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Pictured is a Delta IV rocket launch from Cape Canaveral on November 21st, 2010. The image is a 20 second exposure taken at dusk, shot from about 100 miles west of the launch site. The launch placed a classified payload in orbit for the United States Air Force.
Difficult but not impossible to catch against the dawn or dusk sky, spotting an extreme crescent moon can be a challenge. The slender crescent pictured was shot 30 minutes before sunrise when the Moon was less than 20 hours away from New.� A true feat of visual athletics to catch, a good pair of binoculars or a well aimed wide field telescopic view can help with the hunt.
The Sun is our nearest star, and goes through an 11-year cycle of activity. This image was taken via a properly filtered telescope, and shows the Sun as it appeared during its last maximum peak in 2003. This was during solar cycle #23, a period during which the Sun hurled several large flares Earthward. The next solar cycle is due to peak around 2013-14.
Located in the belt of the constellation Orion, Messier 42, also known as the Orion Nebula is one of the finest deep sky objects in the northern hemisphere sky. Just visible as a faint smudge to the naked eye on a clear dark night, the Orion Nebula is a sure star party favorite, as it shows tendrils of gas contrasted with bright stars. M42 is a large stellar nursery, a star forming region about 1,000 light years distant.
Orbiting the planet in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) every 90 minutes, many people fail to realize that you can see the International Space Station (ISS) from most of the planet on a near-weekly basis. In fact, the ISS has been known to make up to four visible passes over the same location in one night. The image pictured is from the Fourth of July, 2011 and is a 20 second exposure of a bright ISS pass.
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Next to the Sun, the two brightest objects in the sky are the Moon and the planet Venus. In fact, when Venus is favorably placed next to the Moon, it might just be possible to spot the two in the daytime. Another intriguing effect known as earthshine or ashen light is also seen in the image on the night side of the Moon; this is caused by sunlight reflected back off of the Earth towards our only satellite.
A mosaic of three images taken during the total lunar eclipse of December 21st, 2010. The eclipse occurred the same day as the winter solstice. The curve and size of the Earth�s shadow is apparent in the image.
Astro Video of the Week: White Dwarf, Brown Dwarf
+19th magnitude white dwarf WD 1202-024. (SDSS)
Wanna see a wacky planetary system? A recent discovery by MIT, Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Bishop’s University researchers was announced at the 200th AAS meeting in Austin, Texas and made the news rounds last week, but I don’t think folks really got a good grasp on just how strange a binary system WD 1202-024 really is.
Let’s break it down. The primary component in the WD 1202-024 system is a white dwarf star about 40% the mass of our Sun, a degenerate star of compressed matter about the size of the Earth. Whizzing around that is a brown dwarf about 67 Jupiter masses and about the same diameter as Jove… much larger than the primary, but much less massive. And both are � get this � only 193,000 miles apart… about two thirds of the Earth -Moon distance. This means that the brown dwarf is hauling interplanetary butt around the primary once every 71 minutes (a shorter period than satellites in low Earth orbit) moving at 62 miles per second.
Located 270 light years distant in the constellation Virgo, WD 1202-024 was spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope on its extended K2 mission scanning the plane of the ecliptic. Kepler looks for transiting objects, or stars that dip in brightness as an unseen companion crosses in front of our line of sight, and the wacky worlds of WD 1202-024 certainly qualify.
I wouldn’t place too much stock in the statement proclaimed in many news articles that the brown dwarf companion was once in the atmosphere of the red giant star that became the current white dwarf. More likely, the brown dwarf migrated inward to its present orbit.
Both objects must dominate each others sky, as the white dwarf raises the daytime temperature of the brown dwarf to a blazing 5250 K or nearly 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It has a long scorching life ahead, as the white dwarf ember won’t cool down to a black dwarf cinder until a few trillion years from now, longer than the current age of the Universe.
It’s a bizarre Universe for sure. What other strange worlds await?