’s disk. The star is so gigantic, and so luminous, that even with the impending stars and space dust, you can see it with binoculars on a dark night.

The largest star in the galaxy is a beautiful and unusual one. It is hard to say exactly how large UY Scuti is – it is really, really far from us and it is a variable star, which means it changes its luminosity. That makes it difficult to judge it’s size accurately – UY Scuti pulsates once every 740 days. By our best estimates, the star is about 7 AU across.

cee134

Hubble’s Lucky Observation of an Enigmatic Cloud



The little-known nebula IRAS 05437+2502 billows out among the bright stars and dark dust clouds that surround it.

honeybee__12

Shuttle leaving our atmosphere.

cee134

NGC 3682: Sideways Spiral Galaxy



What do spiral galaxies look like sideways? Featured is a sharp telescopic view of a magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3628, a puffy galactic disk divided by dark dust lanes. Of course, this deep galactic portrait puts some astronomers in mind of its popular moniker, The Hamburger Galaxy.

The tantalizing island universe is about 100,000 light-years across and 35 million light-years away in the northern springtime constellation Leo. NGC 3628 shares its neighborhood in the local Universe with two other large spirals M65 and M66 in a grouping otherwise known as the Leo Triplet. Gravitational interactions with its cosmic neighbors are likely responsible for the extended flare and warp of this spiral's disk.

honeybee__12

The shadow covering Discovery, in this image taken by astronaut Paolo Nespoli, was made by the International Space Station as the shuttle prepared to dock.