So, what's up with Betelgeuse?

Betelgeuse and Antares are the two nearest red supergiant stars that are characterized as core-collapse Type-II supernova (SN II) progenitors. Recent photometry shows that Betelgeuse has been declining in brightness since October 2019, and has now reached a modern all-time low of +1.12 mag on December 7, 2019. Betelgeuse is a complicated variable star whose period of ~420 +/-15 days is marginal at best, and this period varies a lot throughout the years. Betelgeuse also has a longer-term (5 - 6 years) and shorter term (100 - 180 days) period of variability with smaller brightness changes. This latest observation has Betelgeuse shining the faintest in the 25+ years of continuous monitoring by astronomers and 50 years of photoelectric V-band spectroscopic observations.

Amateur astronomers around the world have been commenting on the very obvious dimming of one of the key components of the Orion constellation. Many are waiting for Betelgeuse to finally 'go off' which would produce the most fantastic event in modern time astronomy. Indeed, scientists have predicted that Betelgeuse is ripe to go supernova soon, but soon is a relative term, and ranges from 100,000 years and up. No one knows for sure and recent activity may indicate a readiness of the star to enter the pre-supernova phase. Betelgeuse has dipped deeper in brightness before in the 1940's and 50's (long term brightness curve).

Will we see Betelgeuse 'pop' in our lifetime? Probably not, but if it did, you'd certainly know it. No, it would not end life on Earth. No, it won't become a second sun. Betelgeuse is about 450 light years from us and so would appear as a very, very bright star if it exploded. A supernova would need to be less than 50 light years to really affect life on earth. however, when this does happen, Betelgeuse will brighten enormously for a few weeks or months, perhaps as bright as the full moon and visible in broad daylight. And then, Orion will look very different than it does today!

Nope! Jupiter's Red Spot is not disappearing

No, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is not disintegrating, physicist claims

Earlier this year, several amateur astronomers spotted an unusual anomaly on the planet Jupiter: bits of the gas giant's famed Great Red Spot appeared to be flaking off, raising fears that the planet's most identifiable feature might be showing signs of disappearing. But Philip Marcus, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, begs to differ. He argues that reports of the red spot's death have been greatly exaggerated.

A dramatic view of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and its surroundings, courtesy of Voyager 1 on Feb. 25, 1979, when the spacecraft was 5.7 million miles (9.2 million kilometers) from Jupiter.
NASA/JPL/Public Domain

According to Prof. Marcus, however, his computer models demonstrate that the flaking is not a death knell for the Great Red Spot at all. Rather, it's a very natural weather phenomenon arising from the complex fluid dynamics of Jupiter's atmosphere.

Read about it at arstechnica.com

NGC 7635 - Bubble nebula

The Bubble Nebula in SHO

NGC 7635 (The Bubble Nebula)
GT102 f/5.5 APO with ASI1600mm Pro Camera
7.5 hrs total integration time

NGC 7635, also known as the Bubble Nebula, Sharpless 162, or Caldwell 11, is an H II region emission nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. It lies close to the direction of the open cluster Messier 52. The "bubble" is created by the stellar wind from a massive hot, 8.7 magnitude young central star, SAO 20575. (Wikipedia)

The Bubble Nebula is 7 light-years across and lies at a distance of 7,100 light-years from Earth. The star forming this nebula is about 45 times more massive than our sun. Gas on the star gets so hot that it escapes away into space as a "stellar wind" moving at an incredible 4 million miles per hour. This outflow sweeps up the cold, interstellar gas in front of it, forming the outer edge of the bubble. (Hubblesite)

Taken with my 102mm APO refractor and ASI1600mm camera, this is a narrowband image processed in the Hubble palette (SHO). Additional details on the image capture can be found at Bubble Nebula

Transit of Mercury, November 11, 2019

Well the day has finally arrived - the day of Mercury's transit across the sun.

Weather forecast was for 100% high cloud on Monday, the last transit of Mercury until 2032.  Yikes, usually a forecast like that is bad news - no chance at astrophotography. But when you are imaging a small black dot crossing the face of the sun, high clouds, if thin, are not a real problem. So the gear went out and I was able to capture most of the event.

