Basic astronomy and night sky information
Articles about the science of astronomy and objects that are visible in the night sky.
Just confirmed at 5:55 PDT… the New Horizons spacecraft is still operating after passing Pluto earlier today. Congratulations to the NASA team for a job well done! The craft is now outbound to the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Stay tuned for more data and images that are (hopefully) coming in from the craft which is 4.5 light-hours away!
LOCKED! We have confirmation of a successful #PlutoFlyby. pic.twitter.com/Krfo9qxxHw
— NASA New Horizons (@NASANewHorizons) July 15, 2015
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Does understanding more about astronomy make the night sky less beautiful? Does science take the mystery and beauty of nature and make it dull and joyless? The great physicist and teacher Richard Feynman thought not. In a famous BBC interview, Feynman explained, using a flower as an example, why understanding something makes it more beautiful, more interesting, not less. Not convinced? Take a look at this short video clip of Feynman’s “Ode to a Flower” and decide for yourself.
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With less than 6 days to go before New Horizons makes its closest approach to Pluto, the dwarf planet is proving to be an interesting little world. Just released by NASA this morning, this image of Pluto shows the regions of the planet that will be inspected in next week’s close flyby. The dark region along the equator, at bottom, has been dubbed ” the whale”. The lighter heart-shaped region at right is about 1,200 miles across. The polar region is in the upper part of the image.
The probe had a little trouble over the weekend when a software glitch caused the probe to go into safe mode and halt all science operations. But engineers have tidied up the problem and full operations have resumed on July 7. The closest flyby comes next week on July 14, 2015 at 11:50 UTC.
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NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft received a final “all clear” as it approaches Pluto at nearly 50,000 km/hr on its way to an historic flyby on July 14, 2015. Mission scientists have been using the spacecraft’s most powerful telescopic camera, the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), to look for potential hazards such as small moons, rings, or dust, since mid-May. But the path looks clear, and the craft will continue on its present course towards Pluto and its five moons.
New color images released July 1 show two very different faces of the dwarf planet. One side of the planet revealed a series of intriguing and evenly-spaced dark spots along the equator. Each spot is about 480 kilometers in diameter with a surface area roughly equal to that of Missouri [Read more…] about The Two Faces of Pluto
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On June 27, the astronomers at Slooh.com and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), home of the largest telescope on Earth, presented a live observation of an exoplanet passing across the face of its home star. It was the first live broadcast of such an event, and was sufficiently extraordinary that the King of Spain was in attendance to inaugurate the telescopes before the show [Read more…] about Watch an Exoplanet Transit a Star
