As I was watching the grand finale of Cassini and listening to the mission team talk about the accomplishments of the mission, I learned a little bit about propellors. Not your typical airplane propellor, but the name used to describe this fascinating feature in Saturn’s rings. Seeing Saturn’s rings from afar, or even relatively close with Cassini, we see the rings as perfect. How do we end up with strange features and imperfections like this one? Looking elsewhere in the rings, we can find clues. The first clue is the namesake of the mission itself. The Cassini spacecraft was named for...
I remember vividly my first astronomy class in university. Winter 2004, only months before the Cassini spacecraft was set to arrive at Saturn after a seven year journey. On several occasions in that class we talked about what we might see when Cassini reached it’s destination. The first dedicated mission to the jewel of the solar system, originally conceived right after the voyager flyby in 1982, would give us a chance to study more than just a planet, but an entire system of interaction between a planet and it’s moons. Beyond that, it included the Huygens probe, to land at...
After the eclipse on August 21st, I took a deep breath. I spent a year focussed on photographing the eclipse, and with that goal complete, what was next? I was in the plateau of the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, a couple dozen miles from Yellowstone, and had three days to enjoy with my fiancee. As luck would have it, those days were absent of any clouds, giving me two perfect evenings in clear, dark, dry skies to do some of the best astrophotography of my life. Here’s what I shot. The milky way shot for me is a...
It was like someone turned down the Sun with a dimmer switch. The tempurate dropped quickly, enhanced by the lack of moisture in the dry mountain air. In a span of an hour, the Sun looked the same, but was very different, as totality approached. I was taking photos through my telescope with an attached solar filter, so I could see the Moon slowly covering the Sun. But as the environment changed in Northern Wyoming, I grew more excited for what was to come. Over a year of preparation for this event, and clear skies greeted me with the confidence...
The Juno spacecraft began its long journey to Jupiter in 2011. Waking up in 2016 it underwent a successful orbit injection on July 4th. Now after nearly a year of waiting, the public finally gets to see the first fruits of the mission. It has certainly been worth the wait. A new Jupiter, seen from a distance of 52,000 Km, has a vivid and chaotic southern pole in the above image. Swirling storms thousands of kilometres across whirl around one another in a sea of gaseous ammonia clouds. Will the system remain chaotic? Or will it change a year from...
You’d think I would have learned my lesson by now. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, that I’ve seen every strange phenomenon in space, every unique planet, moon, star, galaxy, every variation, I’m proven wrong. I expect that the order has been established and everything newly discovered will fall into a category with no more unique variation. But here we are again. The close up view of Pan. Pan was photographed only a few days ago by the Cassini spacecraft as it carries out the final months of it’s mission to Saturn. It was revealed to be a...
Why does the Universe expand the way it does? Why does it accelerate? Einstein’s equations offer an explanation of gravity that works on the scale we know, but do they work on the grandest scales of space and time? Humanity now has a way to find out. The General Theory of Relativity predicts the behaviour of gravity, and includes a term known as the cosmological constant. Einstein added this term to make the universe static and unchanging, as he believed it was. But when the expansion of the universe was discovered by Edwin Hubble, Einstein regarded it as ‘the greatest blunder...
I hate the term ‘supermoon’. In fact that is the only time I’m going to use that term during this entire post. The Moon does appear a tiny bit larger in the sky, but it’s not an uncommon thing. Here’s why this one was particularly good at driving headlines. The technical term for the full Moon we saw this past week is a ‘perigee syzygy,’ which I think sounds way cooler. Perigee is the term for the Moon’s closest point to the Earth in it’s orbit, and syzygy is the term for an alignment of bodies in space, in this...
Tomorrow, one way or another, the ESA’s Rosetta mission is coming to an end. In a final maneuver, the craft will attempt to land on the surface of the comet, following in the footsteps of the Philae lander, though hopefully with more success. The video shows the final orbit plan, and really highlights how amazing mission scientists are to be able to plan a landing site when the comet is rotating so quickly, relative to the craft’s motion. You can follow the link to watch the live broadcast of the event here. The mission will end around 7:20am EST tomorrow,...
In the past year or so it’s been interesting to see space agencies and companies produce movie-type trailers for scientific expeditions. The technology is there, and it is a proven way to inspire the general public. It also creates an opportunity to create some of the amazing science being done, even if it’s just a small taste. Space X has been candid about wanting to colonize Mars, and yesterday they released a trailer to give some inspiration to all of us. It shows a system that utilizes their nearly-established system of landing and reusing rockets, as well as refueling in...