First contact was around 7:40 am but due to the topography of my property the sun was not visible at that time. It wasn't until 8:26 am before the sun climbed sufficiently to peek out behind my garage/workshop and the southeastern tree line. I had some initial problems with getting the software up and running. Actually, it is a long story - I didn't decide to use my Canon 50D as the primary still camera until that morning and it turned out that the licenses to both my software applications that I use when imaging through the 50D had expired. The last time I used them was during the total solar eclipse of 2017. By the time I downloaded the new versions and paid for the upgrades it was almost 9:00.

But I finally did get everything up and running, although for some reason (still unknown) the mount was not able to keep the sun centered in the sensor of the camera and so I had to re-adjust every 20 minutes or so which made post-processing a nightmare.

Here is a single sub from the Canon. The sunspot-bare sun makes it easy to find the planet - the small black dot just left of center.

Transit of Mercury - November 11, 2019  9:12 a.m.
GT102 f/5.5 Canon 50D 1/1000 sec ISO 200

The whole session has been captured on a YouTube video on my channel which you can view via this link: Transit

A Japanese spacecraft is coming back to Earth with samples from a nearby asteroid

As reported in CNN Space+Science ...

For a little over a year, a tiny unmanned Japanese spacecraft has been sampling the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, capturing images, blasting a little crater in it, and firing a "bullet" into its exterior to dislodge particles.

Now, after traveling about 180 million miles, Hayabusa2 has begun its yearlong journey back to Earth with valuable data and soil samples in tow.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency hopes to use the materials to explore the origins of the planets and the source of Earth's oceans.

More details on this exciting effort can be found at CNN

Strangeness at the Boundary of Interstellar Space

Voyager 2 passes into interstellar space in this artist’s illustration.          NASA

NASA has found something weird and unexplained in the boundary between the Sun and interstellar space. On November 5, 2018, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft crossed into interstellar space, some six years after its twin, Voyager 1, made the same transition. There, it found something new and puzzling that its predecessor had missed.

“There appear to be cosmic ray boundary layers on both sides of the heliopause, with the outer one only being evident at the position of Voyager 2,” says Edward Stone, a professor of physics at Caltech and project scientist on the Voyager program since its inception in the 1970s. “This cosmic ray boundary layer on the outside of the heliopause was not evident at the place and time where Voyager 1 crossed it.”

See full article in VICE.

Two Star clusters and a Dark Nebula

I can't describe how great it is to have all my equipment operating at peak performance. And with a run of clear nights over the last 6 weeks I've finally arrived at the point where I am wishing for some cloudy nights so I can have the time to process all the images I captured!

Last time I wrote about imaging the Cygnus Wall, part of the North America Nebula. I did get about 7.5 hours of integration time in the HaOiiiSii (Hubble palette) and RGB stars, but the post-processing of the subs is giving me a whole bunch of trouble. So while I'm still trying to get this done, I took a break and decided to process some of the simpler objects taken with the standard RGB color palette.

First up is NGC 6712, a small globular cluster in the constellation of Scutum.

NGC 6712 Globular Cluster - September 26, 2019
GT102 f/5.6 - ASI1600mm Pro
20x60sec RGB 

Next, another globular cluster, M71, in the constellation of Sagitta. M71, or NGC 6838, is a star cluster at a distance of about 12,000 light years away from Earth and spans some 27 light years across.

M71 Globular Cluster  -  September 22, 2019
GT102 APO f/5.6 - ASI1600mm Pro
30x10sec RGB

Finally, my first dark nebula, is LDN 1165, in Cephus. Nebulae are giant clouds of dust and gas. Dark nebulae have a higher concentration of dust, which blocks almost all the light from the background stars, thus producing a region of the sky that is dark and featureless - what appears to be a hole in the sky.

LDN 1165  -  September 22, 2019
GT102 APO f/5.6 - ASI1600mmPro
60x60Lum, 30x60RGB

With the cloudy nights coming up, I think I'll be able to complete the processing of my other images. Stay tuned.

