Double Moon

Recently a few of my friends have approached me asking about the rare occurrence of a 'Double Moon' - that Mars will be so close to us that it will appear almost as large as the moon and that on August 27, 2015 both will appear in the sky.

Well, I figured I'd best direct everyone to this article, "Two Moons on August 27?" (and there are many more) by David Emery of Urban Legends for an explanation.  Bottom line, if you don't want to check out the article:  it's a long lasting (surprisingly) - hoax!

Perseids Meteor Shower Tonight

The Perseids meteor shower will peak this evening in what should be a great show for meteor lovers.  This year the moon is out of the picture (new moon occurs on Aug 14th) and the skies are expected to be clear over much of the country.

You should be able to see about 1 meteor a minute. Look to the NE between midnight and 4:00 AM for the best viewing.

Details on the event can be found at Perseids Meteor Shower

Earth from 1 Million Miles away

With all the attention being given to Pluto, it was nice to see this outstanding photo of our home from way up in space - far enough away to show the entire sunlit planet.

Details on the camera and satelite used to capture this image can be found at NASA.gov

Pluto Flyby is Confirmed - All Systems Go!

With a successful fly-by of the planet Pluto behind us, now we wait for the real exciting stuff - hi-res close-ups of the farthest planetary body.  New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface — roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India — making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.
Read about here at New Horizons.

Wow - a clear night at last!

After waiting for over a month, last Saturday night (early Sunday morning) was a nice clear and calm evening.  Reasonably good transparency too for a summer evening.  So, of course, I was out with the scope.

Most of the night was spent checking out the new 'ScopeStuff' focuser I purchased for my Orion ST-80 guide scope.  The focuser that comes with the ST-80 is pretty bad.  I was hoping a good quality focuser would help in both getting a sharp focus and holding the guide camera locked tight with no or at least minimal flexure.  After almost 3 hours getting everything mounted and re-adjusted, and fighting some software crashes with SGP (still can't get that program to auto-focus my camera), I was able to test out the new system with a photo of M20, the Trifid Nebula.

So here is the result ...

M20 - The Trifid Nebula
48 min (24x120sec) at ISO 800 w/Canon 70D
EdgeHD11 w/0.61x Focal Reducer

Based on the roundness of the stars and the guide plots on the PHD monitor screen (+/- 1 arcsec) I think maybe the new focuser helped out a lot.  But, I'll need to test more.  It could have just been the calm atmosphere.  Looks like later this week we might have another one or two clear evenings.  You'll know where I'll be :)

Pluto - look out, here we come!

With just about a day to closest approach, images of the farthest planet (sorry, dwarf planet) from the sun are streaming in and boy are they great!  Nothing like what I expected, but hey, the universe always seems to surprise us.

Check out Pluto mission at APL for up to the minute information on this history making event.

Sinkholes in a Comet

Looks like earth is not the only place to develop sink holes.  Check out this article on the sinkholes on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.   SkyandTelescope

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Pluto, we're almost there.

In just shy of two weeks the New Horizons spacecraft will arrive at the dwarf planet Pluto on July 14, 2015.  A mission that spanned nearly a decade; a spacecraft traveling 3 billion miles; will climax in a single day as New Horizons will speed past Pluto at 32,500 MPH.

If all goes well we will see Pluto in detail never before possible.  This is the event of 2015!  And, you might not know, but New Horizons is controlled from right here in Maryland at the Applied Physics Lab.

Lots of details and up-to-the-minute coverage of this historic event can be found at New Horizons.

Bright Spots on Ceres ... and now a Pyramid.

As each new image of Ceres arrives at earth the more perplexing the dwarf planet grows. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has now identified several more bright spots as well as a pyramid-like peak miles high. More details can be found here.

Bad news from the SpaceX folks

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket broke up in a fiery blast on Sunday just minutes after its launch with a robotic Dragon cargo capsule headed for the International Space Station.

Details at NBC News

Faces of Pluto

As the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to its encounter with the dwarf planet Pluto, some fantastic images are starting to stream in from its current location almost 3 billion miles from Earth.
At that distance it takes about 4hrs and 20min for the signal to get to us from the spacecraft.

New Horizons is a little over 18 million miles from Pluto, moving at 8.6 miles per second, or about 31,000 MPH!

These images, taken by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show four different "faces" of Pluto as it rotates about its axis with a period of 6.4 days. All the images have been rotated to align Pluto's rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down) on the figure, as depicted schematically in the upper left.

New Horizons is just over 25 days and 12 hours to its historic rendezvous with Pluto.
 
For lots of up-to-the-minute information on the mission, check out New Horizons.