New Comet!

A new comet crept up on us this past weekend, one that should be visible for northern hemisphere observers soon.  I'm excited, as my favorite pastime in astronomy (besides just general astrophotography) is imaging comets.

New Comet ASASSN1 (C/2017 O1) already glows aqua from carbon-laced gases.
The comet is currently visible in the pre-dawn sky through modest-sized telescopes.
Rolando Ligustri

C/2017 O1, or Comet ASASSN1, is currently fairly dim and requires a medium sized telescope to see, but may brighten to within binocular capability as the year progresses. In fact, since its discovery on July 19th it has brightened almost 100,000 fold. It was discovered by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN).

Details can be found at SkyAndTelescope  and Universe Today.  

New Horizon's Next Target

The Kuiper Belt object (known as 2014 MU69, 4.1 billion miles from Earth)
passes in front of a star and winks it out

Check out this article about the next target for the New Horizons spacecraft.  One of the team members that went to Argentina to capture the occultation (when one object passes in front of another - in this case, the Kuiper Belt object in front of a star) was Steve Conard, the lead engineer that built and tested the LORRI camera on New Horizons at APL in Laurel, Maryland. Steve is a member of the Westminster Astronomical Society, whom I met when I joined WASI back last year.

Complete article at NASA.

Uh-oh, bad news for life on Mars

The Martian surface may be even less hospitable to life than scientists had thought.
Ultraviolet (UV) radiation streaming from the sun "activates" chlorine compounds in the Red Planet's soil, turning them into potent microbe-killers, a new study suggests.

Complete story on Space.com

Geostationary Satellite in trouble

A satellite may be falling apart in geostationary orbit. On the morning of June 17, the Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES lost control of a large satellite in geostationary space, nearly 36,000km above the Earth's surface. Shortly after, the satellite operator began working with another company that specializes in space situational awareness to track the drifting machine, AMC-9. A few days ago that company, ExoAnalytic Solutions, saw the AMC-9 satellite begin to fragment.

There is a video showing the breakup and more details at:  ARS Technica