New Equipment Up and Running

For those of you following my blog you know of the myriad of problems I've been plagued with over the last couple of years trying to get all my telescope equipment to 'play nice' together. Well I finally decided to try an option that I've been examining for months - placing a NUC (small PC) mounted on my pier so that all cameras, focusers and mount cables can be connected directly to the USB ports without having to travel from my notebook to the mount over USB-LAN. This would also have the side benefit of improving my cable managemnet - reducing the dangling cables tht could cause snags and otherwise make it bad to image overnight unattended.

Well the decision paid off big. Not only did all my connection issues go away, but the USB3 ports made the whole system operate much faster. I've now tested the setup over three nights and not a single problem occurred - well, maybe a few, but they were human in nature not due to equipment faults.

Tonight I'm going to image the Cygnus wall - part of the North America nebula. I also have Sh2-101 (the Tulip nebula) taken last evening (and earlier) that I need to process. So, while I was waiting I took a quick single sub of the moon while the sky was still dusky. A green filter was used to help bring out the contrast.

Moon - September 7, 2019
GT102 f/5.5  ASI1600mm   0.005 seconds  Green Filter

M16, the Eagle Nebula, in Ha only

M16 - The Eagle Nebula - July 25 & 27, 2019
WO-GT102 APO (4" f/5.6) refractor and ASI1600mm Pro Camera
42x300 sec Ha subs

Summer offers some of the most interesting and colorful deep space objects in the night sky. This is because the arm of the Milky Way stretches up from the southern horizon revealing a bunch of bright nebulae. Unfortunately, my telescopes are set up in my backyard and the property is sort of "in a bowl" so to speak - trees line the horizon all the way around blocking any object lower than about 20-25 degrees in altitude. So whenever the skies are clear enough to capture some of these objects I have a limited window in which to get them.

Over the last month or two I've been attempting to capture M16, the Eagle Nebula, in SHO narrowband. As I mentioned in my last post, I ran into all kinds of problems - equipment failures, cloudy or poor sky conditions, etc. Bottom line is that never got good data in Oiii or Sii (the O and S in the SHO Hubble pallette). Not to let that bug me I decided to take the good Ha data and process a monochrome, Ha-only image of M16.

So here it is in all its B&W glory. In turns out that monochrome Ha data can be extremely interesting as it tends to show more of the finer, more tenuous detail in the outer edges of the nebula. Once I get the remaining Oiii and Sii data I can reprocess the image in color - that is, if I can get the data within the next week or so as M16 is setting earlier and earlier each night and soon will be out of my view. Forecast is for clear nights this week, so who knows - maybe I can get the remaining subs.

The Eagle Nebula is part of a diffuse emission nebula, or H II region (Ha). This region is known to contain active star formation and is about 7000 light-years distant. The cluster associated with the nebula has approximately 8100 stars and it is this group of stars that are the source of the energy that makes the nebula glow. Because this was taken with my short focal length, wide field refractor, the famous "Pillars of Creation" are a bit difficult to see. The Pillars were made famous in a 1995 Hubble telescope photo and has become the most recognizable Hubble image. Maybe next year, when I replace my defective large scope mount, I'll capture this again with much higher magnification and resolution.

NGC 6979 - Fleming's Triangular Wisp and Pickering's Triangle

NGC 6979 in HOO

Well it's been over 5 months since I've been able to image anything - lots of reasons, including the cloudy/rainy skies, busy at work, and telescope equipment failures. But over the past two weeks the skies cleared, equipment repaired (or replaced in some cases) and I was able to get back out under the night sky.

I spent a good amount of time on M16, the Eagle Nebula, but this past weekend I managed to capture part of the Veil nebula, Specifically, Fleming's Triangular Wisp and Pickering's Triangle. The entire Veil is large - it is made up of the visible portions of what is known as the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant. Many portions of the nebula have acquired their own individual names and catalogue identifiers, hence the long title.

The entire nebula is too large to capture in one image. The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than the Sun, which exploded around 8,000 years ago. The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, or 36 times the area, of the full Moon). The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, but is believed to be about 1,470 light-years.

