I always get giddy when talking about Europa, as many astronomers do. It’s one of the most fascinating places in our solar system when it comes to the search for life. It has lots of water, likely contained in a subsurface ocean. It’s heated though a gravitational tug of war with Jupiter and the other Galilean moons. And, as of recently, it has a chemical production system that matches Earth’s. I wonder what goes on beneath the thick ice of Europa. Is there an ecosystem filled with alien life down there? Life in Earth’s oceans feels very alien, but creatures from...
On the heels of my last review, I watched another movie with a space-documentary theme. Though it started out with the human perspective from space, it progressed into so much more. This is the TVO documentary called Planetary. It began with Apollo. Humanity broke the bonds of our world and set foot on another heavenly body. For the first time, we could look back and see the world as it truly is. One of my favourite quotes from the movie came up early, though I’m paraphrasing: We are the Earth, and the Earth is all of us. Seeing the Earth...
Have you seen a gorgeous red sky in the evening, just after sunset? If it’s cloudy, the effect becomes even more spectacular. The Sunlight reflects off the clouds and back down to the ground, creating the calm of twilight. Clouds only go so high, so as the Earth continues to turn and we go deeper into nighttime, the glow disappears. But sometimes it sticks around a bit longer. During a rocket launch at dusk, the exhaust trail from the rocket climbs into the upper atmosphere, far above cloud layers. It can reflect sunlight, with the shape of the particles refracting...
I recently had the opportunity to watch a brand new IMAX feature, called A Beautiful Planet. It features incredible views of the Earth from space, captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Most of the footage was taken during Expedition 42 on the ISS, starting with the arrival of Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Virts, and Anton Shkaplerov aboard the Soyuz TMA-15M, and ending with their departure. Much of the film was focused on the views of Earth, the scenic diversity of life and land that can only be seen from space. It was difficult to see the effects of humans during the day time,...
In the APOD photo from May 14th, it is easy to imagine the rocket launching far away into the galactic disk. Sadly the rocket can’t traverse the thousands of light years to reach the distant stars, and is restricted to orbiting the Earth. Another beautiful part of this image is the technique involved in producing it. It required combining two exposures. The first, with low sensitivity to capture the orange rocket trail of the Falcon 9. The second with high sensitivity and a longer exposure time to capture the faint light of the Milky Way galaxy beyond. The result is...
Mercury crossed the face of the Sun this past Monday, a relatively rare event that occurs only a dozen (give or take) times a century. Being able to see it in real time was excellent, but seeing the photos taken by professionals and amateurs alike made the event truly memorable. And look! The International Space Station flew by. Compare this to 2012’s transit of Venus and you get a sense of how much closer to Venus the Earth is than Mercury. In both cases, the most beautiful thing is that you get a sense of just how immense and powerful...
The Transit of Mercury is happening right now here on May 9th, 2016. If you want to watch live, check out the NASA feeds from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. For the small size of Mercury, it makes a pretty stark contrast against the bright Sun, and is easy to see, even in a small telescope. Of course, you need a solar filter. Don’t look directly at the Sun without proper eye protection, you won’t see Mercury and you’ll damage your vision. I managed to snag a photo on my phone through a small telescope. Please excuse the lack of quality...
Have you ever seen a picture of a comet or asteroid in the sky against a background of stars? Here let me show you. Can you spot the asteroid? Okay I confess there is no asteroid in the image above, but if there was you’d believe me because an asteroid in this image would be indistinguishable from the stars. They are all points of light, so how can you tell them apart? There’s something that separates asteroids, comets, planets, and all other solar system objects from background stars in an image. When you’re driving in a car and you look to the...
At this stage of our understanding of the planet Mars, we have seen salty water flowing (recurring slope lineae), found evidence of ancient riverbeds, and seen seasonal changes in the polar caps. But an important question is how does water behave on Mars? A bit of science here on Earth gives some insight. Water at sea level on Earth boils at 100 degrees Celsius, which actually defined the Celsius scale. But as pressure changes, liquids boil at different temperatures. As the atmosphere gets thinner, the boiling temperature of water decreases. On Mars, with it’s extremely thin atmosphere, this means that water...
What is the difference between a comet and an asteroid? The typical response is that an asteroid is rocky and a comet is icy/gassy. Further than this, asteroids typically orbit closer to the Sun than Neptune, and comets orbit beyond this loose dividing line. But as with everything in nature, there are often exceptions to the rule. C/2014 S3 PANSTAARS is classified as a weakly active comet, originating in the Oort cloud with an orbital period of 860 years. As it approached the Sun, astronomers noticed that it was lacking the characteristic comet tail, resulting from the blast of solar radiation upon approach to the...
