A Tediously Accurate Map of the Solar System

A really cool representation of how empty space is. Follow the link below, and grab your favorite drink 'cause it'll take a while to go through all the planets.

If the moon were only 1 pixel.

Blue-Green and Red Clouds on Sunday Night

NASA Rocket Launch Will Create Blue-Green and Red Clouds on Sunday

NASA

On June 11, East Coast skywatchers may be in for a lovely show Sunday night, as NASA launches a sounding rocket and brightly colored vapor clouds into the night.

The (dog-inspired?) Terrier-Improved Malemute rocket is an information-gathering craft laden with instruments to capture information about our atmosphere and ionosphere. Its path will follow a sharp U-shaped trajectory, launching from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, soaring miles into the sky, peaking, then falling back to Earth and plunging into the Atlantic Ocean.

The launch is scheduled to occur between 9:04 and 9:19 p.m. EDT. Experts estimate that the flight will take about eight minutes from start to finish. Approximately four or five minutes after the rocket takes off, NASA will deploy 10 soda can–sized canisters full of reactive chemicals. The cans will burst 96 to 124 miles in the air, producing enormous, vibrant blooms of harmless red and blue-green clouds formed by the interaction of barium, strontium, and cupric-oxide. (These are commonly found in fireworks.) If the weather cooperates, these vapor tracers should be visible from New York to North Carolina and westward into Virginia.

NASA

Scientists will track the movement and dissipation of the clouds to understand how particles and air are flowing through the sky above us. Deploying the vapor tracers at a distance from the rocket should help provide an even fuller picture of just what’s going on up there.

You can catch it via Ustream or on the project’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

Full article here.

Amazing Show Tonight

SEE THE BREATHTAKING PERSEID METEOR SHOWER TONIGHT

There's an amazing show visible all over the world this week, and it's not the Olympics.

Happy Vernal Equinox 2016!

 But What Does That Mean?

Joe Hanson not to scale.

Saturday is the vernal equinox! Well, Saturday night is, depending on where on Earth you are. The moment happens at 04:30 UTC on March 20 this year, which is, for example, March 19 at 10:30 p.m. Mountain (U.S.) time, where I live.

PHIL PLAIT writes Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog and is an astronomer, public speaker, science evangelizer, and author of Death From the Skies!

But what does that mean, exactly? Why,let my friend Joe Hanson explain it to you in an episode of “It’s Okay to Be Smart”

The equilux point he makes is a good one. It’s even worse than he describes; our atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading it out. That’s why we have twilight; the air is lit up even when the Sun is well below the horizon. There are different definitions for twilight depending on what you mean by it, but a fair one is when the center of the Sun is about 12° below the horizon. The Sun moves across the sky at about a degree every two minutes, so twilight is bright for very roughly a half hour before sunrise and after sunset.

So equilux can be hard to define if you dive into the details about it.

One thing I always notice this time of year, too, is that the Sun seems to set noticeably farther north every day. At the December solstice it’s as far south as it can be on the horizon for Northern Hemisphere observers. At the June solstice it’s as far north as it gets. At the equinoxes it sets due west.

But the rate at which the sunset point moves north from winter to summer changes. It’s very slow at first, then speeds up to a maximum at the equinox, then slows again. So right now, not only is it setting farther north every day, the amount it moves north every day is largest. Starting after the equinox it begins to slow, and stops at the solstice (which literally means “the Sun stands still”).

If you’re mathematically inclined, the point on the horizon where the Sun sets is like a sine wave, moving south to north and back again with a period of one year. The speed at which that point moves along the horizon is the derivative of that, which is a cosine curve. Call due west on the horizon 0°, north +90°, and so on. When the Sun sets due west, on the equinox, the sine value is 0, but the cosine is maximized. That means the change in the position where the Sun sets is moving at its fastest speed. At the solstices the sine is maximized (the actual value depends on the Earth’s tilt and your latitude) but the absolute value of the cosine is minimized at 0, and then the cosine switches sign. In other words, the sunset point slows to a stop and then reverses direction the next day.

This gets worse because the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, which messes with things, as Joe pointed out in his video. But it’s close enough. People make analemma photos all the time, showing the Sun’s position in the sky over the course of a year. I’d love to see the same thing, but instead showing the Sun just at sunset every day of the year. Then this speeding up and slowing of the Sun’s sunset point would be obvious. That’d be quite an effort, though, and I’ve never seen one made. Any takers?

original article

Five Planets at Once

Stargazers, you’re in for a treat. From Jan. 20 to Feb. 20, people around the world who wake up just before dawn will be able to see five planets. FIVE! (BuzzFeed News) Here’s what the sky should look like. To see this, you’ll have to set your alarm really early. Like an hour before sunrise. Sky and Telescope Magazine

Winter Solstice

Good Solstice Everyone!

Pluto Flyby

In case you haven't already seen this... take an HD look at Pluto!

Pluto flyby photos thrill New Horizons scientists after nine-year Nasa mission
The Guardian

NASA spacecraft makes history as the first spacecraft to reach distant dwarf planet, the last unexplored world in the solar system.

NASA’s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto early Tuesday, providing the clearest images yet of the dwarf planet.

New Horizons launched in 2006 and has traveled 3 billion miles in the past nine years. It’s not stopping at Pluto, but it flew past the dwarf planet at 7:49 a.m. ET Tuesday. 

At its closest approach, the spacecraft will have been just 12,500 kilometers (about 7,750 miles) from the surface, traveling at 14 kilometers per second (31,000 miles per hour). The pass was the closest scientists have ever been able to get to Pluto.

The stunning image of the dwarf planet was captured in the above photo from New Horizons at about 4 p.m. EDT on July 13, about 16 hours before the moment of closest approach. The spacecraft was 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from the surface.

  

NASA released the first close-up photo of Pluto on Instagram Tuesday morning, taken before the spacecraft reached its closest approach.

It was later released on their website, too.

The probe has given scientists a better view of the dwarf planet than they’ve ever had before.

NASA / Via nasa.gov

This photo of Pluto (right) and Charon was taken just a few days ago, on July 11.

Until Tuesday, the best photograph of Pluto was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

 

NASA / ESA / Hubble / Via hubblesite.org

But Hubble was in Earth’s orbit, so the photo wasn’t very clear. But earlier this year, in May and June, New Horizons began sending back pictures of Pluto that were better than any Hubble had taken.

You can follow the flyby on NASA TV.