NGC 6979
August 10-11, 2019   WO GT102 APO (4" Refractor)
ASI1600 mm Pro  8.3 Hours (50x300sec Ha; 50x300sec Oiii)

Here are two pieces of the nebula taken in bi-color, narrow-band imaging. Fifty exposures (or subs as we astrophotographers call them) were taken with a Hydrogen Alpha filter (Ha) and fifty with an Oxygen Filter (Oiii). These filters allow only a very, very narrow wavelength of light to get through to the camera's sensor. Since supernova remnants glow in both Ha and Oiii the use of these NB filters is ideal. The added benefit is that all the light pollution (and even the nearly full moon at the time of the image) is almost completely eliminated!  The center top of the image is Fleming's Triangular Wisp; the larger portion, to the right, is Pickering's Triangle.  The full resolution image can be found on Astrobin where I keep all my photos.

Later this summer I may try to capture the whole Veil using a process known as mosaic imaging where the telescope takes different subs from different parts of the sky and then stitches them together to form a whole image.  This takes a lot of time and all the equipment needs to be operating at peak efficiency.  

Later this weekend I will be processing the images I took of M16.  Look for M16 soon.

Jupiter - a target again - amateur detects impact on the giant planet!

It has happened a number of times in the past - in fact, 7 recorded impacts since July of 1994.  Texas amateur astronomer Ethan Chappel recorded this latest impact while waiting for some Perseid meteors to flash across the night sky. His Celestron 8 telescope captured the event as a flash of light in the planet's South Equatorial Belt (SEB).

For more, read the complete story at Sky and Telescope.

Is The Great Red Spot Unraveling?

Ever since I was a small boy I remember viewing Jupiter with my telescope and marveling at the huge red spot on the planet.  Known as the Great Red Spot (GRS), this phenomena has been a staple of Jupiter viewing for hundreds of years.

However, in the past few decades it has started to shrink, and continues to do so. In fact, the GRS used to be large enough to hold three Earths. Now only one would be sufficient to cover up the spot.

The giant storm appears to be unraveling. “I haven’t seen this before in my 17-or-so years of imaging Jupiter,” reports veteran observer Anthony Wesley of Australia. 

Will it disappear completely in our lifetimes?  Maybe.  I will be photographing Jupiter in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Complete story at SpaceWeatherArchive.

Teen discovers a Circumbinary Planet

A teen scientist from New York has discovered several distant exoplanets,
including a world that orbits two suns (artist’s concept shown).
T. PYLE/NASA/JPL-CALTECH

For all you Sci Fi fans ... remember Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home world in Star Wars?  That was a great sight on the theater's screen, a majestic planet orbiting twin stars.
Now, a teen in New York City has discovered just such a world orbiting a pair of stars far, far away.
Brian Wu, 17, presented his findings this week at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Ariz.

For the complete story, go to Science News for Students

Black, Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water

A new experiment confirms the existence of “superionic ice,” a bizarre form of water that might comprise the bulk of giant icy planets throughout the universe.

The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves the puzzle of what giant icy planets like Uranus and Neptune are made of. They’re now thought to have gaseous, mixed-chemical outer shells, a liquid layer of ionized water below that, a solid layer of superionic ice comprising the bulk of their interiors, and rocky centers.

Read the complete story at Quanta Magazine.

Universe expansion rate - faster than expected

The universe is getting bigger every second. The space between galaxies is stretching, like dough rising in the oven. But how fast is the universe expanding? As Hubble and other telescopes seek to answer this question, they have run into an intriguing difference between what scientists predict and what they observe.

See the full article at PhysOrg.

Magnetic North - more north than it used to be!

(Marc Ward/Shutterstock)

Have a compass?  Ever used one?  They point north, right?  Well, sorta ... they point to the geomagnetic north, different from the geographic north, and it moves about 30 miles further north every year. But recently it started moving faster than ever before. Interesting stuff - and lots of interesting concerns.

See the full article at Science Alert.

NASA study verifies global warming trends

A new study by researchers from NASA has verified the accuracy of recent global warming figures.
See the complete article at Physics World.

(Image courtesy: iStock/oonal)

Now without getting into the argument of 'what' or 'who' is causing the warmup, I find it interesting that this new study, which uses data from two different systems, finds a statistical correlation between the two data sets indicating a relationship strong enough to verify that global warming is occurring.

I would like to get my hands on the raw data they used and run my own analysis, but this is just one more piece of evidence pointing to a warmer earth.

