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.