Tag Archives: astronomy

The View On Comet 67P

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Spacecraft Lands Safely On Comet 67P

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Jupiter Is Watching You

The pupil is actually the shadow of Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s 67 “confirmed” moons and the largest moon in the solar system. “Larger than Mercury and Pluto, and only slightly smaller than Mars, Ganymede would easily be classified as a planet if it were orbiting the sun rather than Jupiter.” Ganymede whips around the massive Jupiter every seven days. Details.

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Christian Movie The Principle Claims Universe Revolves Around The Earth

Via the Christian site CBN News: A new documentary, “The Principle,” is so controversial that scientists and even people featured in the movie are condemning it before they’ve had a chance to see it. The film chops away at some of the most sacred cows of modern science: that Earth is nothing special and sprang into being by accident. It …

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NASA Spacecraft Orbits Mars

Via the New York Times: NASA’s latest Mars spacecraft, Maven, arrived Sunday evening to study the mystery of what happened to the planet’s air. After a 33-minute engine firing, mission controllers received acknowledgment at about 10:25 p.m. Eastern time that Maven was in orbit around Mars. After a six-week period to turn on and check systems on the spacecraft and …

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Astronomers Find “Mega-Earth”

Via the Washington Post: Astronomers have discovered a surprising planet, a rocky world with 17 times the mass of Earth. There have been “Super-Earths” discovered before, but this one is in a league of its own. The scientists call it a “Mega-Earth.” Discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope and announced Monday at an astronomy meeting in Boston, this planet, officially …

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NASA Cameras Capture Solar Eruption

Via the Telegraph: Solar flares, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs) belch huge clouds of superheated particles from the sun’s corona – the wispy, outermost and hottest layer – and can reach speeds exceeding one million miles per hour. The CME, captured on May 9, 2014, was the first seen by NASA’s new Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS. To capture …

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TONIGHT: Manhattanhenge

Sunsets are not regularly visible to most of Manhattan. But tonight, if you stand in the right place, you’ll see one. It’s Manhattanhenge. Just before sunset, the sun will line up with Manhattan’s cross streets. For 15 minutes, beginning just after 8 p.m., the sun will appear on the edge of the grid in half-disk form, like a postcard. It …

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NASA Tracks Blood Moon Eclipse

There’s a moon in the sky. It’s called the moon. 

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Trolls Creationists

“The Crab Nebula is about 6,500 light years from Earth. According to some beliefs, that’s the age of the whole universe, but if the universe were only 6,500 years old, how could we see light from anything more distant than the Crab Nebula? We couldn’t. To believe in a universe as young as 6,000 or 7,000 years old is to …

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NASA: Look At The Milky Way

Via the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Touring the Milky Way now is as easy as clicking a button with NASA’s new zoomable, 360-degree mosaic presented Thursday at the TEDActive 2014 Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The star-studded panorama of our galaxy is constructed from more than 2 million infrared snapshots taken over the past 10 years by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. “If …

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Meteor Shower Hits Russia

USA Today reports: Russia was hit by a meteor shower on Friday in the nation’s central Ural Mountains, injuring hundreds and causing damage to buildings in six cities, according to reports. Fragments of the meteor fell in a thinly populated area of the Chelyabinsk region, Russia’s Emergency Ministry said in a statement, the Associated Press reported. At least three had …

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Water Confirmed On Mercury

NASA has confirmed the presence of ice on the north pole of Mercury. Temperatures on Mercury can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius), but around the north pole, in areas permanently shielded from the sun’s heat, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft found a mix of frozen water and possible organic materials. Evidence of big pockets of ice is visible from a …

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Take A Stellar Tour

JMG reader BStewart23 points out this fascinating look at the galaxy.  Click on the “take a tour” button.  Start scrolling around and there goes your work productivity for today. This was created by Google, so naturally it works best in Chrome. (But it also seem to work fine in Firefox.)

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WATCH LIVE: Mars Rover Landing

Video appears after clicking play. The rover is scheduled to touch down at 1:17AM eastern time, but confirmation won’t be received for about 15 minutes.

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Asteroid Named For Mattachine Society Cofounder Frank Kameny

The International Astronomical Union and Minor Planet Center has named an asteroid after late Mattachine Society cofounder Frank Kameny. A Canadian amateur astronomer has named an asteroid he discovered after U.S. gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, who died last year in Washington. Kameny, who earned a doctorate in astronomy at Harvard University, was an astronomer with the U.S. Army Map …

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All 786 Known Planets To Scale

The text notes that most of the exo-planets are huge compared to the ones in our solar system because larger bodies are (for now) easier to find. Via the always fascinating XKCD.

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Venus In Flight

Yesterday the Boston Globe’s long-running Big Picture photo essay featured numerous shots of Venus crossing between the sun and the Earth. That won’t happen again until 2117.

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TONIGHT: Venusian Rarity

You’ll only get one shot at seeing this in your lifetime. The annals of European astronomy burst with famous names: Copernicus, Kepler, Halley. Jeremiah Horrocks? Not so famous. But in 1639, the young Englishman became the first person known to witness one of the rarest events in the heavens: the passing of Venus across the face of the sun — …

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TONIGHT: Manhattanhenge

Details.

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