Black Hole finally imaged

The first-ever image of a black hole was released Wednesday by a consortium of researchers, showing the "black hole at the center of galaxy M87, outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon."

Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al

The world was treated to the first-ever image of a black hole today, as an international team of researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope project released their image of a supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87). This image shows a dark disc with the outline of emissions from hot gases swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon.

Located in the Virgo galaxy cluster, the enormous black hole is 55 million light-years from Earth. It has a mass of about 6.5 billion times that of our sun.

And for those of you who may have seen the movie, "Interstellar" - yep, it turns out it looks just like that! Wow.

Check out the full article at NPR

Also, see the article in National Geographic and this YouTube video really explains the image very well - worth watching to the end.

'Bombing' Asteroids and the "Illusion' of Space

Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft has successfully “bombed” asteroid Ryugu in the name of scientific research.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said Hayabusa2 dropped a small explosive box which sent a copper ball the size of a baseball slamming into the asteroid, and that data confirmed the spacecraft had safely evacuated and remained intact.

Full article here.

Credit:  Getty Images

And just when you thought causality works - think again, or maybe you did already ... see the article here.

Fireballs

Apparently March and April have been good months for Fireball sightings.  Check the latest that occurred Thursday morning visible across the SE US.

Fireball Streaks Across the SE US

Best of 2017-18 video up on YouTube

Finally got my "Best of" video for last year done.  Check it out at:

Mikey's Best of 2017-18

 https://youtu.be/VRyTXA6UUis

Sh2-261 (Lower's Nebula) in RGBHa

One of the things we astro-photographers do when its cloudy is spend time doing the post processing of the images we've taken when the skies were clear.

Sh2-261 - February 9, 2019
GT102 f/5.6 with ASI1600mm Pro
15x30sec RGB; 25x300sec Ha

This object is Sh2-261, Sharpless 261, also known as the Lower's Nebula, is a faint region of doubly ionized hydrogen. Its apparent dimension is about 50 arcminutes in East-West direction and 30 arcminutes in North-South. So, it has an apparent size about twice the full Moon diameter. Of course the real size of the nebula is much larger! But we have no information about the distance of this hydrogen cloud, so we are not able to determine how large it is.

This image was taken with my 102mm APO refractor and ASI1600mm Pro camera using RGB filters and with Ha (the doubly ionized hydrogen wavelength).  Once I get another couple of clear nights I’m going to add in the Oiii (oxygen) and Sii (Sulphur) data to bring out the middle of the nebula.

NGC 2174 - The Monkey Head Nebula

Looks like 2019 is starting to have some more clear nights than last year. Of course, we are only in February, but so far, so good!

In late January I was able to capture a difficult object - the "Monkey Head Nebula" in narrowband (in the Hubble palette - SHO).

NGC 2174 - The Monkey Head Nebula
Jan 25-26, 2019   WO GT102 f5.5   6.8 hours
ASI1600mm RGBSHO
Details on Astrobin

NGC 2174 (also known as Monkey Head Nebula) is an H II emission nebula located in the constellation Orion and is associated with the open star cluster NGC 2175. It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth. Since emission nebulae are rich in Ha light, the SHO palette shows them off quite well.

Total Lunar Eclipse of January 2019

The storm moved through, the skies cleared and so I set up in the freezing cold and wind to capture the best placed lunar eclipse in a long time.  I was planning to image this event, but the weather didn't look like it was going to cooperate earlier in the week.  With my remote focuser still in repair I would have to manually focus to get the images.

But the skies did clear, and this was a fantastic evening.  I stayed up to capture the whole event, setting up at 4:30PM and finally tearing down at 2:40AM the next morning.

I used my GT102 f/5.5 APO refractor with my Canon 50D as the imaging camera.  Backyard EOS was the imaging software.  Since I wanted to produce a time-lapse image, I had to sit by and capture a new frame every 6.5 minutes.  Here is the mid-eclipse shot at maximum totality.

Mid Eclipse - 12:12AM Jan 21, 2019
GT102 APO at f/5.5 - Canon 50D - ISO 400  4 Seconds

And the time-lapse, of 33 images.  Sorry for the 'bouncing' around, but I didn't take the time to register each image exactly.

