07 - Mercury
at inferior conjunction with the Sun
at 15h UT.
0000Mercury
passes into the morning sky (not visible).
08 - Moon
near Mars at 1h UT (evening sky). Mag.
+1.5.
19 - Venus
at superior conjunction with the Sun
at 4h UT.
0000Passes
into the evening sky (not visible).
19 - Moon
near Saturn at 7h UT (evening sky).
Mag. +0.7.
18 - Full Moon at 17:30 UT.
20 - Moon near Jupiter at 14h
UT (morning sky). Mag. -2.7. Jupiter displays
the
0000largest
and most detailed planetary disk of all the
planets. Even a small telescope
0000will
reveal Jupiter's cloud bands and its four largest
moons known as the Galilean
0000moons
(discovered by Galileo in 1610). Jupiter has
a total of 63 moons.
20 - Pluto at opposition at
16h UT. Mag. 14. Requires at least a 10-inch
telescope and
0000a
very dark sky to view.
20 - June solstice at 23:59
UT. The time when the Sun reaches the point
farthest north
0000of
the celestial equator marking the start of summer
in the Northern Hemisphere
000
and winter in the Southern Hemisphere.
00 0 0
0 0 0//
Get the complete calendar version
at skymaps.com
7 -
The
Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut
- On February 1, 1978, the first group of space shuttle
astronauts, twenty-nine men and six women, were introduced
to the world. Among them would be history makers, including
the first American woman and the first African American
in space. This assembly of astronauts would carry NASA
through the most tumultuous years of the space shuttle
program. Four would die on Challenger. Mullane vividly
portrays every aspect of the astronaut experience --
from telling a female technician which urine-collection
condom size is a fit; to walking along a Florida beach
in a last, tearful goodbye with a spouse; to a wild,
intoxicating, terrifying ride into space; to hearing
"Taps" played over a friend's grave. Mullane is brutally
honest in his criticism of a NASA leadership whose bungling
would precipitate the Challenger disaster.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Galaxies don mask of stars in new Spitzer image
A pair of dancing galaxies appears dressed for a cosmic masquerade in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared picture shows what looks like two icy blue eyes staring through an elaborate, swirling red mask. These "eyes" are actually the cores of two merging galaxies, called NGC 2207 and IC 2163, which recently met and began to twirl around each other. The "mask" is made up of the galaxies' twisted spiral arms. Dotted along the arms, like strings of decorative pearls, are dusty clusters of newborn stars. This is the first time that clusters of this type, called "beads on a string" by astronomers, have been seen in NGC 2207 and IC 2163.
NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are located 140 million light-years away in the Canis Major constellation. The two galaxies will meld into one in about 500 million years, bringing their masquerade days to an end.
Planets Forming Region Around A Dead Star Found by Spitzer
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has uncovered new evidence that planets might rise up out of a dead star's ashes. The infrared telescope surveyed the scene around a pulsar, the remnant of an exploded star, and found a surrounding disk made up of debris shot out during the star's death throes. The dusty rubble in this disk might ultimately stick together to form planets. This is the first time scientists have detected planet-building materials around a star that died in a fiery blast.
The pulsar observed by Spitzer, named 4U 0142+61, is 13,000 light-years away in the Cassiopeia constellation. It was once a large, bright star with a mass between 10 and 20 times that of our sun. The star probably survived for about 10 million years, until it collapsed under its own weight about 100,000 years ago and blasted apart in a supernova explosion.
The US space agency (Nasa) has released the most detailed colour maps of the planet Jupiter ever produced. The stunning maps were pieced together by researchers from images taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it approached Jupiter on 11 and 12 December 2000.
Raw images exist in only two colours so the maps were coloured to show how Jupiter would appear to the naked eye.They consist of one cylindrical map of the planet along with north and south polar maps of Jupiter.
The maps were created from 36 frames captured by Cassini as it passed the giant planet on a gravity assist manoeuvre to get it to Saturn. Cassini arrived in Saturn orbit on 1 July 2004.
The
Oort cloud, is a postulated spherical cloud
of comets situated about 50,000 to 100,000 AU from
the Sun. This is approximately 1000 times the distance
from the Sun to Pluto or roughly one light year, almost
a quarter of the distance from the Sun to Proxima
Centauri, the star nearest the Sun. The Oort cloud
would have its inner disk at the ecliptic from the
Kuiper belt. Although no direct observations have
been made of such a cloud, it is believed to be the
source of most or all comets entering the inner solar
system (some short-period comets may come from the
Kuiper belt), based on observations of the orbits
of comets. Source: Wikipedia
