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.