You are here: Home / Archives for bering sea meteor
The Sky is Waiting.
Search AstroGuyz
Custom Search
Advertise on Astroguyz!
 |
|
 |
 |
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.
�
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.
Orbiting Eyes Spy a Bering Sea Bollide
Just. wow.
The fascinating sequence of images below has been making its rounds around ye ‘ole web this week. It’s courtesy of the Japanese Space Agency’s Himawari-8 satellite, and shows something pretty remarkable: the contrail from a bolide that exploded over the Bering Sea near local noon off the coast of Kamchatka, Russia on December 18th, 2018. Though the approaching 10-meter asteroid went undetected and the resulting fireball was unwitnessed by human eyes, military detectors designed to record nuclear tests and 16 infrasound detectors recorded the estimated 176 kiloton event, 11 times larger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This was also the largest meteor explosion since Chelyabinsk in 2013.
A heck of a smoke train… Credit: Japan Meteorological Agency.
Though it was a whopper, it wasn’t surprising that the event went unwitnessed: it was cloudy, (see above) near noon, and over a sparsely populated region in the dead of winter. Yes, the Sun does skim the southern horizon as seen from the southern Bering Sea, even near the December solstice, despite what flat-Earthers vlogging from their parent’s basement might have you think.
University of Western Ontario meteor scientist Peter Brown first tweeted the news of the event on March 8th, and later the Himawari-8 imagery above emerged. That bolide trail lingered for a while, and makes you wonder how many other meteor events are out there lingering in the archives.
Enjoy this sunny Friday afternoon, and remember, the next big one is indeed out there. It’s sobering to think, we still don’t see everything, everywhere, all of the time.