Finally, the moon was rather dark during this eclipse, and so lots of stars could be seen around the area of the moon.  Here is a wide field shot at 8 seconds so that the stars can be seen.

All in all it was a great evening - but I'm still feeling the tingling in my fingertips from the bitter cold and wind while I was packing everything up.  I'm still planning on building an observatory to house both scopes.

Cave Nebula (in Ha)

I really like colorful astro images, but every now and then an object lends itself to just plain 'ol mono, albeit in this case mono at a single light frequency - that of Hydrogen Alpha, or Ha.  Normally, I would shoot two or three NB images (Ha, Oiii and Sii) and add in the broadband colors of R, G and B. On December 10 and 11 I took a small number of RGB and a lot of Ha, 40 subs each 10 minutes long. The RGB images just weren't good enough to use - this object needed at least 2 hours of each and I had only about 15 minutes of each. So I decided to process this DSO (Deep Space Object) in the Ha band only.

So here is the Cave Nebula, or Sh2-155.

Sh2-155 (Cave Nebula) in Ha
December 10, 11, 2018    GT102 at f/5.5    ASI1600mm Pro
40x600sec (6.7 hrs integration)

Sh2-155 (also designated Sharpless 155 or S155) is a diffuse nebula in the constellation Cepheus, within a larger nebula complex containing emission, reflection, and dark nebulosity. It is widely known as the Cave Nebula, which was coined for this object by Patrick Moore, presumably derived from photographic images showing a curved arc of emission nebulosity corresponding to a cave mouth. Although Sh2-155 is relatively faint for amateur observation, some of its structure may be seen visually through a moderately sized telescope under dark skies. Sh2-155 lies at the edge of the Cepheus B cloud (part of the Cepheus molecular cloud), and is ionized by young stars from the Cep OB3 association. It has been suggested that radiation from the hot O-type star HD 217086 is compressing the region, triggering the formation of a new generation of stars. A study of the region's young stellar objects by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope shows a progression of stellar ages in front of the cloud, supporting the hypothesis of triggered star-formation. (Wikipedia)

Heart Nebula in the Hubble Palette

Back in early December I took 22 Ha subs of the Heart Nebula (IC 1805).  Then had to wait until early January to complete the imaging. On Jan 5 and 6 captured the 20x RGB and 20 Oiii and Sii.

So here is the Heart Nebula in RGBSHO.

Dec 11, Jan 5 and 6   GT102 f/5.5   ASI1600mm
30min RGB, 300min NB (Ha, Oiii, Sii)  5.8 hrs total integration

The Heart Nebula, IC 1805, Sharpless 2-190, lies some 7500 light years away from Earth and is located in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. This is an emission nebula showing glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.

The very brightest part of this nebula (the knot at the western edge, lower right) is separately classified as NGC 896, because it was the first part of this nebula to be discovered. (Note: The field of view for my capture was not able to include NGC 896.)

The nebula's intense red output and its configuration are driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula's center. This open cluster of stars known as Melotte 15 contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, and many more dim stars that are only a fraction of our Sun's mass.   (from Wikipedia)

Hubble's Main Camera has a problem

Hubble Space Telescope's premier camera shuts down

The Hubble Space Telescope's premier camera has shut down because of a hardware problem.

NASA said the camera stopped working Tuesday. Hubble's three other science instruments are still working fine, with celestial observations continuing.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-hubble-space-telescope-premier-camera.html

New Horizons Successfully Explores Ultima Thule - Most Distant Target in History

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year's Day, ushering in the era of exploration from the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds keys to understanding the origins of the solar system.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI;
sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons' high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule's size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist's impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima's spin axis is indicated by the arrows.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

This sequence of three images, received on Dec. 31, 2018, and taken by the LORRI camera onboard New Horizons at 70 and 85 minutes apart illustrates the rotation of Ultima Thule.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The New Horizons spacecraft will continue downloading images and other data in the days and months ahead, completing the return of all science data over the next 20 months.


The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtags #UltimaThule, #UltimaFlyby and #askNewHorizons to join the conversation. Live updates and links to mission information are also available on http://pluto.jhuapl.edu and www.nasa.gov.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190101